Nginx vs Caddy vs Traefik: Choosing the Right Reverse Proxy in 2026

A reverse proxy sits between the internet and your application servers, handling SSL termination, load balancing, caching, and request routing. It is one of the most critical pieces of your infrastructure — every request to your application passes through it. Choosing the right reverse proxy affects performance, security, operational complexity, and your team's productivity.

Nginx, Caddy, and Traefik are the three most popular options in 2026, each with distinct philosophies and strengths. Here is an honest comparison based on running all three in production.

Nginx: The Battle-Tested Workhorse

Nginx powers over 34 percent of all websites, making it the most widely deployed web server and reverse proxy in the world. Its event-driven, non-blocking architecture handles tens of thousands of concurrent connections with minimal memory usage. Nginx has been battle-tested at every scale, from personal blogs to Netflix and Airbnb.

Nginx's strengths are its raw performance (it is the fastest option for static file serving and reverse proxying), its maturity and stability (after 20 years of development, there are very few surprises), its extensive documentation and community resources, and its flexibility — you can configure it to handle almost any routing, caching, or load balancing scenario.

Nginx's weaknesses are its configuration complexity (the config file syntax has a learning curve and is easy to get wrong), manual SSL certificate management (unless you add Certbot or other automation), no native service discovery for dynamic backends, and configuration changes that require a reload (or the commercial Nginx Plus for API-driven configuration). For simple setups with a few backends, Nginx is straightforward. For complex routing with dozens of services, the configuration becomes unwieldy.

Caddy: Simplicity and Automatic HTTPS

Caddy's defining feature is automatic HTTPS — it obtains and renews SSL certificates from Let's Encrypt with zero configuration. Point Caddy at your domain and it handles everything: obtaining the certificate, configuring TLS, redirecting HTTP to HTTPS, and renewing the certificate before it expires. This alone eliminates one of the most common causes of web server outages.

Caddy's configuration is dramatically simpler than Nginx. A basic reverse proxy setup that requires 15 lines in Nginx takes 3 lines in a Caddyfile. The configuration language is intuitive and readable, making it accessible to developers who are not sysadmin experts.

Caddy is written in Go, which means it is a single binary with no dependencies — deployment is as simple as copying one file. It supports HTTP/3 (QUIC) out of the box, provides a JSON API for dynamic configuration changes, and includes a module system for extending functionality.

Caddy's weaknesses are slightly lower raw performance than Nginx for high-traffic scenarios (though the difference is negligible for most applications), a smaller community and ecosystem, and less comprehensive documentation for advanced use cases. If you need extreme performance optimization or have unusual requirements, Nginx provides more control.

Traefik: Built for Containers and Dynamic Infrastructure

Traefik is designed for modern, container-based infrastructure. Its killer feature is automatic service discovery — it watches Docker, Kubernetes, Consul, and other orchestrators for new services and automatically creates routes for them. Deploy a new container with the right labels and Traefik starts routing traffic to it immediately, with SSL certificates obtained automatically.

In a Docker Swarm or Kubernetes environment, Traefik eliminates the need to manually configure routes for each service. Services declare their routing rules as labels or annotations, and Traefik applies them dynamically. This is transformative for teams deploying frequently — there is no configuration file to update, no proxy to reload, and no deployment step for routing changes.

Traefik includes built-in middleware for rate limiting, authentication, circuit breaking, and request transformation. Its dashboard provides real-time visibility into routes, services, and middleware. And like Caddy, it handles SSL certificates automatically.

Traefik's weaknesses are higher resource usage compared to Nginx (it is not the right choice if you need to squeeze maximum performance from minimal hardware), a steeper learning curve for the initial setup, and configuration that can become complex when you need to customize behavior beyond the defaults. Traefik v3 improved many of these areas, but it remains more opinionated than Nginx.

Performance Comparison

For raw reverse proxy performance, Nginx leads with the lowest latency and highest throughput per CPU core. Caddy and Traefik are both written in Go, which provides excellent performance but slightly higher overhead than Nginx's optimized C codebase. In practice, the performance difference is measurable only at very high traffic levels (tens of thousands of requests per second per instance). For most applications, all three handle traffic with negligible latency overhead.

The Decision Framework

Choose Nginx if you need maximum performance and resource efficiency, have complex routing or caching requirements, your team is comfortable with Nginx configuration, or you run a high-traffic application where every microsecond matters.

Choose Caddy if you want the simplest possible configuration, automatic HTTPS without any additional tooling, easy setup for small to medium applications, or you are a developer who wants to spend zero time on reverse proxy management.

Choose Traefik if you run a container-based infrastructure with Docker or Kubernetes, deploy services frequently and want automatic route discovery, need built-in middleware for rate limiting, authentication, and circuit breaking, or your services are dynamic and change frequently.

For ZeonEdge's infrastructure, we use Nginx for high-traffic public-facing services and Traefik for internal container routing — combining Nginx's performance with Traefik's dynamic service discovery. This hybrid approach works well for organizations that need both.

ZeonEdge provides reverse proxy configuration and infrastructure optimization services. Learn more about our infrastructure services.