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Pound

Lightweight reverse proxy and HTTPS load balancer

Reverse Proxy & Gateways ★ 70 stars Easy setup GPL-3.0

Pound is a small reverse proxy and load balancer that terminates HTTPS and distributes requests across backend web servers. It is intended to be simple, secure, and easy to audit.

Official siteSource code

Key features

  • HTTPS termination
  • Backend load balancing
  • Session stickiness
  • Small auditable codebase

Pros & cons

Strengths

  • Tiny and simple
  • Easy to secure

Trade-offs

  • Limited features
  • Minimal community

Is Pound secure?

OSV.dev has no published security advisories for Pound's repository. No known vulnerabilities is not proof of security: it means none have been publicly catalogued.

Source: OSV.dev, checked 2026-10-14. How this is measured.

Pound replaces

Self-hosted NGINX alternativesSelf-hosted HAProxy alternatives

Health badge

Maintain Pound? Add its health score to your README. The badge links back to this page.

SelfHostIndex: 69 · good

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   :alt: SelfHostIndex health score for Pound
   :target: https://selfhostindex.com/app/pound/

The score is recomputed on every nightly rebuild from public repository data — see how it is calculated.

Compare Pound

9 head-to-head comparisons.

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