Kong Gateway vs Nginx Proxy Manager
A side-by-side comparison of two self-hosted reverse proxy & gateways options
— licensing, setup difficulty, resource needs, and what each one
replaces.
Not the right match-up?
Compare Kong Gateway with
choose an app… Caddy Traefik Pi-hole acme.sh mitmproxy Istio AdGuard Home NPS Nginx Envoy Authelia Pingora authentik SafeLine Pangolin Anubis Ingress-NGINX DDNS-Go Apache APISIX Shadowsocks-libev flaresolverr LibreSpeed OAuth2 Proxy CrowdSec CoreDNS cert-manager OpenResty dnscrypt-proxy Tengine MyIP Linkerd FrankenPHP SmartDNS imgproxy Tyk BunkerWeb lego YARP Technitium DNS Server ExternalDNS Tinyauth iodine Fabio Blocky HAProxy dae Tinyproxy NGINX Unit 3proxy Zoraxy WireGuard UI sslh Tor Browser Pomerium go-shadowsocks2 sish Caddy Docker Proxy Emissary-ingress Apache HTTP Server Varnish Cache Kuma Contour relayd go-doxy Coraza WAF Speed Test by OpenSpeedTest™ mosdns Sozu SWAG Skipper Squid Algernon Canary Tokens MySpeed Gateway API Sablier KrakenD Angie Syslog-ng River Static Web Server beelzebub Traefik Mesh gobetween Apache Traffic Server Maza ad blocking frp-panel Adguard Home Sync Træfik Hub Note Caddy-L4 UUSEC WAF OpenResty Manager Pingap Ehco SimpleTorrent g3proxy Unifi-controller ctrld HAProxy Kubernetes Ingress Gravitee API Management HAProxy Data Plane API Chromium Duck DNS Traefik Geoblock Cloudflare DDNS Privoxy Wakupator socks5-proxy-server Pound gandi-livedns Urbit Holesail Switchboard Adguard Firefox Lighttpd Remmina Tor Snowflake Proxy Twingate Vinyl Cache
Compare Nginx Proxy Manager with
choose an app… Caddy Traefik Pi-hole acme.sh mitmproxy Istio AdGuard Home NPS Nginx Envoy Authelia Pingora authentik SafeLine Pangolin Anubis Ingress-NGINX DDNS-Go Apache APISIX Shadowsocks-libev flaresolverr LibreSpeed OAuth2 Proxy CrowdSec CoreDNS cert-manager OpenResty dnscrypt-proxy Tengine MyIP Linkerd FrankenPHP SmartDNS imgproxy Tyk BunkerWeb lego YARP Technitium DNS Server ExternalDNS Tinyauth iodine Fabio Blocky HAProxy dae Tinyproxy NGINX Unit 3proxy Zoraxy WireGuard UI sslh Tor Browser Pomerium go-shadowsocks2 sish Caddy Docker Proxy Emissary-ingress Apache HTTP Server Varnish Cache Kuma Contour relayd go-doxy Coraza WAF Speed Test by OpenSpeedTest™ mosdns Sozu SWAG Skipper Squid Algernon Canary Tokens MySpeed Gateway API Sablier KrakenD Angie Syslog-ng River Static Web Server beelzebub Traefik Mesh gobetween Apache Traffic Server Maza ad blocking frp-panel Adguard Home Sync Træfik Hub Note Caddy-L4 UUSEC WAF OpenResty Manager Pingap Ehco SimpleTorrent g3proxy Unifi-controller ctrld HAProxy Kubernetes Ingress Gravitee API Management HAProxy Data Plane API Chromium Duck DNS Traefik Geoblock Cloudflare DDNS Privoxy Wakupator socks5-proxy-server Pound gandi-livedns Urbit Holesail Switchboard Adguard Firefox Lighttpd Remmina Tor Snowflake Proxy Twingate Vinyl Cache
Feature Kong Gateway Nginx Proxy Manager Category Reverse Proxy & Gateways Reverse Proxy & Gateways License Apache-2.0 MIT Language Lua TypeScript Setup difficulty Medium Easy Min. RAM 512 MB 256 MB Deployment docker, kubernetes, helm docker GitHub stars ★ 43,947 ★ 33,804 First released 2015 2019 Replaces AWS API Gateway, Apigee Cloudflare
Why pick each one
Choose Kong Gateway if… Released under the Apache-2.0 license First-class Docker support for quick deployment Kubernetes-ready with Helm charts available Mature project with 43.9k GitHub stars Kong Gateway details
Frequently asked questions Is Kong Gateway or Nginx Proxy Manager better? Neither is universally better. Kong Gateway has the larger community, while Nginx Proxy Manager is simpler to set up (easy difficulty). Choose based on the comparison table above and your own setup.
Are Kong Gateway and Nginx Proxy Manager free and open-source? Yes. Kong Gateway is licensed under Apache-2.0 and Nginx Proxy Manager under MIT. Both can be self-hosted at no software cost.
Can I run Kong Gateway and Nginx Proxy Manager with Docker? Kong Gateway: yes. Nginx Proxy Manager: yes.