Pingora vs Tengine
A side-by-side comparison of two self-hosted reverse proxy & gateways options — licensing, setup difficulty, resource needs, and what each one replaces.
| Feature | Pingora | Tengine |
|---|---|---|
| Deploy effort | Read-the-docs project | Under-an-hour setup |
| Health score | 97 · Excellent | 75 · Good |
| Category | Reverse Proxy & Gateways | Reverse Proxy & Gateways |
| License | Apache-2.0 | BSD-2-Clause |
| Language | Rust | C |
| Setup difficulty | Hard | Hard |
| Min. RAM | 128 MB | 128 MB |
| Deployment | binary, source | docker, binary, bare-metal |
| GitHub stars | ★ 27,517 | ★ 13,373 |
| First released | 2024 | 2011 |
| Replaces | Nginx | Nginx |
What are Pingora and Tengine?
Pingora
Pingora is an open-source Rust framework from Cloudflare for building fast, secure, and programmable proxies and network services. It powers a large share of Cloudflare's traffic.
- Programmable proxy framework
- Memory-safe Rust core
- High performance
- Battle-tested at Cloudflare
Tengine
Tengine is a web server originated by Taobao based on Nginx, adding advanced features for high-traffic websites such as dynamic module loading and enhanced load balancing. It is fully Nginx compatible.
- Nginx-compatible server
- Dynamic module loading
- Enhanced load balancing
- Proven at large scale
Pingora vs Tengine: key differences
Pingora is written in Rust, while Tengine is built with C. Licensing differs — Apache-2.0 for Pingora versus BSD-2-Clause for Tengine. Tengine is the more established project (first released 2011), while Pingora arrived in 2024. Pingora has the considerably larger community, at 27,517 GitHub stars versus 13,373. Tengine lists first-class Docker deployment; Pingora does not.
Why pick each one
Choose Pingora if…
- Battle-tested at Cloudflare
- Excellent performance
- Memory-safe Rust
Watch out for
- Rust coding required
- Not a turnkey proxy
Choose Tengine if…
- Released under the BSD-2-Clause license
- First-class Docker support for quick deployment
- Mature project with 13.4k GitHub stars
- Written in C
Frequently asked questions
Is Pingora or Tengine better?
Neither is universally better. Pingora has the larger community; both share a hard setup difficulty, so the decision comes down to features and licensing.
Are Pingora and Tengine free and open-source?
Yes. Pingora is licensed under Apache-2.0 and Tengine under BSD-2-Clause. Both can be self-hosted at no software cost.
Can I run Pingora and Tengine with Docker?
Pingora: check the project docs for container support. Tengine: yes.