Pound vs River
A side-by-side comparison of two self-hosted reverse proxy & gateways options — licensing, setup difficulty, resource needs, and what each one replaces.
| Feature | Pound | River |
|---|---|---|
| Deploy effort | Read-the-docs project | Read-the-docs project |
| Health score | 69 · Good | 17 · At risk |
| Category | Reverse Proxy & Gateways | Reverse Proxy & Gateways |
| License | GPL-3.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Language | C | Rust |
| Setup difficulty | Easy | Medium |
| Min. RAM | 32 MB | 64 MB |
| Deployment | bare-metal, source | binary, source |
| GitHub stars | ★ 70 | ★ 2,353 |
| First released | 2002 | 2024 |
| Replaces | NGINX, HAProxy | nginx, HAProxy |
What are Pound and River?
Pound
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.
- HTTPS termination
- Backend load balancing
- Session stickiness
- Small auditable codebase
River
River is a reverse-proxy application built on Cloudflare's Pingora engine, providing a configurable binary for HTTP proxying and load balancing. It is self-hosted and configured through files.
- Pingora-based
- Load balancing
- File-driven config
- Memory-safe Rust
Pound vs River: key differences
Pound is written in C, while River is built with Rust. Licensing differs — GPL-3.0 for Pound versus Apache-2.0 for River. Pound is the lighter option, starting around 32 MB of RAM against 64 MB for River. Pound is the more established project (first released 2002), while River arrived in 2024. River has the considerably larger community, at 2,353 GitHub stars versus 70.
Why pick each one
Choose Pound if…
- Tiny and simple
- Easy to secure
Watch out for
- Limited features
- Minimal community
Choose River if…
- Released under the Apache-2.0 license
- Active community (2.4k GitHub stars)
- Written in Rust
- Tiny footprint — runs in 64 MB RAM
Frequently asked questions
Is Pound or River better?
Neither is universally better. River has the larger community, while Pound is simpler to set up (easy difficulty). Choose based on the comparison table above and your own setup.
Are Pound and River free and open-source?
Yes. Pound is licensed under GPL-3.0 and River under Apache-2.0. Both can be self-hosted at no software cost.
Can I run Pound and River with Docker?
Pound: check the project docs for container support. River: check the project docs for container support.
Which is lighter on resources, Pound or River?
Pound has the smaller minimum footprint at 32 MB of RAM, compared to about 64 MB for River. Real-world usage depends on library size, user count, and enabled features.