Repo Compare › Reverse proxies
Traefik vs Caddy vs NGINX
A side-by-side look at how actively Traefik, Caddy and NGINX are developed on GitHub — popularity, contributor base, commit activity and how quickly issues and pull requests move.
What the numbers say
- Caddy is the most-starred of the 3, with 76k stars — about 2.4× NGINX's 32k.
- Over the 52 weeks to the snapshot, Traefik recorded the most commits (916), against 270 for NGINX.
- Traefik has closed or merged the most pull requests in its lifetime: 6.7k.
- Relative to its popularity, Caddy carries the lightest open-issue load: 2.6 open issues per 1,000 stars, versus 10.6 for Traefik.
Head-to-head
Snapshot taken 30 September 2026.
| Metric | Traefik Active | Caddy Active | NGINX Active |
|---|---|---|---|
| Stars | 65k | 76k | 32k |
| Forks | 6.2k | 5.0k | 8.3k |
| Contributors | 1.1k | 443 | 137 |
| Commits, last 52 weeks | 916 | 345 | 270 |
| Open issues | 686 | 200 | 197 |
| Open pull requests | 248 | 99 | 255 |
| Closed / merged PRs | 6.7k | 3.1k | 667 |
| Watchers | 682 | 865 | 958 |
| Last push | 30 Sep 2026 | 30 Sep 2026 | 29 Sep 2026 |
| Latest release | v3.7.13 (Sep 2026) | v2.11.4 (Jun 2026) | release-1.31.6 (Sep 2026) |
| Main language | Go | Go | C |
| Licence | MIT | Apache-2.0 | BSD-2-Clause |
| Created | Sep 2015 | Jan 2015 | Jun 2015 |
The wide bar is that repository’s share of the largest value in its own row — half the length means half the number. The thin gauge beneath it is the same row rescaled from its smallest value to its largest, which makes a close gap such as 61k against 59k visible; on that gauge the row’s lowest value always sits at zero however big it is, so read it as a spread and never as a quantity. Bars compare repositories with each other and never one metric against another. Colour identifies the repository, matching the dot beside its name. On the two issue rows a longer bar means more open work, which is usually the opposite of better. The highlighted cell is the highest value in a row. “Active / Slowing / Dormant” is a simple heuristic from how recently code was pushed and open issues per star — a starting point, not a verdict. Stars measure popularity, not quality.
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