Wondering about the value you gain from upgrading from NGINX Open Source to NGINX Plus?
Upgrading to NGINX Plus provides many advantages over the free NGINX Open Source (OS) Version. A couple of the of the most important features that get unlocked with the Plus Version are the active health checks, and Dynamic reconfiguration without process reloads. Allowing you to intelligently remove servers based on their health from the traffic pools you’re load balancing, and make changes on the fly without reloading processes. But that’s really just the beginning of all the extra bells and whistles that become available with the NGINX Plus license aka NGINX subscription.
See the below NGINX OS vs PLUS table for a side-by-side comparison of the different features & use cases available in NGINX open source vs NGINX plus.
| Features | NGINX Open Source | NGINX Plus | NGINXaaS for Azure |
|---|---|---|---|
| Load balancer | |||
| HTTP and TCP/UDP support | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Layer 7 request routing | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Session persistence | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Active health checks | ✓ | ✓ | |
| DNS service‑discovery integration | ✓ | ✓ | |
| Content cache | |||
| Static and dynamic content caching | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Cache‑purging API | ✓ | ||
| MQTT protocol support for IOT devices | ✓ | ✓ | |
| Web server and reverse proxy | |||
| Origin server for static content | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Reverse proxy: HTTP, FastCGI, memcached, SCGI, uwsgi | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| HTTP/2 gateway | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| gRPC proxy | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| HTTP/2 server push | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| HTTP/3 over QUIC | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Security controls | ✓ | ✓ | |
| HTTP Basic Authentication | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| HTTP authentication subrequests | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| IP address‑based access control lists | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Rate limiting | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Dual‑stack RSA/ECC SSL/TLS offload | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| TLS 1.3 support | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| JWT authentication | ✓ | ✓ | |
| OpenID Connect single sign‑on (SSO) | ✓ | ✓ | |
| Internal redirect | ✓ | ||
| NGINX as a SAML Service Provider | ✓ | ✓ | |
| NGINX App Protect DoS (additional cost) | ✓ | ||
| Monitoring | |||
| Export to external monitoring tools | ✓ | ✓ | Export Metrics to Azure Monitor |
| Built-in dashboard | ✓ | Azure Monitor and Azure Portal | |
| Extended status with 100+ additional metrics | ✓ | ✓ | |
| Native Open Telemetry Tracing | ✓ | ||
| High availability (HA) | |||
| Active‑active | ✓ | ✓ | |
| Active‑passive | ✓ | Not Applicable | |
| Configuration synchronization across cluster | ✓ | Not Applicable | |
| State sharing: sticky‑learn session persistence, rate limiting, key‑value stores | ✓ | ||
| Programmability | |||
| NGINX JavaScript module | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| NGINX Plus API for dynamic reconfiguration | ✓ | N/A | |
| Key‑value store | ✓ | ✓ | |
| Dynamic reconfiguration without process reloads | ✓ | ||
| Streaming media | |||
| Live streaming: RTMP, HLS, DASH | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| VOD: Flash (FLV), MP4 | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Adaptive bitrate VOD: HLS, HDS | ✓ | ||
| MP4 bandwidth controls | ✓ | ||
| Third-party ecosystem | |||
| Ingress controller | ✓ | ✓ | |
| OpenShift Router | ✓ | ✓ | |
| Dynamic modules repository | ✓ | Image-Filter njs OpenTelemetry XSLT | |
| Deployable as a service | Microsoft Azure | ||
| Commercial support | ✓ | ✓ |
If you need expert assistance with NGINX®—WorldTech IT offers enterprise-class NGINX® and NGINX Plus® Professional Services / Consulting and options for emergency support through our Always-On program. Our engineers combine extensive experience in the application delivery and security space with broad expertise in the Linux and open-source community.
