Companies Using Nginx

We detect Nginx on 4,708,036 domains, of which 2,692,447 match to a company record. The population is overwhelmingly small business — 65.49% of sized companies have 1-10 employees — because Nginx is the default web server across managed and shared WordPress hosting. At the other end it also serves IBM, Microsoft, Ford, SAP, Starbucks and gov.uk.

Our August 2026 rollup reads 4,708,036 domains. That counts domains rather than installations or licences: one Nginx instance on a shared host can serve thousands of domains, so the number of servers running it is far smaller and the number of organisations that deliberately chose it is smaller still.

33.97% of Web Servers, second of fifty behind Apache HTTP Server on 37.12%. If you see a materially higher figure elsewhere, check whether OpenResty and Tengine are being counted as Nginx — both are built on it but identify themselves differently, and we count them separately.

Apache HTTP Server (5,144,649 domains) is the direct equivalent, LiteSpeed (2,442,625) is the commercial drop-in most common in shared hosting, and Caddy (67,165) is the modern option with automatic HTTPS. OpenResty is worth naming separately: it is Nginx with LuaJIT built in, so it is less an alternative than a distribution of it.

The United States leads with 621,312 of the 2,563,342 companies where we hold a country, but at 24.24% its share is unusually low for a technology of this size. Germany is second at 11.05% and the Netherlands fourth at 5.94% — Nginx is disproportionately the European hosting default.

65.49% of the 2,362,214 sized companies have 1-10 employees and 22.00% have 11-50, so nearly nine in ten are small businesses. That reflects what Nginx serves rather than who evaluates it: shared and managed WordPress hosting, where every tenant is a separate small company.

The 2010s lead at 37.04% of the 1,173,769 companies with a founding year. Unusually, the 2020s at 17.49% are almost level with the 2000s at 19.03% — newer companies land on Nginx by default because it is what modern hosting stacks ship.

In practice there isn't one, and that is the honest answer. Nginx is horizontal infrastructure: no industry in our data exceeds 4.80%, company sizes run from one person to gov.uk, and the geography spans four continents. The closest thing to a typical deployment is a small company's WordPress site on managed hosting, served from the apex domain.

It means the hostname returned a Server header naming Nginx. That is one of the most reliable signals we collect — it needs no JavaScript, no cookie and no particular configuration. Its one blind spot is deliberate concealment: operators can suppress or rewrite the Server header, and a CDN in front will usually replace it with its own, so some Nginx is invisible to us.

Our data cannot rank it, but it can show what the market chose. WordPress appears on 47.93% of Nginx domains, alongside PHP at 23.81%, Yoast SEO at 18.45% and Elementor at 13.77%. Close to half of the Nginx web is WordPress, which makes it the most common pairing we observe for either technology.

We deliberately publish no switching figures for Nginx. The raw counts are large — 59,296 domains from Nginx to Apache and 187,626 the other way — but 99.9% of both sit inside one 90-day window, which would imply an implausible share of Apache's base moving in a single quarter. Both servers are read from the same Server header, so a change in how that header is captured moves both at once. Nginx in front of Apache is also a standard architecture rather than a migration.

Only 3.5% of our Nginx detections are on a hostname other than the apex or www, against 15.0% for Amazon ALB and 14.9% for Azure Front Door. A web server answers wherever the site lives, whereas a managed edge service is deployed onto specific properties such as portals and community sites. The gap is a clean way to tell the two classes of product apart in header data.

NGINX Plus is F5's commercial distribution, adding active health checks, session persistence, a live monitoring API and support. Our detection reads the Server header, which does not reliably distinguish the two, so the 4,708,036 domains here should be read as Nginx in the broad sense rather than as a count of open-source installs.

F5 Networks acquired NGINX Inc. for $670 million in March 2019. Igor Sysoev created Nginx in 2004 while working at Rambler, then co-founded NGINX Inc. in 2011 to offer commercial support. The open-source version continues to receive updates under F5's ownership, while NGINX Plus targets companies that need SLA-backed support.

Yes. The open-source Nginx is released under a BSD-like license, free for commercial use with no restrictions. F5 Networks also sells NGINX Plus starting at approximately $2,500/year per instance for companies that need commercial support, advanced load balancing, and API gateway features.

Nginx added experimental QUIC and HTTP/3 support in version 1.25.0 (June 2023), and it became stable in the 1.27.x branch. For production HTTP/3, NGINX Plus includes full support with active health checks over QUIC. The open-source version requires manual compilation with the quic branch.