Companies Using Nginx

With 10+ years in web crawling and technographic data analysis, I've examined 4,636,575 active Nginx domains and enriched 52,263 of them with firmographic data (a 52.3% match rate on a 100K sample) at TechnologyChecker.io, as of our March 2026 crawl. Nginx isn't just a web server. It's the default infrastructure layer for the modern internet. Here's what our data reveals for sales teams targeting this install base.

Growth Trajectory

Nginx went from 2,187 active domains in January 2011 to a peak of 4,270,088 in April 2025, a 1,952x increase in 14 years. The sharpest acceleration came in 2013, when active domains jumped from 27,000 to 101,000 in a single year as Docker and microservices took hold. By 2018, Nginx had crossed 1 million active domains. Growth continued through 2024, adding roughly 600,000 new active domains per year.

Since April 2025, active domains have declined to 3.4 million by July 2025. That decline likely reflects changes in crawl coverage rather than real-world churn. Nginx is an embedded infrastructure component -- it doesn't get removed the way a SaaS tool does. Over 8.1 million domains have used Nginx at some point, putting the former-to-current ratio at roughly 1.8:1. That's actually low compared to application-layer tools like marketing automation platforms.

Sales Signal: Nginx's growth curve isn't slowing -- it's approaching infrastructure saturation. When your technology runs on 4.6 million domains, the addressable market for "getting companies to adopt Nginx" is mostly tapped. The real opportunity is upselling services, support contracts (NGINX Plus), and adjacent tooling to the existing install base. Target companies that still run Apache or IIS, particularly the 17,432 that have already started migrating from Apache 2.2.

"Nginx's 1,952x growth over 14 years isn't a startup story anymore. It's an infrastructure takeover. When 4.6 million domains run on a single web server, the question isn't who's adopting. It's who's still on something else, and why." - Mehmet Suleyman, CEO at TechnologyChecker.io

Customer Profile

69.9% of Nginx customers have 1-10 employees. Combined with the 11-50 range, 81.8% are small companies. This tracks with Nginx's open-source DNA. Small teams pick it because it's free, fast, and well-documented. The age distribution reinforces that pattern: 41.2% were founded in the 2010s and another 19.7% in the 2020s, so over 60% of the enriched base are less than 15 years old.

The enterprise segment matters. At 5.7% with 10,001+ employees, Nginx has higher enterprise penetration than many SaaS tools. Accenture, Deloitte, McDonald's, Infosys, IBM, and Capgemini all run Nginx. Unlike SaaS platforms where enterprise detection often means a microsite, Nginx on domains like ibm.com and accenture.com means infrastructure-level deployment. These are production web servers, not marketing experiments. F5 Networks (which acquired NGINX Inc. in 2019) publishes case studies featuring Airbnb, Netflix, and Dropbox, but our detection data centers on a different set of companies, reflecting how Nginx is deployed across both tech-first and traditional companies.

Sales Signal: The sweet spot for selling Nginx-adjacent tools (monitoring, security, API gateways) is companies with 11-200 employees (18.1% of the base). They're large enough to need production-grade infrastructure but small enough to lack dedicated DevOps teams. For the enterprise 5.7%, pitch managed Nginx services or migration to NGINX Plus: they're running the open-source version at scale and likely hitting configuration complexity that a paid tier solves.

Industry and Geographic Concentration

Retail leads at 4.87%, followed by Software Development (3.61%) and Business Consulting (3.16%). The industry distribution is remarkably flat. No single vertical exceeds 5%. This makes Nginx the most horizontal technology in our Web Servers category. It doesn't serve a specific industry -- it serves the internet.

Geographically, the United States leads with 28.7% of enriched companies (27,553), followed by the UK (6.9%) and Germany (6.0%). European adoption is stronger than the typical US-dominated pattern we see in SaaS tools. Spain (4.0%), Netherlands (3.9%), and Italy (3.8%) each hold meaningful shares. China at 3.2% stands out because Nginx was originally created by Russian developer Igor Sysoev and has historically had strong adoption in non-English markets.

Sales Signal: The European spread is the key insight here. Companies selling web infrastructure services in Spain, Netherlands, Italy, and Belgium have a pre-qualified audience of Nginx users. For geographic targeting, the US/UK/Germany cluster covers 41.6% of enriched companies, but don't ignore the European long tail. Germany and the Netherlands in particular have mature DevOps cultures where Nginx-adjacent tools (like Caddy or Traefik) can gain traction with localized technical content.

Migration Patterns

Nginx's migration data tells a one-directional story. 17,432 companies switched from Apache 2.2 to Nginx, while only 264 went the other direction. That's a 66:1 gain ratio. Against IIS 10, Nginx gained 7,054 companies while losing 3,374, a 2.1:1 ratio. The IIS-to-Nginx corridor has accelerated recently: 3,540 companies switched from IIS 10 in the last year alone, more than the entire 5-year total from most other servers.

The only real competitive threat is Caddy. Nginx gained 2,451 from Caddy but lost 1,290 to it, a 1.9:1 ratio that's tighter than any other competitor. Caddy's automatic HTTPS and simpler configuration are pulling developers away from Nginx for smaller projects, though Nginx's performance at scale keeps it dominant for production workloads.

Sales Signal: The Apache-to-Nginx migration wave is the largest infrastructure shift in our data. Companies that moved from Apache 2.2 in the last 1-3 years are in active retooling mode -- they need new monitoring, new configuration management, and possibly new CDN or WAF integration. Target the 1,059 Apache-to-Nginx switchers from the last 3 years with messaging about post-migration optimization. The Caddy angle is also worth exploring: if you sell to developers who value simplicity over raw performance, the 1,290 Nginx-to-Caddy switchers are your ideal audience.

"A 66:1 migration ratio against Apache 2.2 isn't a competitive win. It's the end of an era. Apache dominated the web for two decades, and now 17,432 of its companies have moved to Nginx. The remaining Apache holdouts aren't choosing Apache. They're stuck on it." - Mehmet Suleyman, CEO at TechnologyChecker.io

Technology Ecosystem

The tech stack overlap shows what a typical Nginx-powered site looks like. jQuery at 78.6% is near-universal, reflecting the broad base of traditional web applications. Let's Encrypt at 65.4% confirms most Nginx operators use free SSL, which tracks with the open-source, cost-conscious profile. Google Tag Manager (56.9%) and Google Analytics (54.7%) tell us these aren't just API backends -- they're customer-facing websites with marketing instrumentation.

The CMS layer is telling. PHP at 20.7% and Yoast Plugins at 25.2% point to a massive WordPress-behind-Nginx segment. About one in four Nginx sites runs WordPress with Yoast SEO, using Nginx as a reverse proxy for performance. React at 18.6% represents the modern frontend segment. Cloudflare at 20.0% and CloudFront at 21.8% overlap shows many Nginx operators place a CDN in front for caching and DDoS protection. Google Cloud infrastructure also co-occurs frequently, reflecting Nginx's role as the default web server on GCP instances.

Sales Signal: The WordPress-Nginx combination at 25% is a massive market. If your product targets WordPress performance (caching plugins, managed hosting, CDN integration), a quarter of the 4.6 million Nginx domains are potential customers. The 18.6% React overlap signals a growing modern frontend segment that needs different tooling: API gateways, edge functions, and serverless deployment alongside Nginx.

Key Takeaways

1. Nginx is the #1 web server by a wide margin. 4.6 million active domains with a 66:1 gain ratio over Apache 2.2. The infrastructure shift is complete in most markets.
2. Small companies dominate, but enterprise penetration is high. 69.9% have 1-10 employees, yet 5.7% are 10,001+ employee companies. Nginx serves both ends because it's infrastructure, not a product you buy by seat count.
3. The flattest industry distribution we've measured. No industry exceeds 5%. Nginx is truly horizontal. Sales teams should target by company size and tech stack, not by vertical.
4. European adoption is disproportionately strong. Germany, Spain, Netherlands, and Italy each hold 3-6% shares. This is unusual for a US-dominated web.
5. Caddy is the only emerging competitive threat. A 1.9:1 gain ratio is the tightest among Nginx competitors. Caddy appeals to developers who want zero-config HTTPS and simpler deployments.
6. WordPress-Nginx is a quarter of the install base. 25% of Nginx sites run Yoast/WordPress, making this the single largest identifiable use case.

Sales Applications

Outreach template for Nginx operators:

"Hi [Name], I noticed [Company] runs Nginx on [domain]. Our data shows that 65% of Nginx sites use Let's Encrypt for SSL, but only 20% have a CDN in front. Are you seeing performance or security gaps as traffic scales? Happy to share what we're seeing from similar [industry] companies running Nginx in production."

Targeting strategy: Filter the Nginx install base by company size (11-200 employees), tech stack (WordPress + Nginx for managed hosting pitches, or React + Nginx for modern infrastructure pitches), and geography (Germany and Netherlands for European expansion). This narrows to the highest-conversion segment: companies large enough to care about infrastructure performance but small enough to lack dedicated DevOps teams.

Competitive angle: Don't lead with "Nginx is hard to configure." Lead with the operational overhead. Companies running Nginx in production need monitoring, log management, and security updates that the open-source version doesn't include. Frame your pitch around reducing the ops burden: "You're spending [X] hours per month managing Nginx configs across [Y] servers. We can automate that."

Explore the full Nginx install base with company-level filtering at TechnologyChecker.io. Our dataset covers 4,636,575 active Nginx domains with 52,263 enriched companies including industry, size, location, and tech stack data. Use the "Create Lead List" feature to build targeted prospect lists from this data.