Companies Using Tengine

Tengine is a strange web server to profile, because a large part of its raw count isn't a decision anyone made about web servers. A domain counts here when the Server header in our crawler's response says Tengine. In our October 2026 crawl that's 16,071 domains after cleaning, 7,560 of them matched to a company, 12th of 70 in Web Servers with 0.11%. On 13 October I broke the raw count down by parent domain and requested a random sample of 60 by hand, because a header only tells you whose machine answered.

What we took out

Our crawl treats each store's hostname as a domain, so every Tmall or Taobao shop with its own subdomain had counted once. On 13 October the set held 3,727 Tmall stores, 3,490 on 1688, 2,845 on Taobao, 136 on Alibaba.com and 88 on AliExpress, plus 1,112 supplier pages on china.cn. In my sample, 21 of the 23 marketplace pages were stores such as shop112449362.taobao.com, and all 21 answered as Tengine/Aserver, a variant we only saw on Alibaba properties. We removed 11,393 store pages in all.

"Before the cut, more than a third of the domains answering as Tengine were Tmall, Taobao and 1688 shop pages. That was Alibaba counting itself." - David Thomson, CTO at TechnologyChecker.io

Sales signal: the 16,071 is the list worth working. The chart has one point because the cleaned series starts in October, and since March 3,927 domains have dropped the header, 340 of them still showing it elsewhere; don't size a trend from that.

The edge answers as Tengine

The larger layer of what's left is Alibaba Cloud. Its CDN responses carry headers such as EagleId and Ali-Swift next to Server: Tengine, and its firewall sets an acw_tc cookie. Of the 37 non-marketplace domains in my sample, 17 answered this way, 11 of them with DNS records pointing at Alibaba's CDN or firewall hostnames. In our list of 50 companies, 26 responses carried the same headers, among them Ping An, DJI, Starbucks China, Shangri-La and Price Chopper's AdvantEdge Rewards site.

That explains the overlap figures. Since March, 4,301 domains have shown both Tengine and Nginx, but only 1,153 still do; OpenResty's pair is 731 and 199, and Apache's 821 and 341. When a site moves onto or off Alibaba Cloud's edge, the header changes and the site behind it doesn't, so we suppressed these rows as switching.

"When a Chinese company's site says Tengine, my first check is for an EagleId header. If it's there, you're talking to Alibaba Cloud's CDN, not to the company's server." - David Thomson, CTO at TechnologyChecker.io

Sales signal: for CDN, security and observability vendors, a Tengine header plus Alibaba CDN headers marks an Alibaba Cloud account. That's a competitive displacement list, and it's the larger part of this count.

Who runs it themselves

11 of the 60 sampled domains answered with Tengine and no Alibaba marker. In our company list, DiDi and NIO report Tengine/2.3.3, Great Wall Motor serves its fleet-management site with Tengine, and 58.com's business site and Afni's homepage answer as Tengine with no CDN headers. Five careers sites, Econocom's, DomusVi's, Fiteco's, the University of Rennes' and Supermercados Bravo's, answer as Tengine because the recruiting software Beetween hosts them. The company base leans mid-sized: 51 to 200 employees is the largest band at 26.26%, and 473 companies have more than 1,000 staff. Only 9.21% were founded in the 2020s.

Sales signal: self-hosted Tengine shops such as DiDi, NIO and Great Wall Motor run their own Nginx variant. They're the buyers here for performance, TLS and observability tools.

China and its exporters

China has 5,169 of the 7,560 matched companies, 68.37%. The United States is second with 298, then Germany (220) and Brazil (104). IT Services (6.3%) and Software Development (6.07%) lead the industries, but the three manufacturing categories add up to 11.35% and Wholesale to 4.66%. Alibaba Cloud's website builder runs 9.2% of Tengine domains and NetEase's foreign-trade builder 1.44%, so some exporters bought the site and the hosting in one go.

Sales signal: for cross-border marketing and trade-show vendors, the manufacturing rows are a list of Chinese exporters already paying for a Western-facing site.

The stack around it

Across the 16,071 clean live domains, Baidu Analytics (19.98%) edges out Google Analytics (19.56%), and CNZZ is on 13.91%. Alibaba's Goldlog analytics, which the marketplace store pages carried, is down to 2.82%. 21.26% load scripts from alicdn.com, which our stack labels Alibaba Cloud CDN, though that's a page asset rather than proof of the edge. Microsoft ASP.NET shows on 19.01%, Vue.js on 16.21% and Cloudflare on 7.82%.

Sales signal: Baidu Analytics running level with Google Analytics tells you which ad ecosystem these sites buy into. Chinese-market ad and analytics tools will land here; most Western martech won't.

Versions and the 2026 CVEs

Tengine is free under the BSD 2-Clause licence on GitHub, where the latest stable release is 3.1.0 from October 2023 and 3.2.0 reached its fifth release candidate in September 2026. Orca Security's analysis found that 3.1.0, built on Nginx 1.24.0, carries the rewrite-module overflows CVE-2026-42945 and CVE-2026-9256. The two companies in our list that print a version, DiDi and NIO, both report 2.3.3, a development release the project announced in March 2021.

Sales signal: self-hosted Tengine with a visible version string is a patching conversation waiting to happen. Filter out the Alibaba Cloud edge first; patching that is Alibaba's job.

Key takeaways

1. 16,071 domains, 12th of 70 in Web Servers with 0.11%, counted from the Server header.

2. We removed 11,393 Alibaba marketplace and china.cn store pages that Alibaba's servers answer for.

3. In a random sample, 17 of 37 non-marketplace domains answered through Alibaba Cloud's CDN or firewall, and 11 ran Tengine with no Alibaba marker.

4. China has 68.37% of matched companies, and the base leans mid-sized and established.

5. Overlaps with Nginx and OpenResty are header flips at the edge. We found no real switching.

Working with the list

Split the list by whether the response carries Alibaba CDN headers. The companies without them run Tengine themselves. Our Apache HTTP Server profile shows what a web server's count looks like when the owner picked it. For the full list of 16,071 Tengine domains with company and stack data, explore TechnologyChecker.io, and our guide to technology detection methods explains why a header can name the platform rather than the site owner.