Nginx vs Envoy: Which Proxy to Self-Host?

Quick Verdict Nginx is the right choice for self-hosting. It's a proven web server and reverse proxy with simple configuration, static file serving, and decades of community knowledge. Envoy is a cloud-native service proxy designed for microservice architectures and service meshes — its complexity is unjustified for self-hosting setups. Overview Nginx is the world's most popular web server, also serving as a reverse proxy, load balancer, and HTTP cache. It powers roughly a third of the internet. Current version: 1.28.2. Envoy is a high-performance L7 proxy designed for cloud-native architectures, originally built at Lyft. It's the data plane for service meshes like Istio. Current version: v1.37.0. Feature Comparison Feature Nginx 1.28 Envoy v1.37 Web server Yes No Static file serving Excellent No Config format nginx.conf (familiar) Typed YAML (verbose) SSL termination Yes Yes Automatic HTTPS No (needs Certbot) No (needs SDS) gRPC proxying Basic Native first-class Circuit breaking No Ye