Compare the Top Application Server Software for Linux as of April 2025

What is Application Server Software for Linux?

Application server software provides a platform for deploying, managing, and running applications, typically for web or enterprise environments. These servers handle the backend logic of applications, facilitating the connection between client devices and databases or other services. Application servers often provide middleware services such as security, transaction management, and messaging, enabling the smooth execution of applications. They are designed to support multiple users simultaneously and ensure high availability, scalability, and performance of applications. This software is commonly used in environments where complex, data-intensive applications are developed, such as in e-commerce platforms, enterprise resource planning (ERP), and customer relationship management (CRM) systems. Compare and read user reviews of the best Application Server software for Linux currently available using the table below. This list is updated regularly.

  • 1
    RasPiEsi
    RasPiEsi is The World's Smallest Open Source ERP Application Server powered by Epesi and running on Raspberry Pi Zero with 1 core and 512MB RAM only. Part of Epesi ENS - the first FOSS Enterprise Nervous System. Epesi BIM on LLMP stack: - Linux - Lighttpd - MariaDB - tuned - PHP 7.4 FPM + memcached and ZRAM neofetch, mc, ncdu added and updated 77 packages on November 4, 2023 for version 1.1 ("Józiu") RasPiEsi is the smallest possible Epesi Node I was able to build with the smallest RAM usage of only 133MB! Thanks to the excellent DietPi distro this tiny server runs Epesi surprisingly well especially on a fast SD card. It should run unmodified on any Raspberry Pi - from the lowest end $5 RPi Zero with no WiFi and 1 CPU and 512 MB of RAM (used to create this disk image), to the high end RPi 4. Tested fine on RPi 3 - unmodified, just swapped between units! MIT License • Copyright (c) 2024 by Janusz Tylek and Karina Tylek
    Starting Price: $0
  • 2
    NGINX
    NGINX Open Source: The open source web server that powers more than 400 million websites. NGINX Plus is a software load balancer, web server, and content cache built on top of open source NGINX. Use NGINX Plus instead of your hardware load balancer and get the freedom to innovate without being constrained by infrastructure. Save more than 80% compared to hardware ADCs, without sacrificing performance or functionality. Deploy anywhere: public cloud, private cloud, bare metal, virtual machines, and containers. Save time by performing common tasks through the built‑in NGINX Plus API. From NetOps to DevOps, modern app teams need a self‑service, API‑driven platform that integrates easily into CI/CD workflows to accelerate app deployment – whether your app has a hybrid or microservices architecture – and makes app lifecycle management easier.
  • 3
    Apache Geronimo
    Apache Geronimo is an open-source set of projects that are focused on providing JavaEE/JakartaEE libraries and Microprofile implementations. We are actively delivering reusable Java EE components though. They are widely used and still actively maintained! Apache Geronimo provides libraries for the implementations of the Java EE and Jakarta EE specifications. The implementations are also focused on providing OSGi bundle metadata. The goal of XBean project is to create a plugin-based server analogous to Eclipse is a plugin-based IDE. XBean will be able to discover, download and install server plugins from an Internet-based repository. In addition, we include support for multiple IoC systems, support for running with no IoC system, JMX without JMX code, lifecycle and class loader management, and rock-solid Spring integration. Apache Geronimo hosts several Microprofile implementations. Apache Geronimo Arthur is an effort to build a thin layer on top of Oracle GraalVM.
    Starting Price: Free
  • 4
    NGINX Unit
    An universal web app server that combines several layers of the typical application stack into a single component. NGINX Unit simplifies the application stack for web apps and APIs by combining several layers of the typical stack into a single component. NGINX Unit is a universal web app server, intended as a building block for any web architecture regardless of its complexity, from enterprise-scale deployments to your pet's home page. It is equally suited to simplifying modern microservices environments as it is to modernizing legacy and monolithic applications. NGINX Unit was created by the original NGINX team on an all-new, open-source codebase. The architecture incorporates insights from over a decade of running the world’s most popular web server. Unlike the NGINX web server, NGINX Unit uses a multi-process, multi-threaded architecture. The NGINX web server is often deployed as a reverse proxy in front of web applications. NGINX Unit can run the application code natively.
  • 5
    Caddy

    Caddy

    Caddy

    Caddy simplifies your infrastructure. It takes care of TLS certificate renewals, OCSP stapling, static file serving, reverse proxying, Kubernetes ingress, and more. Its modular architecture means you can do more with a single, static binary that compiles for any platform. Caddy runs great in containers because it has no dependencies—not even libc. Run Caddy practically anywhere. Caddy obtains and renews TLS certificates for your sites automatically. It even staples OCSP responses. Its novel certificate management features are the most mature and reliable in its class. Written in go, Caddy offers greater memory safety than servers written in C. A hardened TLS stack powered by the go standard library serves a significant portion of all Internet traffic. Caddy is both a flexible, efficient static file server and a powerful, scalable reverse proxy.
  • 6
    Envoy

    Envoy

    Envoy Proxy

    As on the ground microservice practitioners quickly realize, the majority of operational problems that arise when moving to a distributed architecture are ultimately grounded in two areas: networking and observability. It is simply an orders of magnitude larger problem to network and debug a set of intertwined distributed services versus a single monolithic application. Envoy is a self contained, high performance server with a small memory footprint. It runs alongside any application language or framework. Envoy supports advanced load balancing features including automatic retries, circuit breaking, global rate limiting, request shadowing, zone local load balancing, etc. Envoy provides robust APIs for dynamically managing its configuration.
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