Best Web Servers for Mac
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What are Web Servers for Mac?
Web servers, also known as HTTP servers, are servers that host websites and web applications. Web servers are the backbone of all sites and web apps on the internet. Many popular web servers are open source. Different web servers have advantages and disadvantages when compared to one another, and selecting the right one depends on use case, deployment, operating system, and more. Compare and read user reviews of the best Web Servers for Mac currently available using the table below. This list is updated regularly.
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1
Apache HTTP Server
Apache Software Foundation
The Apache HTTP Server Project is an effort to develop and maintain an open-source HTTP server for modern operating systems including UNIX and Windows. The goal of this project is to provide a secure, efficient and extensible server that provides HTTP services in sync with the current HTTP standards. -
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Jaisocx
Jaisocx
Since 2024 Jaisocx supports PHP over HTTP/3, intuitively switching among HTTP/1.1, h2 and h3 depending on negotiation with HTTP client. a) Unique feature is Charset detection of published text contents, and making browser showing correctly extended ascii chars like in German or French alphabets. b) It has built-in motor for securing endpoints with Basic Auth and JSON Web Token. c) Proxy Endpoints. d) Also the framework-like solution for publishing SQL queries results in JSON format out of the box with minimal configuration. e) On the same company site this software is well documented. f) Software is free, g) and has the Docker Hub repository h) and Github.com repository with some basic samples for Laravel, Symfony and WordPress apps under Docker Compose.Starting Price: $0 -
3
NGINX
F5
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. -
4
Node.js
Node.js
As an asynchronous event-driven JavaScript runtime, Node.js is designed to build scalable network applications. Upon each connection, the callback is fired, but if there is no work to be done, Node.js will sleep. This is in contrast to today's more common concurrency model, in which OS threads are employed. Thread-based networking is relatively inefficient and very difficult to use. Furthermore, users of Node.js are free from worries of dead-locking the process, since there are no locks. Almost no function in Node.js directly performs I/O, so the process never blocks except when the I/O is performed using synchronous methods of Node.js standard library. Because nothing blocks, scalable systems are very reasonable to develop in Node.js. Node.js is similar in design to, and influenced by, systems like Ruby's Event Machine and Python's Twisted. Node.js takes the event model a bit further. It presents an event loop as a runtime construct instead of as a library. -
5
Tornado Web Server
Tornado
Tornado is a Python web framework and asynchronous networking library, originally developed at FriendFeed. By using non-blocking network I/O, Tornado can scale to tens of thousands of open connections, making it ideal for long polling, WebSockets, and other applications that require a long-lived connection to each user. Tornado is different from most Python web frameworks. It is not based on WSGI, and it is typically run with only one thread per process. While some support of WSGI is available in the tornado.wsgi module, it is not a focus of development and most applications should be written to use Tornado’s own interfaces (such as tornado.web) directly instead of using WSGI. In general, Tornado code is not thread-safe. Tornado is integrated with the standard library asyncio module and shares the same event loop (by default since Tornado 5.0). In general, libraries designed for use with asyncio can be mixed freely with Tornado. -
6
OpenResty
OpenResty
OpenResty® is a full-fledged web platform that integrates our enhanced version of the Nginx core, our enhanced version of LuaJIT, many carefully written Lua libraries, lots of high-quality 3rd-party Nginx modules, and most of their external dependencies. It is designed to help developers easily build scalable web applications, web services, and dynamic web gateways. By taking advantage of various well-designed Nginx modules (most of which are developed by the OpenResty team themselves), OpenResty® effectively turns the nginx server into a powerful web app server, in which the web developers can use the Lua programming language to script various existing nginx C modules and Lua modules and construct extremely high-performance web applications that are capable to handle 10K ~ 1000K+ connections in a single box. OpenResty® aims to run your server-side web app completely in the Nginx server, leveraging Nginx's event model to do non-blocking I/O with the HTTP clients. -
7
quark
suckless.org
The goal of this project is to do one thing and do it well, namely serving static web directories and doing that right. Most other solutions either are too complex (CGI support, dependencies on external libraries, etc.) or lack features you expect (TLS, virtual hosts, partial content, not modified since, etc.). quark tries to find a midway and just restrict itself to being static while still offering functions you only find in more bloated solutions and being as secure as possible (chroot, privilege dropping, strict parsers, no malloc at runtime, pledge, unveil, etc.). We believe that most of the web does not need to be dynamic and increasing complexity on server-side applications is one of the main reasons for the web obesity crisis. The common approach nowadays is to do everything on the server, including parsing requests, modifying files and databases, generating HTML and all that using unfit languages like PHP or JavaScript, which is a security and efficiency nightmare. -
8
H2O
H2O
H2O is a new generation HTTP server that provides a quicker response to users with less CPU utilization when compared to older generation of web servers. Designed from the ground up, the server takes full advantage of HTTP/2 features including prioritized content serving and server push, promising an outstanding experience to the visitors of your website. Full support for dependency and weight-based prioritization with server-side tweaks. Thanks to others, H2O is provided as a binary package on some environments. Therefore you may try to at first install the software using your favorite packaging system, and then resort to installing from source. Generally speaking, we believe that using LibreSSL is a better choice for running H2O, since LibreSSL not only is considered to be more secure than OpenSSL but also provides support for new ciphersuites. -
9
Monkey Server
Monkey Server
Monkey is a lightweight and powerful web server and development stack for Linux & OSX. It has been designed to be very scalable with low memory and CPU consumption, the perfect solution for embedded devices. Made for ARM, x86 and x64. Monkey is a lightweight and scalable Web Server. Originally made for Linux, it's also compatible with OSX. It have been designed with a strong focus on Embedded devices, therefore its scalable by nature having a low memory and CPU consumption, making it a real solution for high-end production servers too. Monkey is built and tested for different architectures such as ARM, x86 and x64. Monkey uses a hybrid mechanism composed by a fixed number of threads being each one capable to attend thousands of clients thanks to the event-driven model based in asynchronous sockets. The interaction between the scheduler and each worker thread is lock-free, avoiding race conditions and exposing a huge performance compared to other available options. -
10
Tengine
Tengine
Tengine is a web server originated by Taobao, the largest e-commerce website in Asia. It is based on the Nginx HTTP server and has many advanced features. Tengine has proven to be very stable and efficient on some of the top 100 websites in the world, including Taobao and tmall. Tengine has been an open source project since December 2011. It is being actively developed by the Tengine team, whose core members are from Taobao, Sogou and other internet companies. Tengine is a community effort and everyone is encouraged to get involved. All features of Nginx-1.17.3 are inherited, i.e., it is compatible with Nginx. Support the connect HTTP method for forward proxy. Enhanced operations monitoring, such as asynchronous log & rollback, DNS caching, memory usage, etc. Sends unbuffered upload directly to HTTP and FastCGI backend servers, which saves disk I/Os. More load balancing methods, e.g., consistent hashing, session persistence, upstream health check, etc. -
11
Kestrel
Microsoft
Kestrel is a cross-platform web server for ASP.NET Core. Kestrel is the web server that's included and enabled by default in ASP.NET Core project templates. Kestrel supports HTTPS, HTTP/2 (except on macOS), Opaque upgrade used to enable WebSockets, Unix sockets for high performance behind Nginx. Kestrel is supported on all platforms and versions that .NET Core supports. Some browsers require granting explicit permission to trust the local development certificate. Project templates configure apps to run on HTTPS by default and include HTTPS redirection and HSTS support. The Kestrel web server has constraint configuration options that are especially useful in Internet-facing deployments. There's a separate limit for connections that have been upgraded from HTTP or HTTPS to another protocol (for example, on a WebSockets request). The default maximum request body size is 30,000,000 bytes, which is approximately 28.6 MB. -
12
Mongoose
Mongoose
Mongoose turns a software product, a device or appliance into a web server, accessible by a browser. One of the most common use cases is to use Mongoose to add a Web-accessible control panel for a device. Ready-to-go examples and tutorials for common functionalities like authentication, live logs, video streaming. Using Mongoose, it is easy to create various API to control your device or application remotely, via browser, mobile phone, or automation tools. We have created an extremely memory-efficient, easy-to-use, MIT-licensed JSON library to use together with Mongoose. Real-time, full-duplex communication over MQTT or Websocket. Exchange plain data, or wrap data into JSON to use JSON-RPC! Mongoose turns a software product, a device or appliance into a web server, accessible by a browser. Upload device data to a cloud server of your choice. Use a 3rd party cloud provider, or spin your own. -
13
lighttpd
lighttpd
Security, speed, compliance, and flexibility — all of these describe lighttpd (pron. lighty) which is rapidly redefining efficiency of a webserver; as it is designed and optimized for high performance environments. With a small memory footprint compared to other web-servers, effective management of the cpu-load, and advanced feature set (FastCGI, SCGI, Auth, Output-Compression, URL-Rewriting and many more) lighttpd is the perfect solution for every server that is suffering load problems. And best of all it's Open Source licensed under the revised BSD license. lighttpd powers several popular Web 2.0 sites. Its high speed io-infrastructure allows them to scale several times better with the same hardware than with alternative web-servers. -
14
Hiawatha
Hiawatha
Hiawatha has been written with security in mind. This resulted in a highly secure webserver in both code and features. Hiawatha can stop SQL injections, XSS and CSRF attacks and exploit attempts. Via a specially crafted monitoring tool, you can keep track of all your webservers. You don't need to be a HTTP or CGI expert to get Hiawatha up and running. Its configuration syntax is easy to learn. The documentation and examples you can find on this website will give you all the information you need to configure your webserver within minutes. Although Hiawatha has everything a modern webserver needs, it's nevertheless a small and lightweight webserver. This makes Hiawatha ideal for older hardware or embedded systems. Special techniques are being used to keep the usage of resources as low as possible. -
15
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. -
16
Cherokee
Cherokee
Cherokee is an innovative, feature-rich, lightning-fast and easy to configure open source web server designed for the next generation of highly concurrent secured web applications. All the configuration is done through Cherokee-Admin, a beautiful and powerful web interface. Cherokee supports the most widespread web technologies, FastCGI, SCGI, PHP, uWSGI, SSI, CGI, LDAP, TLS/SSL, HTTP proxying, video streaming, content caching, traffic shaping, etc. Cherokee runs on Linux, Mac OS X, Solaris, and BSD. It is highly efficient, extremely lightweight and provides rock-solid stability. Among its many features, there is one that deserves special credit, a user-friendly interface called cherokee-admin that is provided for a no-hassle configuration of every single feature of the server. This administration interface allows you to configure the webserver without having to worry about editing a text file written with a certain syntax. -
17
Cowboy
99s
Cowboy is the ultimate server for the modern Web with support for Websocket, HTTP/2 and REST. Cowboy is a small, fast and modern HTTP server for Erlang/OTP. Cowboy aims to provide a complete modern Web stack. This includes HTTP/1.1, HTTP/2, WebSocket, server-sent events and Webmachine-based REST. Cowboy comes with functions for introspection and tracing, enabling developers to know precisely what is happening at any time. Its modular design also easily enables developers to add instrumentation. Cowboy is a high-quality project. It has a small code base, is very efficient (both in latency and memory use) and can easily be embedded in another application. Cowboy is clean Erlang code. It includes hundreds of tests and its code is fully compliant with the Dialyzer. It is also well documented and features a function reference, a user guide and numerous tutorials. Knowledge of the HTTP protocol is recommended but not required, as it will be detailed throughout the guide. -
18
Apache Traffic Server
Apache Software Foundation
Apache Traffic Server™ software is a fast, scalable and extensible HTTP/1.1 and HTTP/2 compliant caching proxy server. Formerly a commercial product, Yahoo! donated it to the Apache Foundation, and currently used by several major CDNs and content owners. Improve your response time, while reducing server load and bandwidth needs by caching and reusing frequently-requested web pages, images, and web service calls. Scales well on modern SMP hardware, handling 10s of thousands of requests per second. Easily add keep-alive, filter or anonymize content requests, or add load balancing by adding a proxy layer. APIs to write your own plug-ins to do anything from modifying HTTP headers to handling ESI requests to writing your own cache algorithm. Handling over 400TB a day at Yahoo! both as forward and reverse proxies, Apache Traffic Server is battle hardened. -
19
OpenLiteSpeed
LiteSpeed Technologies
OpenLiteSpeed is the Open Source edition of LiteSpeed Web Server Enterprise. Both servers are actively developed and maintained by the same team, and are held to the same high-quality coding standard. OpenLiteSpeed contains all of the essential features found in LiteSpeed Enterprise, and represents our commitment to support the Open Source community. Event driven processes, less overhead, and enormous scalability. Keep your existing hardware. OpenLiteSpeed is mod_rewrite compatible, with no new syntax to learn. Continue to use your existing rewrite rules. Built-in full-page cache module is highly-customizable and efficient for an exceptional user experience. Automatically implement Google’s PageSpeed optimization system with the mod_pagespeed module. Install OpenLiteSpeed, MariaDB and WordPress on various operating systems with just one click. -
20
Abyss Web Server
Aprelium
Abyss Web Server is a compact web server available for Windows, macOS, and Linux operating systems. Despite its small footprint, it supports HTTP/2, secure SSL/TLS connections (HTTPS), automated provisioning and renewal of free certificates from Let's Encrypt® (ACME v2), IPv6, on-the-fly HTTP compression, dynamic content generation through CGI/FastCGI scripts, ISAPI extensions, native ASP.NET, HTTP/HTTPS/WebSocket reverse proxying, eXtended Side Includes (XSSI), custom error pages, password protection, IP address control, anti-leeching, bandwidth throttling, and log rotation. It also features an automatic antihacking system as well as a multilingual remote web management interface that makes its configuration as easy as browsing a web site.Starting Price: $59.95 one-time payment -
21
Apache Tomcat
Apache
The Apache Tomcat® software is an open source implementation of the Jakarta Servlet, Jakarta Server Pages, Jakarta Expression Language, Jakarta WebSocket, Jakarta Annotations and Jakarta Authentication specifications. These specifications are part of the Jakarta EE platform. Apache Tomcat software powers numerous large-scale, mission-critical web applications across a diverse range of industries and organizations. Some of these users and their stories are listed on the PoweredBy wiki page. The Apache Tomcat Project is proud to announce the release of version 10.0.10 of Apache Tomcat. This release implements specifications that are part of the Jakarta EE 9 platform. -
22
LiteSpeed Web Server
LiteSpeed Technologies
Our lightweight Apache alternative conserves resources without sacrificing performance, security, compatibility, or convenience. Double the maximum capacity of your current Apache servers with LiteSpeed Web Server's streamlined event-driven architecture, capable of handling thousands of concurrent clients with minimal memory consumption and CPU usage. Protect your servers with already familiar ModSecurity rules while also taking advantage of a host of built-in anti-DDoS features, such as bandwidth and connection throttling. Conserve capital by reducing the number of servers needed to support your growing hosting business or online application. Reduce complexity by eliminating the need for an HTTPS reverse proxy or additional 3rd party caching layers. LiteSpeed Web Server is compatible with all popular Apache features including its Rewrite Engine and ModSecurity, and can load Apache configuration files directly. -
23
MacHTTP-js
MacHTTP-js
MacHTTP-js is currently available for preview on macOS now. As a brand new application, MacHTTP-js includes features never envisioned in the original when it was first released in 1992. MacHTTP-js is written from the ground up using the node.js platform, which means it is a cross-platform application that can run on macOS, Windows, and Linux operating systems. MacHTTP-js is a full-featured Web server for 21st century desktops and servers. A "preview" release is available now for Mac users, followed by a general release for Windows 10 and Linux computers, including support for Docker. This is a full-featured release for macOS and other O/S versions will follow shortly.
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