What are the best Squid alternatives in 2020?

    Squid is described as 'caching proxy for the Web supporting HTTP, HTTPS, FTP, and more. It reduces bandwidth and improves response times by caching and reusing frequently-requested web pages. Squid has extensive access controls and makes a great server accelerator' and is a popular app in the File Sharing category. There are more than 10 alternatives to Squid for a variety of platforms, including Linux, Mac, Windows, BSD and Self-Hosted solutions. The best alternative is Privoxy, which is both free and Open Source. Other great apps like Squid are Varnish (Free, Open Source), hBlock (Free, Open Source), TinyProxy (Free, Open Source) and Proxomitron (Free).

    This page was last updated Nov 25, 2020

    1. Privoxy

      • Free • Open Source
      • Mac
      • Windows
      • Linux
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      Privoxy is a non-caching web proxy with advanced filtering capabilities for enhancing privacy, modifying web page data and HTTP headers, controlling access, and removing ads and other obnoxious Internet junk.
      No screenshots yet
      Privoxy vs Squid opinions
      Some users think Privoxy is a great alternative to Squid, some don't.
      It accomplishes the same thing except for one feature: the caching aspect.
      Top positive comment  about 6 years ago

      3
      squid increases speed by storing caching specific http, curl requests.
      Top negative comment  over 5 years ago

      0
      There is no similarity between the two applications. Squid is a caching proxy. Privoxy is not.
      Negative comment • about 1 year ago

      0
      Squid is a caching proxy. Privoxy is a non-caching software. There is no overlap in the use-cases for those types of software.
      Negative comment • over 4 years ago

      -1
      Privoxy doesn't cache web content.
      Negative comment • over 4 years ago

      -2
      No caching function. Primary usage of squid.
      Negative comment • almost 5 years ago

      1
    2. Varnish Cache is an open source, state of the art HTTP application accelerator. You can install it on your HTTP server and it makes your application more accessible. The open source community for the fastest web accelerator in the known universe.
      No screenshots yet
      Varnish vs Squid opinions
      This alternative is disputed. Varnish is still a legitimate alternative to Squid, but it might have issues that some users think are important.
      It is an alternative for the server-side use of squid. It is not suitable for the client-side functionality
      Negative comment • about 3 years ago

      8

    4. hBlock

      • Free • Open Source
      • Mac
      • Linux
      • BSD
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      hBlock is a POSIX-compliant shell script, designed for Unix-like systems, that gets a list of domains that serve ads, tracking scripts and malware from multiple sources and creates a hosts file (alternative formats are also supported) that prevents your system from connecting to...
      No screenshots yet
    5. Tinyproxy is a light-weight HTTP/HTTPS proxy daemon for POSIX operating systems. It is free software, and supports transparent and reverse proxying.
    6. For those who have not yet been introduced, meet the Proxomitron: a free, highly flexible, user-configurable, small but very powerful, local HTTP web-filtering proxy.

      Discontinued

      Last version, 4.5, released on June 2003, is still downloadable from the official website

    8. CacheGuard-OS

      • Windows
      • VirtualBox
      • VMware vSphere Hypervisor
      • Microsoft Hyper-V Server
      • Proxmox Virtual Environment
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      All CacheGuard products and services are focused on delivering secured and optimized Web contents to our clients. To achieve that goal we made CacheGuard OS which is our core product.
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    9. A small and fast caching web proxy (a web cache, an HTTP proxy, a proxy server). Polipo can be used in place of ad-filtering, privacy-enhancing proxies such as Junkbuster, Privoxy or WWWOFFLE.

      Discontinued

      From the official website, "Polipo is obsolete. When it was first written, Polipo was probably the best HTTP proxy available. Since then, the web protocols have changed, and Polipo hasn't kept up — it has no support for HTTP/2.0 or the WebSocket protocol. Polipo will no longer be maintained."

    10. Formerly a commercial product, Yahoo! donated it to the Apache Foundation, and it is now an Apache TLP. Caching Improve your response time, while reducing server load and bandwidth needs by caching and reusing frequently-requested web pages, images, and web service calls.
      No screenshots yet
      Apache Traffic Server vs Squid opinions
      pros, cons and recent comments
      ATS has an event driven architecture where as Squid runs single-threaded. ATS scales much better than Squid.
      Positive comment • over 4 years ago

      -2
    11. ARTICA Proxy is an enterprise grade security appliance : web filtering (w/o SSL decryption), DNS Filtering, bandwith optimisation, easy ACL management, users authentication on LDAP or Active Directory (NTLM/Kerberos), deployment tools (such as proxy.
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    12. 3proxy

      • Free • Open Source
      • Mac
      • Windows
      • Linux
      • BSD
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      3Proxy tiny free proxy server is really tiny cross-platform (Win32/Win64&Unix) freeware proxy servers set. It includes HTTP proxy with HTTPS and FTP support, SOCKSv4/SOCKSv4.5/SOCKSv5 proxy (socks/socks.exe), POP3 proxy, SMTP proxy, AIM/ICQ proxy (icqpr/icqpr.

      Warning

      This site has a poor reputation on WOT. You can see the comments on http://www.mywot.com/en/scorecard/3proxy.ru#page-3

      No screenshots yet
    Showing 10 of 21 alternatives