Varnish Alternatives

Varnish is described as 'Cache is an open source, state of the art HTTP application accelerator' and is an app in the development category. There are more than 10 alternatives to Varnish for a variety of platforms, including Linux, Mac, Windows, Self-Hosted and BSD apps. The best Varnish alternative is nginx, which is both free and Open Source. Other great apps like Varnish are Squid, BunkerWeb, CivetWeb and TinyProxy.

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Varnish alternatives page was last updated Oct 26, 2025

nginx
324 likes
nginx ("engine x") is an HTTP web server, reverse proxy, content cache, load balancer, TCP/UDP proxy server, and mail proxy server.
61 nginx alternatives
Cost / License
Free
Open Source (BSD-2-Clause)
Application type
Web Server
Origin
United States
Platforms
Mac
Linux
BSD
Is nginx a good alternative to Varnish?
Squid
59 likes
Squid is a 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.
24 Squid alternatives
Cost / License
Free
Open Source (GPL-2.0)
Application type
Proxy Service
Platforms
Mac
Windows
Linux
BSD
Self-Hosted
FreeBSD
NetBSD
OpenBSD
Is Squid a good alternative to Varnish?
BunkerWeb
8 likes
BunkerWeb is a next-generation and open-source Web Application Firewall (WAF).
58 BunkerWeb alternatives
Cost / License
Free
Open Source (AGPL-3.0)
Application types
Web Application Firewall
Reverse Proxy
Origin
France
EU
Platforms
Self-Hosted
Is BunkerWeb a good alternative to Varnish?
CivetWeb
2 likes
CivetWeb is an easy to use, powerful, C/C++ embeddable web server with optional CGI, SSL and Lua support.
Cost / License
Free
Open Source
Application type
Web Server
Platforms
Self-Hosted
Docker
Windows
Linux
Is CivetWeb a good alternative to Varnish?
TinyProxy
10 likes
Tinyproxy is a light-weight HTTP/HTTPS proxy daemon for POSIX operating systems. It is free software, and supports transparent and reverse proxying.
28 TinyProxy alternatives
Cost / License
Free
Open Source (GPL-2.0)
Application type
Proxy Service
Origin
United States
Platforms
Linux
Is TinyProxy a good alternative to Varnish?
WinGate
3 likes
WinGate Proxy Server is a highly capable integrated Proxy server, firewall and email server designed for access control, security and communications needs. What you do get is all the features of Standard license for 3 concurrent users.
13 WinGate alternatives
Cost / License
Freemium
Proprietary
Application type
Proxy Service
Origin
New Zealand
Platforms
Windows
Is WinGate a good alternative to Varnish?
Artica Proxy
3 likes
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.
Cost / License
Free Personal
Open Source
Application type
Proxy Service
Origin
France
EU
Platforms
Linux
+1
Is Artica Proxy a good alternative to Varnish?
freenginx
1 like
freenginx is an effort to preserve free and open development of nginx, an HTTP and reverse proxy server, a mail proxy server, and a generic TCP/UDP proxy server, originally written by Igor Sysoev.
Cost / License
Free
Open Source
Application type
Web Server
Origin
Russia
Platforms
Windows
Linux
Is freenginx a good alternative to Varnish?
memcached
12 likes
Free & open source, high-performance, distributed memory object caching system, generic in nature, but intended for use in speeding up dynamic web applications by alleviating database load.
Cost / License
Free
Open Source
Platforms
Mac
Linux
Is memcached a good alternative to Varnish?
Apache Traffic Server
3 likes
Formerly a commercial product, Yahoo! donated it to the Apache Foundation, and it is now an Apache TLP.
Cost / License
Free
Open Source
Origin
United States
Platforms
Mac
Linux
Self-Hosted
FreeBSD
Is this a good alternative to Varnish?
Apache Ignite
3 likes
high-performance, integrated and distributed in-memory platform for computing and transacting on large-scale data sets in real-time.
Cost / License
Free
Open Source
Platforms
Mac
Windows
Linux
Online
Java
Is Apache Ignite a good alternative to Varnish?

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1comment
Comments about Apache Ignite as an Alternative to Varnish

Guest
Negative commentSep 8, 2016
0
Ignite is a distributed object cache (like Gemfire, Coherence, or Hazelcast). It's not an HTTP proxy or caching proxy.
Review by a new / low-activity user.
Apache Ignite is Free and Open SourceVarnish is also Free and Open Source
cachelot
3 likes
Cachelot works within a fixed amount of memory. No garbage collector. Small metadata, near perfect memory utilization (overhead is 5-7% of the total memory).
Cost / License
Free
Open Source
Platforms
Mac
Linux
Is cachelot a good alternative to Varnish?