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NGINX Plus vs Zend PHP Engine comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary
 

Categories and Ranking

NGINX Plus
Ranking in Application Infrastructure
2nd
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
29
Ranking in other categories
Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) (5th)
Zend PHP Engine
Ranking in Application Infrastructure
13th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.5
Number of Reviews
11
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of December 2024, in the Application Infrastructure category, the mindshare of NGINX Plus is 11.9%, down from 12.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Zend PHP Engine is 1.5%, up from 1.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Application Infrastructure
 

Featured Reviews

Ritesh-Bakhru - PeerSpot reviewer
Quick installation and very easy to manage while doing orchestration or automation
NGINX cannot be a replacement for your traditional load balancer with what we use in the network today. However, with applications going toward microservices, NGINX is definitely a way forward. F5 has many traditional load balancing features, so they still need to bring some of those features to NGINX. NGINX is a very basic load balancer and cannot do as many customizations as F5. I think F5 is trying to implement those features in NGINX so they can improve the balancing on NGINX, but I think that will take some time. With the traditional F5 set up, the same OS can do load balancing, firewalls, and even policy enforcement. If we are able to bring some of those capabilities to NGINX, I think it would become a versatile solution and usage would definitely increase.
SatyendraGupta - PeerSpot reviewer
The fact that it is available open-source is the best feature
The fact that it is available open-source is the best feature.  A general scripting language should be further developed and should be embedded into it. I have been Zend PHP Engine for nine years.  Multiple people are using the solution.  Overall, I rate the solution a seven out of ten.…

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"The robust software architecture allows for it to be scalable and very stable."
"​The flexibility of its modules allow it to be scalable.​"
"Nginx is extremely efficient in terms of the connection rate to the CPU cycles ratio, and in terms of the bandwidth to CPU cycles."
"The web proxy and the database proxy are excellent."
"NGINX Plus' most valuable feature is the ingress controller."
"NGINX works much better than HAProxy in our current hardware and architecture for HTTP/HTTPS load balancing. ​​"
"I find the solution’s community support and documentation most valuable. Compared to HAProxy, have found a lot of documentation and community support on Quora. If you would be asking me as a developer whether to choose this product, I would recommend this since it has good community support, documentation, and signature updates. The configuration of HAProxy is also very tedious. However, NGINX’s configuration is very simple."
"I think installation only took a couple of minutes — no more than 10 minutes."
"This solution is really easy for me to use."
"Scaling up is an important factor for large projects, and with PHP 7 and its performance improvements, this becomes even easier.​"
"​Zend Engine is the core of PHP. It makes PHP fast, efficient, and basically, the language of choice for web applications."
"The Zend Framework provides an easy, open source way to produce coding based on the needs of our customers.​"
"Zend Engine gives the flexibility to use external modules to easily expand the functionalities you need for your web project."
"Offers a complete environment to develop PHP applications. It is valuable because it allows you to have a complete stack (PHP, MySQL, Zend Server) enabling the building of a development environment, and to deploy to the production system."
"Zend PHP Engine is more secure than any other framework, and I usually prefer Zend PHP Engine for big applications."
"It offers good support for various types of classes, along with many open source libraries that we can readily utilize in our application development process. This gives us a lot of options when it comes to custom development solutions, without having to worry about licensing or other programming-related issues."
 

Cons

"They should do in the open source version of what they did to Advanced HTTP, TCP, and UDP load balancing."
"The scalability could be improved."
"Our most challenging part was to run an older PHP website reverse-proxied through NGINX. That was not fun."
"Only improvement needed that I would point to is scalability. With it, I mean clusterized organisation on a low level. At the moment, the best alternative is RHEL HA."
"I would like it to have a more user-friendly graphical interface."
"I would suggest adding GUI-based configuration panels to NGINX Plus to simplify setup and management tasks."
"The drawback is that you must obtain a license for everything."
"The solution must improve its performance."
"The process of installing and configuring the product is a bit complex and could be improved."
"Although it offers a complete environment to develop and deploy PHP applications, it has some limitations. For example, when the volume of data increased exponentially, I had problems scaling the system."
"SQL queries have always been an issue with PHP, especially if you use large tables, which require caution from the side of the developer.​"
"Zend PHP Engine needs to improve the loading time of its libraries and make it faster."
"The main area that Zend needs to improve is to support asynchronous programming tasks, which is facilitated in PHP 7, but not at the same degree as HHVM.​​"
"Integration of MVC with ORM tools for PHP is okay, but lacking a short list of decent ORM tools for PHP to choose from; there is ample room for improvement in both areas."
"The biggest problem with PHP is you have to write lot of conditions or have to use a framework."
"In terms of improvement, it doesn't support concurrent processing. When we want to process anything on a concurrent basis, we have to divide it into a number of things, like a queue, or we have to run it using Cron jobs. We would like to have the capability to run any thread or process in parallel."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I use the solution's community edition which is free of cost."
"The cost is reasonable."
"Compared to other similar solutions on the market, I think it's over-priced."
"NGINX Plus is an open-source solution with limited additional features. When you try to get additional features in the solution, then you need to pay an extra amount to NGINX Plus."
"​NGINX is a free tool in Brazil. There are some companies which do support it.​"
"There's an open-source version of NGINX that is free."
"You pay for each feature that you want."
"The list price of NGINX Plus is close to $5,500."
"Zend PHP Engine is not an expensive solution."
"Its pricing depends on the number of users."
"No problem with pricing and licensing, as tools are open source. You have to consider training cost, mindset setup cost, as part of the TCO."
"The solution is open source and you just pay for the server cost."
"The Zend PHP engine is open source technology, so there's no need for us to worry about licensing or other costs."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
18%
Computer Software Company
17%
Government
8%
Manufacturing Company
6%
Computer Software Company
16%
Government
14%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Construction Company
10%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

Which is better - IIS or NGINX Plus?
IIS is a flexible, secure, and manageable web server to host anything on the web. IIS’s scalable and open architecture can handle the most demanding tasks. From media streaming to web applications,...
What do you like most about NGINX Plus?
It performs very well. That's one of the primary reasons we use NGINX.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for NGINX Plus?
NGINX is not cost-effective, especially for few applications, and is considered higher-priced.
What do you like most about Zend PHP Engine?
The fact that it is available open-source is the best feature.
What needs improvement with Zend PHP Engine?
Integrating AI tools would make PHP more competitive, as other tools already have AI features.
 

Also Known As

NGINX
PHP Engine
 

Learn More

 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Locaweb, AppNexus, Wix, Reliam, Montana Interactive, MuleSoft, Warpwire, Discovery Education, InkaBinka, WordPress.com, Gogo, GOV.UK, NASA
Cisco
Find out what your peers are saying about NGINX Plus vs. Zend PHP Engine and other solutions. Updated: December 2024.
824,067 professionals have used our research since 2012.