Angie is a drop-in replacement for NGINX, maintained by the original NGINX core developers after leaving F5/NGINX Inc. This page compares the two side by side, explains the key Angie-only features in detail, and shows you when and how to migrate.
Feature comparison
| Feature | NGINX Mainline | Angie |
|---|---|---|
| Native ACME / Let’s Encrypt | No — needs Certbot or external tool | Yes — built-in http_acme module, RFC 8555 |
| JSON status API | No — plain-text stub_status only (4 counters) |
Yes — rich JSON at /status (connections, upstreams, zones, SSL, caches, reload counts) |
| Config compatibility | Reference implementation | 100% compatible — no config changes needed |
| HTTP/3 + QUIC | Experimental | Experimental (same quality) |
| Dynamic modules | Yes | Yes — same set, prefixed angie-module-* |
| OpenSSL+QUIC (myguard build) | Yes | Yes |
| MQTT proxying | No | Yes — stream_mqtt_filter module |
| License | BSD 2-clause | BSD 2-clause |
| myguard packages | Yes | Yes |
Angie native ACME — TLS without Certbot
Angie implements the ACME protocol (RFC 8555) directly. You declare the CA inside nginx.conf and Angie handles challenge responses, certificate issuance, storage and renewal automatically. No Certbot, no cron jobs, no hooks.
When to choose Angie
- You want native Let’s Encrypt / ACME without Certbot or shell hooks
- You want per-upstream monitoring data without a separate metrics agent
- You prefer running the version developed by NGINX’s original authors
- You want more frequent releases and backported security patches
- You need MQTT stream proxying