Caddy

Web server with automatic HTTPS by default

As of 29 August 2026, Caddy is free to use. A web server that obtains and renews TLS certificates automatically, with no configuration to get right. Softwr lists it under Cloud. Caddy is made by Stack Holdings, available on Linux, macOS, Windows, Self-hosted.

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Overview

What Caddy does

Caddy is an open-source web server written in Go whose defining feature is automatic HTTPS: it obtains and renews certificates from Let’s Encrypt or ZeroSSL without configuration, and redirects HTTP to HTTPS by default. That sounds small and is not. Certificate management is a recurring source of outages — expired certificates, misconfigured renewal, forgotten cron jobs — and Caddy removes the category. Its Caddyfile is correspondingly short: a working reverse proxy with TLS is two lines, where the equivalent Nginx configuration is considerably longer.

What people use it for

Sites and services where expired certificates have caused outages before
Small deployments where Nginx configuration is more effort than the problem warrants
Reverse proxying internal services with TLS without a certificate workflow

Where it falls short

Concrete and checkable, so you can decide whether any of them matter to you. This is the half of a review a vendor will not write about Caddy.

Smaller ecosystem than Nginx, so third-party guides and modules are fewer
Adding plugins means rebuilding the binary rather than loading a module
Under very high throughput Nginx generally still benchmarks ahead
Automatic certificate issuance needs outbound internet access, which complicates air-gapped deployments

Cross-shopped

What people choose instead of Caddy

Each pairing was judged by two reviewers asking whether a buyer would genuinely weigh the two against each other. The ones that failed were deleted rather than published.

Caddyvs
Nginx
Nginx: The higher-throughput standard with a far larger ecosystem, at the cost of manual TLS management

Pricing

What Caddy costs

Taken from the vendor's own pricing page. Prices move, so check before you buy.

Caddy

Free

Full functionality
Commercial use permitted
Community support

Capabilities

Features

Automatic HTTPS
Certificates obtained and renewed with no configuration
Caddyfile
A concise configuration format for common cases
Reverse proxy
Load balancing and health checks built in
Single binary
No dependencies, written in Go, with plugins compiled in

Answered, with sources

Questions people ask

Each answer names the page it came from, so you can check it rather than take our word for it.

Is Caddy free?

Yes, open source under the Apache 2.0 licence, free for commercial use.

What does automatic HTTPS mean?

Caddy obtains certificates from Let’s Encrypt or ZeroSSL on first request and renews them before expiry, with no cron job or configuration.

Caddy or Nginx?

Caddy is dramatically simpler to configure and removes certificate management. Nginx has the larger ecosystem and better peak throughput.

Keep looking

Where to go from Caddy

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Softwr does not host reviews and shows no star rating for Caddy, because a rating we did not collect is not ours to publish. What is here is the pricing and platform detail from the vendor’s own pages, limitations we could state concretely, and alternatives a reviewer confirmed people weigh against it. Tell us if any of it is wrong.