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Caddy

Hacker Approved

Ranked 2 of 8 web servers by recommenders

A web server and reverse proxy people pick for fully automatic HTTPS certificates and a very short config file, though some find it slower than Nginx under heavy load.

A web server and reverse proxy people pick for fully automatic HTTPS certificates and a very short config file, though some find it slower than Nginx under heavy load.

124 people gave an opinion

recommend it
114
criticize it
10
approval share
92%
Each figure is one person. RecommendsCriticizes

Recommended in 12 of 13 months

  1. November 2025: recommended
  2. December 2025: recommended
  3. January 2026: recommended
  4. February 2026: recommended
  5. March 2026: recommended
  6. April 2026: recommended
  7. May 2026: recommended
  8. June 2026: recommended
  9. July 2026: recommended
  10. August 2026: recommended
  11. September 2026: recommended
  12. October 2026: recommended
  13. November 2026: not recommended (month in progress)

Why it carries the badge

  • 114 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, met.
  • 11 recommenders for every criticNeeds 2 to 1 or better, met.
  • Recommended in 12 of 13 monthsNeeds 4 or more, met.

The same three rules apply to every product, and the badge can’t be bought. How the badge works

What people say about it

The reasons people give, with the number of comments that give each one. Open a reason to read what they said.

Why people recommend it

Each mark is one comment

  • Automatic HTTPS certificate management

    “Caddy checks a Rails endpoint before issuing any certificate, so random domains pointed at your IP won't trigger cert issuance.”

    Comment from 31 Mar 2026 in “Building Multi-Tenant SaaS with Rails 8, Caddy, and Kamal”

    “Caddy runs on top of Go's excellent acme library that handles all of the cert acquisition and renewal process automatically.”

    Comment from 8 Apr 2026 in “We moved Railway's front end off Next.js. Builds went from 10 minutes to under 2”

    “simply add a tag/label to your docker compose files for each of self hosted services to get a real SSL, that auto renewed”

    Comment from 10 Jul 2026 in “TLS certificates for internal services done right”
  • Short, simple configuration

    “For common web server scenarios, a Caddyfile is very short, much shorter than a typical Apache or nginx configuration.”

    Comment from 10 Nov 2025 in “LLMs are steroids for your Dunning-Kruger”

    “Adding Caddy as a proxy server is literally one line in Caddyfile, and I trust Caddy to do it right”

    Comment from 28 Jan 2026 in “LM Studio 0.4.0”

    “Here's the entirety of the Caddy config to reverse proxy something with managed tls certs.”

    Comment from 7 Aug 2026 in “The web server deployment model breaks at hobby scale”
  • Easy reverse proxy for self-hosting

    “you can also use a reverse proxy like caddy or nginx where encryption and security are primary concerns”

    Comment from 8 Sep 2026 in “Jellyfin 12.0”

    “TLS only takes a few minutes to add to a self hosted solution, just plop caddy in front of your server”

    Comment from 9 Dec 2025 in “10 Years of Let's Encrypt”

    “Adding Caddy as a proxy server is literally one line in Caddyfile, and I trust Caddy to do it right”

    Comment from 28 Jan 2026 in “LM Studio 0.4.0”
  • Reliable and battle-tested

    “I can rely on gifts to the world like Linux, Debian, PostgreSQL, Apache, Nginx, Caddy, and Yggdrasil without any problems for decades.”

    Comment from 9 Oct 2026 in “Ask HN: What do you run on a $5 VPS that's worth keeping online 24/7?”

    “My web apps aren't allowed to think about TLS, they sit behind Caddy and I'm secure as long as I keep it updated”

    Comment from 23 Jan 2026 in “Stunnel”

    “if you're looking for something that "just works" and is widely used, have a look at caddy”

    Comment from 2 Apr 2026 in “Show HN: I built a DNS resolver from scratch in Rust – no DNS libraries”

What people warn about

Each mark is one comment

  • Slower than Nginx

    “Caddy, their developers and community refuse to believe Caddy is slow is a much bigger issue.”

    Comment from 15 Jun 2026 in “Caddy compatibility for zeroserve: 3x throughput and 70% lower latency”

    “Caddy on that machine bottlenecks at 300MB/s despite using 100% of the CPU”

    Comment from 15 Jun 2026 in “Caddy compatibility for zeroserve: 3x throughput and 70% lower latency”

    “Another benchmarks showing Caddy not performing on par with Nginx”

    Comment from 7 Jun 2026 in “Zeroserve: A zero-config web server you can script with eBPF”
  • Security and vulnerability concerns

    “Caddy's admin interface is system-wide opened, any local user can inject configuration and take over everything.”

    Comment from 10 Jul 2026 in “Ditching Vagrant: VMs with KVM and Virsh on Debian”

    “it's written in go so probably listening on an mtcp socket meaning you are probably vulnerable”

    Comment from 1 Nov 2026 in “TCP Use-After-Free: CVE-2026-98432 / CVSS 9.8”

    “Caddy had multiple vulnerabilities in its request parsing this year”

    Comment from 14 May 2026 in “New Nginx Exploit”
  • Certificate edge cases and quirks

    “if you are routing over tailscale exclusively Caddy can't automatically validate the domain names over ACME”

    Comment from 8 Sep 2026 in “Jellyfin 12.0”

    “It works, but as another comment mentioned there may be quirks with IP certs, specifically IPv6”

    Comment from 16 Jan 2026 in “6-Day and IP Address Certificates Are Generally Available”

    “there’s no indication from Caddy that you would only be able to renew the cert twice”

    Comment from 2 Dec 2025 in “Decreasing Certificate Lifetimes to 45 Days”
  • Sponsor header controversy

    “putting ads in your servers via a `Caddy-Sponsors` header”

    Comment from 4 Dec 2025 in “Anthropic acquires Bun”

    “I am unstarring Caddy. That's absolutely wild.”

    Comment from 5 Dec 2025 in “Anthropic acquires Bun”

Other web servers people recommend

The four most recommended other web servers, with the same counts for each, so you can compare like for like. The tick on each bar marks the 2 to 1 line the badge needs.

Caddy compared with 4 alternatives
ProductRecommendCriticizeApprovalMonthsOwnedBadge
nginx1304475%1215 yrs5 ownersApproved
CaddyThis page1141092%12—Approved
Apache HTTP Server523262%1210 yrs5 owners—
Zeroserve17868%1——
FrankenPHP15194%8—Approved
See all 8 web servers, ranked

What people said

40 of the 152 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.

“it's written in go so probably listening on an mtcp socket meaning you are probably vulnerable”

CriticizesComment from 1 Nov 2026 in “TCP Use-After-Free: CVE-2026-98432 / CVSS 9.8”

“My main HTTP server, Caddy, has gained WebDAV support since I published this configuration, but I haven't used it in anger.”

MixedComment from 13 Oct 2026 in “IRCv3”

“I can rely on gifts to the world like Linux, Debian, PostgreSQL, Apache, Nginx, Caddy, and Yggdrasil without any problems for decades.”

RecommendsComment from 9 Oct 2026 in “Ask HN: What do you run on a $5 VPS that's worth keeping online 24/7?”

“The Caddy container handling certificates and reverse proxies for everything.”

RecommendsComment from 5 Oct 2026 in “"I'm Embarrassed on Behalf of the Tech Industry"”

“Nginx, Caddy, Apache, etc have found and fixed a million edge cases you'd never think of”

RecommendsComment from 19 Sep 2026 in “I built the fastest PHP webserver in the world”

“I expose my services with a Caddy reverse proxy on a VPS”

MixedComment from 18 Sep 2026 in “Ask HN: What self-hosted apps do you use daily?”

“if you are routing over tailscale exclusively Caddy can't automatically validate the domain names over ACME”

MixedComment from 8 Sep 2026 in “Jellyfin 12.0”

“you can also use a reverse proxy like caddy or nginx where encryption and security are primary concerns”

RecommendsComment from 8 Sep 2026 in “Jellyfin 12.0”

“Mine uses caddy for the Web front, which automates letsencrypt certification.”

MixedComment from 3 Sep 2026 in “Ask HN: Advice on Migrating from 1Password?”

“Here's the entirety of the Caddy config to reverse proxy something with managed tls certs.”

RecommendsComment from 7 Aug 2026 in “The web server deployment model breaks at hobby scale”

“Caddy's admin interface is system-wide opened, any local user can inject configuration and take over everything.”

CriticizesComment from 10 Jul 2026 in “Ditching Vagrant: VMs with KVM and Virsh on Debian”

“simply add a tag/label to your docker compose files for each of self hosted services to get a real SSL, that auto renewed”

RecommendsComment from 10 Jul 2026 in “TLS certificates for internal services done right”

“Caddy, their developers and community refuse to believe Caddy is slow is a much bigger issue.”

CriticizesComment from 15 Jun 2026 in “Caddy compatibility for zeroserve: 3x throughput and 70% lower latency”

“Caddy on that machine bottlenecks at 300MB/s despite using 100% of the CPU”

CriticizesComment from 15 Jun 2026 in “Caddy compatibility for zeroserve: 3x throughput and 70% lower latency”

“Another benchmarks showing Caddy not performing on par with Nginx”

CriticizesComment from 7 Jun 2026 in “Zeroserve: A zero-config web server you can script with eBPF”

“Caddy had multiple vulnerabilities in its request parsing this year”

CriticizesComment from 14 May 2026 in “New Nginx Exploit”

“Caddy will even do fully automated valid TLS certificates for private IP ranges via DNS ACME challenge for free”

RecommendsComment from 5 May 2026 in “Should I Run Plain Docker Compose in Production in 2026?”

“I reverse proxy everything through a Caddy instance running on the same machine”

RecommendsComment from 5 May 2026 in “Should I Run Plain Docker Compose in Production in 2026?”

“Automatic HTTPS, dead-simple config, and it proxies to your Go binary in about 4 lines.”

RecommendsComment from 12 Apr 2026 in “I run multiple $10K MRR companies on a $20/month tech stack”

“Caddy runs on top of Go's excellent acme library that handles all of the cert acquisition and renewal process automatically.”

RecommendsComment from 8 Apr 2026 in “We moved Railway's front end off Next.js. Builds went from 10 minutes to under 2”

“if you're looking for something that "just works" and is widely used, have a look at caddy”

RecommendsComment from 2 Apr 2026 in “Show HN: I built a DNS resolver from scratch in Rust – no DNS libraries”

“Caddy checks a Rails endpoint before issuing any certificate, so random domains pointed at your IP won't trigger cert issuance.”

RecommendsComment from 31 Mar 2026 in “Building Multi-Tenant SaaS with Rails 8, Caddy, and Kamal”

“Caddy trying to get certs by default is annoying”

CriticizesComment from 25 Mar 2026 in “You Can Run a DNS Server”

“I fully understand and appreciate the gifts that things like Docker and systemd and even Caddy have brought to the table”

RecommendsComment from 18 Mar 2026 in “I Love FreeBSD”

“Caddy lets you specify any number of ACME providers to try in sequence if the previous ones fail.”

RecommendsComment from 18 Feb 2026 in “Google Public CA is down”

“use its on_demand TLS to handle certificates for the upload and conference subdomains automatically”

RecommendsComment from 16 Feb 2026 in “Running My Own XMPP Server”

“Adding Caddy as a proxy server is literally one line in Caddyfile, and I trust Caddy to do it right”

RecommendsComment from 28 Jan 2026 in “LM Studio 0.4.0”

“Both require minimal configuration, and provide packages for many Linux distributions”

RecommendsComment from 27 Jan 2026 in “Cloudflare claimed they implemented Matrix on Cloudflare workers. They didn't”

“My web apps aren't allowed to think about TLS, they sit behind Caddy and I'm secure as long as I keep it updated”

RecommendsComment from 23 Jan 2026 in “Stunnel”

“It works, but as another comment mentioned there may be quirks with IP certs, specifically IPv6”

MixedComment from 16 Jan 2026 in “6-Day and IP Address Certificates Are Generally Available”

“You add a new app/site in caddy's config and everything else is completely automatic.”

RecommendsComment from 12 Jan 2026 in “2026 is the Year of Self-hosting”

“this works on my mobile devices as well with a dns record to point to this caddy instance”

RecommendsComment from 7 Jan 2026 in “Firefox extension to redirect x.com to xcancel.com”

“automation like Caddy server that does this for us while also being our ingress proxy for all those domains”

RecommendsComment from 16 Dec 2025 in “Upcoming Changes to Let's Encrypt Certificates”

“I would probably use a centralized authorization service "authentication gateway" with something like forward_auth in Caddy”

RecommendsComment from 11 Dec 2025 in “Sharding to Contain the Blast Radius of Data Breaches”

“Thank you Let's Encrypt, together with the acme.sh, caddy and the whole ecosystem for TLS.”

RecommendsComment from 10 Dec 2025 in “10 Years of Let's Encrypt”

“TLS only takes a few minutes to add to a self hosted solution, just plop caddy in front of your server”

RecommendsComment from 9 Dec 2025 in “10 Years of Let's Encrypt”

“I am unstarring Caddy. That's absolutely wild.”

CriticizesComment from 5 Dec 2025 in “Anthropic acquires Bun”

“putting ads in your servers via a `Caddy-Sponsors` header”

CriticizesComment from 4 Dec 2025 in “Anthropic acquires Bun”

“there’s no indication from Caddy that you would only be able to renew the cert twice”

RecommendsComment from 2 Dec 2025 in “Decreasing Certificate Lifetimes to 45 Days”

“For common web server scenarios, a Caddyfile is very short, much shorter than a typical Apache or nginx configuration.”

RecommendsComment from 10 Nov 2025 in “LLMs are steroids for your Dunning-Kruger”

Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.