Do you know any reason to use Apache instead of Nginx?

Apache is still the most popular web server on the Internet, estimated to serve about 55% of all websites in existence, compared to nginx's 12% (in Jan 2013).

UPDATE (Apr 2015): Apache still has the largest share at about 40%, and nginx has grown to 15%. Check the above mentioned link for the latest figures.

UPDATE (Jul 2020): nginx has comfortably surpassed Apache in popularity at 37% vs 25%. Apache still has more hits on searches.

It is the oldest web server around, which means that you won't have any trouble finding people skilled in configuring it.

You're also slightly more likely to find help when searching the web. SO has ~80,000 tags for Apache, and ~40,000 for nginx.

Installation documents sometimes assume you're using Apache, often including .htaccess documentation, but not the equivalent nginx configuration:

• Yii 1.0 was only tested with Apache
• Yii 1.1 only has clean URL instructions for Apache
• CodeIgniter 2.0 only has .htaccess instructions for Apache
• CodeIgniter 3.0 still only has .htaccess instructions for Apache in the clean URL section
• The Drupal setup page has notes for Apache and IIS, but nginx is only mentioned in the comments, and at least one person is having trouble getting the nginx settings working

My recommendation? Either are perfectly good choices, flip a coin if you can't find any compelling reasons either way.

Feb 2018 response here.

Apache is 47.4% (-3.3% 1 year), Nginx is 36.8% (+4.4% 1 year)

The trend is linear, by 2020 if nothing happens, Nginx will be the most used.

Nginx was made for supporting lots of concurrent requests, which modern apps usually do, like small Ajax requests, and less full page loads.

I've seen Benchmarks ( for a static resource), and Nginx MURDERS Apache, both in requests per seconds and RAM usage.

I've realized all this an hour ago, I’ve been using apache for lots of years, and I’m migrating just after writing this post.

Conclusion for 2018: Go for Nginx.

Bench:dreamhost Web-server-performance-comparison

Share:w3techs.com web_server

Share 2: netcraft.com web-server-survey

There really aren't any objective reasons to use Apache over Nginx.

In fact, there may actually be performance reasons why Nginx is superior. These sorts of reasons however are usually of no significance when putting an entire web application in perspective.

You will find many subjective reasons to prefer one web server over the other, such as bias related to familiarity. With respect to web servers, these biases might be tied to a user's age since Apache has been around much longer. For many of these users, learning a new system is not a productive use of time. For less experienced or new administrators, familiarity bias is not applicable.

Another subjective reason is the mis-belief that a larger market share will always yield recognizably greater levels of support. These reason fails to recognize the diminishing relevance of larger market share past extreme points of acceptance. For example, a recent Netcraft survey has Nginx up to 14.42% market share of all web sites while Apache is at 37.45%. While one may blindly assume Apache to have superior support given its substantially larger percent of market share, the fact is the 14.42% represents one hundred forty eight million, three hundred thirty thousand, one hundred ninety websites (148,330,190). That's an extraordinarily massive number of websites and users which and who are running on Nginx. The raw number of users of Nginx is so large that it's relatively smaller market share will have no recognizable difference in support level.