Portainer VS Nginx Proxy Manager

Compare Portainer vs Nginx Proxy Manager and see what are their differences.

Nginx Proxy Manager

Docker container for managing Nginx proxy hosts with a simple, powerful interface (by NginxProxyManager)
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Portainer Nginx Proxy Manager
335 651
28,426 19,167
2.1% 8.6%
9.8 8.8
7 days ago about 21 hours ago
TypeScript JavaScript
zlib License MIT License
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

Portainer

Posts with mentions or reviews of Portainer. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-03-19.
  • Cómo instalar Docker CLI en Windows sin Docker Desktop y no morir en el intento
    2 projects | dev.to | 19 Mar 2024
  • Docker CI/CD with multiple docker-compose files.
    2 projects | /r/homelab | 17 Oct 2023
    I am currently running Portainer, but webhooks (GitOps) appear to be broken ( [2.19.0] GitOps Updates not automatically polling from git · Issue #10309 · portainer/portainer · GitHub ) and so I cannot send webhook to redeploy a stack. So, looking for alternatives. Using this as a good excuse to learn more about docker and CI/CD etc.
  • Ask HN: How do you manage your “family data warehouse”?
    3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 15 Sep 2023
    A Synology NAS running Portainer (https://www.portainer.io/) running Paperless NGX (https://github.com/paperless-ngx/paperless-ngx)

    This works better than I can possibly tell you.

    I have an Epson WorkForce ES-580W that I bought when my mother passed away to bulk scan documents and it scans everything, double-sided if required, multi-page PDFs if required, at very high speed and uploads everything to OneDrive, at which point I drag and drop everything into Paperless.

    I could, thinking about it, have the scanner email stuff to Paperless. Might investigate that today.

    Paperless will OCR it and make it all searchable. This setup is amazing, I love living in the future.

  • Bare-Metal Kubernetes, Part I: Talos on Hetzner
    8 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 9 Sep 2023
    > I've come to the conclusion (after trying kops, kubespray, kubeadm, kubeone, GKE, EKS) that if you're looking for < 100 node cluster, docker swarm should suffice. Easier to setup, maintain and upgrade.

    Personally, I'd also consider throwing Portainer in there, which gives you both a nice way to interact with the cluster, as well as things like webhooks: https://www.portainer.io/

    With something like Apache, Nginx, Caddy or something else acting as your "ingress" (taking care of TLS, reverse proxy, headers, rate limits, sometimes mTLS etc.) it's a surprisingly simple setup, at least for simple architectures.

  • What are some of your fav panels and why?
    3 projects | /r/homelab | 23 Aug 2023
    casaos it just makes things like backups, offsite syncing and many other nas related things so much easier to manage. And gives you a proper nas like experience similar to that in which you'd fine on companies like tnas or synology. I actually also use it as a replacement for portainer when i don't need the more advanced features it offers
  • Kubernetes Exposed: One YAML Away from Disaster
    4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 8 Aug 2023
    > I moved to docker swarm and love it. It's so much easier, straight forward, automatic ingress network and failover were all working out of the box. I'll stay with swarm for now.

    I've had decent luck in the past with the K3s distribution, which is a bit cut down Kubernetes: https://k3s.io/

    It also integrates nicely with Portainer (aside from occasional Traefik ingress weirdness sometimes), which I already use for Swarm and would suggest to anyone that wants a nice web based UI: https://www.portainer.io/

    Others might also mention K0s, MicroK8s or others - there's lots of options there. But even so, I still run Docker Swarm for most of my private stuff as well and it's a breeze.

    For my needs, it has just the right amount of abstractions: stacks with services that use networks and can have some storage in the form of volumes or bind mounts. Configuration in the form of environment variables and/or mounted files (or secrets), some deployment constraints and dependencies sometimes, some health checks and restart policies, as well as resource limits.

    If I need a mail server, then I just have a container that binds to the ports (even low port numbers) that I need and configure it. If I need a web server, then I can just run Apache/Nginx/Caddy and use more or less 1:1 configuration files that I'd use when setting up either outside of containers, but with the added benefit of being able to refer to other apps by their service names (or aliases, if they have underscores in the names, which sometimes isn't liked).

    At a certain scale, it's dead simple to use - no need for PVs and PVCs, no need for Ingress and Service abstractions, or lots and lots of templating that Helm charts would have (although those are nice in other ways).

  • What kind of Alpine user are you?
    4 projects | /r/AlpineLinux | 9 Jul 2023
    The control panel is called Homepage. I like it more than Heimdall. To manage Docker I use Portainer.
  • Portainer kind of screwed me after updating a container -- Any other alternatives to managing your containers?
    3 projects | /r/selfhosted | 5 Jul 2023
    Synology use a custom version of Docker in their NAS products, which we've noted has issues with environment variables. We have this issue open around it, but unfortunately we haven't been able to come up with a fix as of yet and Synology seem to be reluctant to engage with us on it.
  • Risk of self-hosting smaller projects
    3 projects | /r/selfhosted | 4 Jul 2023
    Here are hundreds of others that did though: https://github.com/portainer/portainer/issues/8452
    3 projects | /r/selfhosted | 4 Jul 2023

Nginx Proxy Manager

Posts with mentions or reviews of Nginx Proxy Manager. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-03-07.

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Portainer and Nginx Proxy Manager you can also consider the following projects:

Yacht - A web interface for managing docker containers with an emphasis on templating to provide 1 click deployments. Think of it like a decentralized app store for servers that anyone can make packages for.

traefik - The Cloud Native Application Proxy

swarmpit - Lightweight mobile-friendly Docker Swarm management UI

docker-swag - Nginx webserver and reverse proxy with php support and a built-in Certbot (Let's Encrypt) client. It also contains fail2ban for intrusion prevention.

podman - Podman: A tool for managing OCI containers and pods.

OpenMediaVault - openmediavault is the next generation network attached storage (NAS) solution based on Debian Linux. Thanks to the modular design of the framework it can be enhanced via plugins. openmediavault is primarily designed to be used in home environments or small home offices.

socks5-proxy-server - SOCKS5 proxy server

acme-dns - Limited DNS server with RESTful HTTP API to handle ACME DNS challenges easily and securely.

BunkerWeb - 🛡️ Make your web services secure by default !

docker-pi-hole - Pi-hole in a docker container

homer - A very simple static homepage for your server.

caddy-docker - Source for the official Caddy v2 Docker Image