NGINX Open Source Software (OSS) is free while NGINX Plus is a commercial product that offers advanced features and enterprise-level support as licensed software by NGINX, Inc.
NGINX Plus combines the functionality of a high-performance web server, a powerful front-end load balancer and a highly-scalable accelerating cache to create the ideal end-to-end platform for your web applications. NGINX Plus is built on top of NGINX open source.
For organizations currently using NGINX open source, NGINX Plus eliminates the complexity of managing a “do-it-yourself” chain of proxies, load balancers and caching servers in a mission-critical application environment.
For organizations currently using hardware-based load balancers, NGINX Plus provides a full set of ADC features in a much more flexible software form factor, on a cost-effective subscription.
NGINX Plus provides enterprise-ready features such as application load balancing, monitoring and advanced management to Azure applications and services.
NGINX Plus provides:
- A Load Balancer and Application Delivery solution, giving reliability, control and consistently excellent performance.
- A high-performance HTTP Server, delivering web and video assets with unparalleled speed, maximizing performance and efficiency.
- A Web Accelerator, providing SSL and HTTP/2 acceleration, HTTP connection optimization, high-performance caching and HTTP compression.
- An Application Gateway for PHP, Ruby, Java and other application types, supporting FastCGI, uWSGI and HTTP Proxy interfaces.
Further reading: NGINX FAQs
Feature Set Comparison of NGINX OSS and NGINX Plus from nginx.com:
