Varnish Alternatives

Varnish is described as 'Cache is an open source, state of the art HTTP application accelerator' and is an app in the development category. There are more than 10 alternatives to Varnish for a variety of platforms, including Linux, Mac, Windows, Self-Hosted and BSD apps. The best Varnish alternative is nginx, which is both free and Open Source. Other great apps like Varnish are Squid, BunkerWeb, CivetWeb and freenginx.

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Get a badge for your siteVarnish alternatives page was last updated Jul 22, 2025

cachelot
3 likes
Cachelot works within a fixed amount of memory. No garbage collector. Small metadata, near perfect memory utilization (overhead is 5-7% of the total memory).
Cost / License
Free
Open Source
Platforms
Mac
Linux
Good alternative?Is cachelot a good alternative to Varnish?
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Lusca
1 like
Lusca is a fork of the Squid -2 development tree. The Lusca project aims to fix the shortcomings in the Squid-2 codebase whilst maintaining the the Squid-2 functionality and stability.
Cost / License
Free
Open Source
Alerts
Discontinued
Platforms
Windows
Linux
L
Good alternative?Is Lusca a good alternative to Varnish?
N
N
nuster
1 like
nuster is a high performance HTTP proxy cache server and RESTful NoSQL cache server based on HAProxy. It is 100% compatible with HAProxy, and takes full advantage of the ACL functionality of HAProxy to provide fine-grained caching policy based on the content of request, response...
Cost / License
Free
Open Source
Platforms
Mac
Linux
BSD
N
Good alternative?Is nuster a good alternative to Varnish?
Section
4 likes
Section's industry-leading edge compute platform gives engineers the flexibility and control to run any workload, anywhere, underpinned by modern DevOps principles.
Cost / License
Paid
Proprietary
Application type
CDN
Origin
United Kingdom
Platforms
Online
Wordpress
Magento Community Edition
United Kingdom
+3
Good alternative?Is Section a good alternative to Varnish?
E
E
ExaProxy
1 like
ExaProxy is a a high-performance non-caching proxy. It is able to filter HTTP traffic using third party scripts in your favorite programming language.
Cost / License
Free
Proprietary
Application type
Proxy Service
Platforms
Mac
Linux
BSD
E
Good alternative?Is ExaProxy a good alternative to Varnish?
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gate.js
1 like
gate - Performance & scalable I/O forward & reverse HTTP proxy based on node.js + V8 a real alternative to Squid & NGINX
Cost / License
Free Personal
Proprietary
Platforms
Mac
Linux
BSD
G
Good alternative?Is gate.js a good alternative to Varnish?
NightShift
Like
Pre-load Netflix in advance so you can watch your favorite shows without interruption and always in full HD.
Cost / License
Paid
Proprietary
Origin
Canada
Platforms
Online
Good alternative?Is NightShift a good alternative to Varnish?
HtmlSpeed
Like
Html-Speed is a reverse proxy written in Java. It is used for accelerating performance of websites by improving page load speed and reducing load on webservers. This is achieved by applying unique front-end optimizations.
Cost / License
Free
Open Source
Alerts
Discontinued
Platforms
Windows
Linux
Good alternative?Is HtmlSpeed a good alternative to Varnish?
Pogocache
Like
Pogocache is fast caching software built from scratch with a focus on low latency and CPU efficiency.
Cost / License
Free
Open Source (MIT)
Origin
United States
Platforms
Self-Hosted
Good alternative?Is Pogocache a good alternative to Varnish?