Why Are Developers Worldwide Choosing OpenResty?

In an era of diverse and competitive technology choices, why has OpenResty become a common choice for developers and enterprises worldwide? The latest June 2025 Web Server Survey data from Netcraft provides a compelling answer.

The Power Behind the Authoritative Data

With its stable, high-performance architecture, OpenResty continues to demonstrate strong vitality in the global web infrastructure:

• Powering over 85,000,000 websites worldwide, accounting for 6.89% of all websites globally.
• Nearly 40,000,000 active domains choose OpenResty, capturing a significant 14.31% of the domain market share.
• Ranked as the 4th most popular web server worldwide.

Favored by High-Value Users: The Ultimate Testament to Technical Prowess

A particularly noteworthy signal is that OpenResty’s domain share of 14.31% is significantly higher than its website share of 6.89%. This indicates that it is not just “widely used,” but more importantly, “preferentially adopted in mission-critical business scenarios”—especially in enterprise-level applications that manage multiple sites and handle high traffic, where OpenResty’s performance advantages and technical reliability truly shine.

More Than a Technical Option, A Proven Standard of Trust

OpenResty has never invested in large-scale advertising, yet it consistently holds a place in the tech stacks of architects globally. It not only powers a vast number of high-concurrency, high-complexity online systems but has also become the top choice for a growing number of technical teams in “zero-tolerance” scenarios.

Chosen for its technology, trusted for its strength.

User Testimonials: Authentic Endorsements from the Front Lines

Data can reveal trends, but the voices of real users are the most powerful endorsement. OpenResty not only shines on authoritative international platforms like Netcraft but has also earned widespread recognition among developers and enterprise users worldwide.

A Stunning First Experience:

“Behold, the almighty OpenResty!!! I am usually never fazed by technology. But OpenResty was probably one of the things that made me go ‘WHY DIDN’T I KNOW ABOUT THIS EARLIER?!?!?!?!’ and there are many good reasons for that.”

Professional Acclaim from Architects:

“OpenResty provides extremely sensible defaults compared to using a bare Nginx server. The way it uses worker threads, each with their own LuaJIT VM, is particularly neat.”

Proven Productivity in Enterprise Practice:

“OpenResty is a great platform that allows our developers to create applications and portals that help our field staff work more efficiently.”

The Choice for Technical Teams at Scale:

“It is the best web server for building scalable applications. It offers all the advantages of Nginx modules, developed by the same team.”

These voices come from real users and front-line use cases. They not only confirm OpenResty’s technical prowess, as reflected in various data rankings, but also highlight its unique value as the “Engineers’ Choice”. It is this continuous endorsement from the technical front lines that drives an increasing number of enterprises to adopt OpenResty, making it their core productivity platform and continually pushing the boundaries of its application in the enterprise space.

Technical Prowess: Making Excellence the Norm

The reason OpenResty stands out in the highly competitive global web server landscape is not just its profound technical foundation, but also its future-oriented architectural thinking. It is not merely a “collection of features,” but a complete, engineered productivity toolchain.

Core Architecture: A Perfect Fusion of Flexibility and Performance OpenResty deeply integrates the high-performance architecture of Nginx with the dynamic programmability of LuaJIT, granting developers unprecedented flexibility. Each worker process runs an independent LuaJIT virtual machine, ensuring stable isolation between tasks and laying a solid foundation for building high-availability systems.

Compared to native Nginx, OpenResty also features optimized default configurations, making it ready for production environments right out of the box.

Performance-Driven: Born for High Concurrency Inheriting from Nginx, OpenResty is naturally suited for handling massive concurrent connections. Leveraging the execution efficiency of LuaJIT, most logic processing can approach the performance of C code, while retaining the code’s maintainability and scalability. Its modular architecture gives the system greater adaptability, effortlessly handling business changes.

Developer Experience: From Ease of Use to Productivity OpenResty not only supports modern development features like hot reloading and dynamic configuration but has also cultivated a complete toolchain and an active developer community. Developers familiar with Nginx can get started quickly to build and deliver high-performance applications.

With these technical advantages, OpenResty has earned the trust of nearly 40 million website domains worldwide and continues to grow in enterprise-level deployments. It is more than just a high-performance web platform; it is a complete, mature, implementable, and trustworthy solution. It empowers developers to master their technical challenges and helps businesses stay one step ahead in their operations.

Experience OpenResty’s Exceptional Performance Firsthand

Data provides evidence, and reputation is worth considering, but the final decision is always yours. Instead of just taking our word for it, experience the performance and stability of OpenResty firsthand and discover why it has earned the trust of nearly 40 million domains and 8.5 million websites.

Experience It Now: A Three-Step Journey to High Performance

1. Step 1: Rapid Deployment Visit the official OpenResty website to download the ready-to-use stable version. Check out the official examples on Github—a simple copy-paste is all it takes to launch a high-performance service.

2. Step 2: Benchmark and Compare Run high-concurrency stress tests against your current web server to see the performance gap firsthand. Experience millisecond-level response times and witness the significant reduction in resource usage.

3. Step 3: Explore Advanced Features Test enterprise-grade features like dynamic configuration and caching strategies. Pilot non-core services first, and proceed with a full-scale upgrade after confirming stability.

Technical Deep Dive: Master the Core Competencies

Are you a deep-tech enthusiast? We welcome you to:

• Dive into the source code architecture to understand its design philosophy.
• Master Lua extension development to create custom functional modules.
• Join the global developer community to share practical experiences and best practices.

Acknowledgements: Thank You for Your Long-standing Trust and Support

We would like to extend our sincere thanks to every user who has chosen OpenResty. We are grateful for your trust and support, which is the driving force behind our continued progress.

At the same time, we would also like to thank every contributor to the open-source community. It is through your wisdom and hard work that OpenResty continues to evolve and has become a preferred platform for developers worldwide.

Finally, we thank our technical team for their diligent efforts and dedication, which have enabled OpenResty to stand out in a fiercely competitive market.

About The Author

Yichun Zhang (Github handle: agentzh), is the original creator of the OpenResty^® open-source project and the CEO of OpenResty Inc..

Yichun is one of the earliest advocates and leaders of “open-source technology”. He worked at many internationally renowned tech companies, such as Cloudflare, Yahoo!. He is a pioneer of “edge computing”, “dynamic tracing” and “machine coding”, with over 22 years of programming and 16 years of open source experience. Yichun is well-known in the open-source space as the project leader of OpenResty^®, adopted by more than 40 million global website domains.

OpenResty Inc., the enterprise software start-up founded by Yichun in 2017, has customers from some of the biggest companies in the world. Its flagship product, OpenResty XRay, is a non-invasive profiling and troubleshooting tool that significantly enhances and utilizes dynamic tracing technology. And its OpenResty Edge product is a powerful distributed traffic management and private CDN software product.

As an avid open-source contributor, Yichun has contributed more than a million lines of code to numerous open-source projects, including Linux kernel, Nginx, LuaJIT, GDB, SystemTap, LLVM, Perl, etc. He has also authored more than 60 open-source software libraries.