Caddy vs Traefik

Caddy and Traefik are the two reverse proxies people reach for when they want HTTPS to take care of itself. Both are single Go binaries, both obtain and renew certificates on their own, and both will happily sit on ports 80 and 443 in front of every app on your server. So the choice is not about whether you get valid TLS — you do, either way. It is about where your routes are written down: in one short file you edit by hand, or in labels on the containers themselves.

Where the routes live

Caddy is configured with a Caddyfile. A site is a domain name and a directive; the whole reverse-proxy config for one app is two lines:

copyapp.example.com {
  reverse_proxy app:3000
}

Every new app is one more block in the same file. Under the Caddyfile sits a native JSON config and an admin API, and Caddy's docs describe config changes as "lightweight, efficient, and incur zero downtime" — a reload never drops connections. Our automatic HTTPS with Caddy guide walks through exactly this setup.

Traefik watches a provider — most often the Docker socket — and builds its routing table from container labels. You do not edit a proxy config to add an app; you label the app's container, and Traefik notices it and starts routing to it. Its README lists Docker, Swarm, Kubernetes, ECS and plain files as providers, and it "continuously updates its configuration (No restarts!)".

Auto-discovery is the real dividing line

• Caddy: explicit. Its standard build has no Docker discovery; the Caddyfile is the complete list of what is being served, which makes it easy to read, diff and back up. A community plugin, caddy-docker-proxy, adds label-based discovery, but it is a separate project and a custom build, not part of Caddy itself.
• Traefik: dynamic. Start a labelled container and its route exists; stop it and the route goes away. In a stack where services come and go, you stop touching the proxy after the first day. The cost is that Traefik needs the Docker API — its own docs warn that mounting the socket means an attacker who compromises Traefik "might get access to the underlying host".

Certificates

On the everyday case they are even. Caddy enables Let's Encrypt and ZeroSSL by default and redirects HTTP to HTTPS without being asked; Traefik provisions Let's Encrypt certificates through a certificate resolver you define once. Both need Let's Encrypt to reach them on port 80 or 443 for issuance, or a DNS challenge instead. For wildcard certificates both need the DNS challenge — in Caddy's case that means a DNS provider module compiled into your build, which the official image makes straightforward with its builder variant and xcaddy.

Beyond routing

Traefik carries more built-in operational tooling: a web dashboard, metrics for Prometheus, Datadog, StatsD and InfluxDB, access logs, circuit breakers and retries, and a middleware system for auth, rate limiting and header rewriting. Caddy's reverse proxy is no toy either — load balancing with a long list of policies, active and passive health checks, WebSockets and dynamic upstreams are all in the standard directive — and it is also a full web server that can serve static files itself. What it lacks is Traefik's dashboard and its catalogue of built-in providers.

Setup effort and resources

Caddy is the shorter path: one official container, one Caddyfile, done. We rate it 2 / 5. Traefik is a 3 / 5 — static configuration, entrypoints, a certificate resolver, the Docker provider and the socket mount all have to be right before the first label does anything, and the router / service / middleware model takes a while to click.

Neither project publishes a RAM minimum. Both are single Go binaries, and the 256 MB on each page is our estimate rather than an upstream figure — either will sit comfortably on the smallest VPS next to the apps it fronts.

Which should you self-host?

Pick Caddy if…

• You want automatic HTTPS with the least configuration of any proxy here, written in a file you can read top to bottom.
• Your set of apps changes rarely, or some of them are not containers at all.
• You also want a capable static-file web server in the same binary.

Pick Traefik if…

• Your stack is Docker-native and changes often, and you want routes and certificates to follow container labels without touching the proxy.
• You want a dashboard, metrics and a middleware chain built in.
• You run Swarm or Kubernetes and want the same proxy across them.

Running either on a VPS

Both fit on the smallest server you can rent, alongside the apps behind them. If neither a config file nor labels appeals and you would rather click, see Nginx Proxy Manager vs Traefik and Caddy vs Nginx Proxy Manager. The step-by-step setups are linked below, and any of the VPS options here has room for the proxy plus everything sitting behind it.