Compare Varnish Enterprise and Varnish Cache

Feature

Description

Varnish Cache

Varnish Enterprise

Massive Storage Engine (MSE) 

An optimized dual-layer storage solution for persistent caching, and a cost-effective way to increase cache size using disk

✖

✔

Varnish High Availability (VHA)

A multi-master object replication suite that reduces backend traffic by replicating object in the cluster

✖

✔

Varnish Controller

A GUI and API to administer all the Varnish servers in your setup

✖

✔

Varnish Traffic Router

Request routing via HTTP or DNS based on customizable rulesets

✖

✔

Varnish Custom Statistics (VCS)

A statistics engine to aggregate, display and analyze user web traffic and cache performance in real time

✖

✔

Varnish Broadcaster

Broadcasts client requests to multiple Varnish nodes from a single entry point

✖

✔

In-process TLS

TLS termination in the Varnish core

✖

✔

Backend TLS/SSL

Connect to backend servers over TLS/SSL, ensuring end-to-end encryption

✖

✔

Varnish Discovery

Autoscale Varnish in cloud or container services

✖

✔

Memory Governor

Dynamic cache sizing and control over Varnish worker process footprint

✖

✔

Parallel ESI

Process Edge Side Includes (ESI) in parallel, rather than sequentially as in Varnish Cache

✖

✔

TCP-only Probes

Perform health checks on backends without sending an HTTP request

✖

✔

Last Byte Timeout

Modify timeouts from VCL, including overriding on a per-request basis and defining how long Varnish waits for full backend responses to complete

✖

✔

Per-Backend Health Counter

Insight into backend health without needing to directly deal with probes

✖

✔

Scoreboard

Detailed information about Varnish instances, for debugging and performance troubleshooting

✖

✔

Varnish Module (VMOD)

Varnish Cache

Varnish Enterprise

Utilities for VCL Data (vmod_blob)

Utilities for encoding and decoding the VCL data type BLOB

✔

✔

Cookie Handling (vmod_cookie)

Inspect, modify, and delete client-side cookies

✔

✔

Load Balancing and Sharding (vmod_directors)

Group multiple backends and load balance requests between them

✔

✔

PROXY Protocol Information Retrieval (vmod_proxy)

Extract TLV attributes from connections made with PROXY protocol

✔

✔

Soft Purge (vmod_purge)

Perform soft purges

✔

✔

Basic Functions (vmod_std)

Custom log messages, Query string sorting, Request body caching, Filesystem access

✔

✔

UNIX Domain Socket Information Retrieval (vmod_unix)

Provides information about the credentials of the peer process

✔

✔

Test Cases (vmod_vtc)

A utility module for varnishtest

✔

✔

Content Localization (vmod_accept)

Content negotiation and sanitization module that inspects the content of HTTP request headers

✔
(Requires separate installation)

✔

Cryptographic Functions (vmod_digest)
Computing HMAC, message digests and working with Base64.

✔

✔

Header Manipulation (vmod_header)

Modify and change complex HTTP headers

✔

✔

Per-object Backend Blacklisting (vmod_saintmode)
Handle backends that are failing in random ways for specific requests

✔

✔

String Manipulation (vmod_str)

A string manipulation module

✔

✔

Transfer Rate Limiting (vmod_tcp)
Control TCP congestion control algorithms and log information

✔

✔

Variable Support (vmod_var)

Support strings, integers and real numbers in VCL

✔

✔

Rate Limiting (vmod_vsthrottle)
Rate limit clients using identifying information

✔

✔

Basic Key-based Purging (vmod_xkey)

Perform tag-based invalidation

✔

✔

Detailed Cache Metrics (vmod_accounting)
VCL controlled detailed statistics based on keys, where you can create statistics on different tenants, content types, and more

✖

✔

Dynamic Access Control Lists (vmod_aclplus)

ACL module that doesn't need access control information to be explicitly defined in VCL, but can store ACLs as a string

✖

✔

Dynamic Load Balancing (vmod_activedns)

DNS updates at runtime

✖

✔

Akamai Connector

A module that synchronizes Akamai CDNs with Varnish

✖

✔

AWS VCL (vmod_aws)

Access AWS services, including request signing, S3, Secrets Manager

✖

✔

Brotli Compression (vmod_brotli)

Brotli is the go-to compression algorithm for web content, providing better compression rates than legacy gzip compression

✖

✔

Advanced Cookie Handling (vmod_cookieplus)

Improved cookie modification, allowing interaction with Cookie header on request side and Set-Cookie header on response side

✖

✔

Cache Encryption (vmod_crypto)

Encrypt data at rest in the cache, headers and body using AES encryption.

✖

✔

Device Intelligence (vmod_deviceatlas)

Device detection using the Device Atlas database (subscription required) to match User-Agent with client-device information

✖

✔

Edge-side Page Assembly (vmod_edgestash)

A Mustache-based templating engine on the edge that parses JSON data into Mustache placeholders

✖

✔

File Operations (vmod_file)

A module that allows Varnish to interact with the file system, but also act as a fileserver

✖

✔

String Building (vmod_format)

A module for easy string formatting, based on the ANSI C printf format

✖

✔

Advanced Header Manipulation (vmod_headerplus)

Add, remove, update or retrieve any HTTP header

✖

✔

Synchronous and asynchronous HTTP fetch (vmod_http)

Implement content prefetching or other business logic where an HTTP request to an external server is necessary

✖

✔

Image Compression (vmod_image)

Convert and resize images to WEBP on the fly

✖

✔

JSON Parsing (vmod_json)

A JSON parsing and introspection module

✖

✔

JWT Verification (vmod_jwt)

Inspect, verify, modify and issue JSON Web Tokens (JWT) on the edge

✖

✔

Key Value Store (vmod_kvstore)

A high-performance in-memory key-value store with optional TTLs

✖

✔

Least Connections Director (vmod_leastconn)
Directs traffic to the backend with the least number of active connections

✖

✔

Geo-Location (vmod_mmdb)

Geolocation using the MaxMind GeoIP database to localize users based on their IP address 

✖

✔

Health Probes Proxying (vmod_probe_proxy)
Intercept, manipulate and redirect health probe requests.

✖

✔

Bot Verification (vmod_resolver)

Perform Forward Confirmed reverse DNS (FCrDNS) on a client IP

✖

✔

Rewrite (vmod_rewrite)

Reduces the amount of VCL needed to perform URL and header manipulation

✖

✔

Per-session Modification (vmod_session)

Control the idle timeout of the TCP session

✖

✔

S3 Dynamic Backends (vmod_s3)

Use Varnish as a caching proxy in front of S3, including a dynamic backend director for S3 bucket endpoints

✖

✔

Cache Range Requests (vmod_slicer)

Cache and stitch together ranges of a response, for large file delivery and video streaming

✖

✔

Execute SQL Statements (vmod_sqlite3)

Interact with an SQLite3 database in VCL

✖

✔

Stale-If-Error (vmod_stale)

A convenient and elegant way to implement Stale-If-Error logic in Varnish

✖

✔

Prometheus Integration (vmod_stat)
Export Varnish statistics from a backend in JSON or Prometheus format

✖

✔

Synthetic Backends (vmod_synthbackend)

Insert synthetic objects into the cache as if they were generated by regular backends

✖

✔

TLS Querying (vmod_tls)
Retrieve TLS information from native TLS connections

✖

✔

Load Balancing (vmod_udo)
Flexible load-balancing, supporting local and ad-hoc reconfiguration, smart retry mechanisms and activeDNS

✖

✔

URI Parsing (vmod_uri)

Parse and manipulate URIs from VCL

✖

✔

URL Parsing (vmod_urlplus)

URL inspection and manipulation

✖

✔

Utility Functions (vmod_utils)

A collection of utility functions collected

✖

✔

Web Application Firewall (vmod_waf)

An add-on module that makes Varnish behave like a Web Application Firewall by leveraging the ModSecurity library 

✖

✔

Body Access and Transformation (vmod_xbody)

Access and modify request and response bodies

✖

✔

Improved Key-based Purging (vmod_ykey)

Tag-based invalidation with more features and better performance on MSE

✖

✔