# Advanced features with NGINX Plus




NGINX Gateway Fabric can use NGINX Open Source or NGINX Plus as its data plane. [NGINX Plus](https://www.f5.com/products/nginx/nginx-plus) is the closed source, commercial version of NGINX. Using NGINX Plus as the data plane offers additional benefits compared to the open source version.

## Benefits of NGINX Plus

- **Robust metrics**: A plethora of [additional Prometheus metrics](/ngf/monitoring/prometheus.md) are available.
- **Live activity monitoring**: The [NGINX Plus dashboard](/ngf/monitoring/dashboard.md) shows real-time metrics and information about your server infrastructure.
- **Dynamic upstream configuration**: NGINX Plus can dynamically reconfigure upstream servers when applications in Kubernetes scale up and down, preventing the need for an NGINX reload.
- **Session persistence**: NGINX Plus provides support for cookie-based session persistence, allowing client requests to be consistently routed to the same upstream pod.
- **Load balancing methods**: NGINX Plus provides advanced, latency-aware load balancing methods (such as `least_time` and `least_time last_byte inflight`) that route traffic based on time to first byte or full response, optionally factoring in in-flight requests for smarter upstream selection.
- **JWT and OIDC Authentication**: [JSON Web Token (JWT)](/ngf/traffic-security/jwt-authentication.md) and [OpenID Connect (OIDC)](/ngf/traffic-security/oidc-authentication.md) authentication support for access control and auth delegation.
- **Web Application Firewall**: NGINX Plus enables integration with [F5 WAF for NGINX](/ngf/waf-integration/overview.md) (separate add-on subscription), providing enterprise-grade protection against web exploits, injection attacks, and other OWASP Top 10 threats. WAF policies are applied at the Gateway or Route level using the `WAFPolicy` custom resource.
- **Support**: With an NGINX Plus license, you can take advantage of full [support](https://my.f5.com/manage/s/article/K000140156/) from NGINX, Inc.