Hiawatha was a free and open source cross-platform web server developed by Hugo Leisink.

"[5] In 2015 Hiawatha was cited as a lightweight alternative to Apache, as it prioritized the installation experience and reduced storage over adding other features.

[10] As of December 2023, Leisink has continued to publish bug fixes and small improvement releases.

It allowed banning of potential hackers and had an option to limit the runtime of CGI applications.

They found that Hiawatha was faster than ten other servers with Drupal static content, but performed comparably to the rest in other metrics.