It's an OSS NGINX fork which implements some of the NGINX stuff which is only in the paid version (metrics, dynamic DNS updates for upstream servers, etc.).

Some backstory and expanded description of what Angie is from last October:

Angie: A New Nginx Fork Developed by Some of Its Former Devs

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33421096

They also seem to be tracking upstream(?) changes https://github.com/webserver-llc/angie/commit/20da8e2aa00270...

(it's BSD-2-Clause if that interests you)

anyone have any experience with this? This is the first time I'm seeing this!

How is this different from or better than Openresty? And, is it capable of handling openresty/nginx plugins?

I think OpenResty uses Lua to implement advanced features not available in Nginx core. Angie aims to implement non-core features in C without Lua.

Im pretty torn on this.

One the one hand, having to recompile every time i add a module, is a damn burden, and exactly why i dont use nginx beyond out of the box. On the other, C performance is much better than Lua.