Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Amazon CloudFront
Score 7.8 out of 10
N/A
CloudFront is the content delivery network (CDN) from Amazon Web Services.
$0.02
Apache Tomcat
Score 8.0 out of 10
N/A
Tomcat is an open-source web server supported by Apache.N/A
NGINX
Score 9.2 out of 10
Mid-Size Companies (51-1,000 employees)
NGINX, a business unit of F5 Networks, powers over 65% of the world's busiest websites and web applications. NGINX started out as an open source web server and reverse proxy, built to be faster and more efficient than Apache. Over the years, NGINX has built a suite of infrastructure software products o tackle some of the biggest challenges in managing high-transaction applications. NGINX offers a suite of products to form the core of what organizations need to create…N/A
Pricing
Amazon CloudFrontApache TomcatNGINX
Editions & Modules
Over 5PB
$0.02
Next 524TB
$0.03
Next 4PB
$0.03
Next 350TB
$0.04
Next 100TB
$0.06
Next 40TB
$0.08
First 10TB
$0.09
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Amazon CloudFrontApache TomcatNGINX
Free Trial
NoNoYes
Free/Freemium Version
NoNoYes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNoYes
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup feeOptional
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Amazon CloudFrontApache TomcatNGINX
Considered Multiple Products
Amazon CloudFront
Chose Amazon CloudFront
We use a great set of AWS features and it was easy to implement Amazon CloudFront. It fulfills our needs, and the learning curve was not difficult given the AWS configuration we already have.
Apache Tomcat
Chose Apache Tomcat
Apache Tomcat is very smooth tool compared to other applications. Since there are very less feature it's very smooth. NGINX server doesn't need Apache Tomcat we can directly deploy so it faster comparatively. In my working time I have never come across the UI of NGINX. Apache …
Chose Apache Tomcat
Apache Tomcat is lightweight but performs well, even when running multiple applications. Its performance and security features are the reasons for choosing Apache Tomcat among its competitors. Also, there is a huge community support than other products.
NGINX
Chose NGINX
Nginx's cache mechanism is better than Apache and HAProxy. Also Nginx is very light weight and works for multiple sites with much less work. i.e. As front end proxy server configuration is very easy as compared to other applications. Apache sometimes crashes and is not able to …
Chose NGINX
The support and ability to provide near zero downtime for changes is a winner. The lightweight engine also helps reduce cost.
Chose NGINX
How does it compare? We use Apache ATP server and we also use Tom Cat also owned by Apache, but both Apache, ATP, and MKA. They are relatively older than GX and so they're one problem for Apache and MKA they need more power, more memory, and more space.
Chose NGINX
NGINX have higher market share which obviously show to us it is the preferred choice of most of the customers. Both of platform competes in the Web and Application server areas, but due the security features of NGINX be more flexible this in my opinion makes more sense.
Chose NGINX
Nginx works on basic operating system principles and what I like the most about it is that even after being feature-rich and easily customizable it uses minimum resources.
Chose NGINX
It's lightweight and it does not require complex configurations for simple scenarios. If you want you can accomplish some other complicated tasks like reverse proxies which are well supported by the product.
Chose NGINX
Nginx is one of the top three web servers and sits in the second position in terms of the amount of servers deployed. The main competition comes from Apache and Apache-based forks on Linux based servers, and less-so from Microsoft IIS on Windows based servers. As stated …
Features
Amazon CloudFrontApache TomcatNGINX
Application Servers
Comparison of Application Servers features of Product A and Product B
Amazon CloudFront
-
Ratings
Apache Tomcat
9.2
24 Ratings
14% above category average
NGINX
8.7
32 Ratings
9% above category average
IDE support00 Ratings10.022 Ratings7.617 Ratings
Security management00 Ratings9.024 Ratings8.627 Ratings
Administration and management00 Ratings8.224 Ratings8.827 Ratings
Application server performance00 Ratings8.124 Ratings9.327 Ratings
Installation00 Ratings10.024 Ratings8.929 Ratings
Open-source standards compliance00 Ratings10.024 Ratings9.025 Ratings
Best Alternatives
Amazon CloudFrontApache TomcatNGINX
Small Businesses
Cloudflare
Cloudflare
Score 8.9 out of 10
NGINX
NGINX
Score 9.2 out of 10
Apache HTTP Server
Apache HTTP Server
Score 9.1 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Cloudflare
Cloudflare
Score 8.9 out of 10
NGINX
NGINX
Score 9.2 out of 10
Apache Tomcat
Apache Tomcat
Score 8.0 out of 10
Enterprises
Azure CDN
Azure CDN
Score 7.6 out of 10
NGINX
NGINX
Score 9.2 out of 10
Apache Tomcat
Apache Tomcat
Score 8.0 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Amazon CloudFrontApache TomcatNGINX
Likelihood to Recommend
9.0
(17 ratings)
9.0
(24 ratings)
8.9
(50 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(1 ratings)
9.1
(1 ratings)
Usability
9.0
(1 ratings)
8.0
(3 ratings)
8.3
(3 ratings)
Availability
-
(0 ratings)
6.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Performance
-
(0 ratings)
9.0
(2 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
7.0
(4 ratings)
9.1
(3 ratings)
8.1
(4 ratings)
Configurability
-
(0 ratings)
8.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Ease of integration
-
(0 ratings)
9.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Product Scalability
-
(0 ratings)
9.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
Amazon CloudFrontApache TomcatNGINX
Likelihood to Recommend
Amazon AWS
Amazon CloudFront is the perfect solution for any type of company. If a company is small or medium size, CloudFront offers 1 TB monthly free bandwidth which is more than for any small and medium size companies. If we compare the speed of CloudFront with other CDN, CloudFront is way ahead of their competitors and with 1 TB free bandwidth. If someone is ready to invest time in CloudFront documentation then he/she definitely go for it.
Read full review
Apache
Excellent value for companies wishing to host Java applications in the cloud. Utilizing hosting tools such as load balancers and network and application firewalls, Tomcat can be part of a powerful system to host web applications to thousands of users. There has been consistency in the development and support of Tomcat since its initial release in the late '90s and the best commonalities have been carried forward. If you host Java web applications, Tomcat is as good as any for an application server.
Read full review
F5
Nginx is well-suited for any web server scenarios, such as web applications, backend or reverse proxy for both application and HTTP requests, and distribution. It is less appropriate for Windows-based applications that run directly on a Windows Server host. In any case, it is very easy to manage, through separate conf files for each application or site you want to host with it.
Read full review
Pros
Amazon AWS
  • if a website’s static data are based in New York City, people in Boston will get the content faster than people in San Francisco or Tokyo. The farther away customers are from a company’s data center, the slower the website or application loads. This problem can be fixed with a content delivery network like Amazon CloudFront
  • When a visitor requests a file from your website, Amazon CloudFront automatically sends the request to a copy of the file at the nearest edge location. This results in faster download times.
  • You may have great hosting but it doesn’t have the capacity or scalability offered by Google, Microsoft or Yahoo. The better CDNs like Amazon CloudFront offer higher availability, lower network latency and lower packet loss.
  • Amazon CloudFront provides 24/7 email and phone support
  • Amazon CloudFront Free Tier allows you to free up to 50 GB of data transfer and 2,000,000 HTTP and HTTPS requests / month for one year.
Read full review
Apache
  • Fast to start up, which is useful when we need to just check that our changes are working correctly.
  • Free, which allows us to not be involved with the finance/legal team about using it.
  • Bundled with Spring Boot, which makes it even more convenient for our testing.
Read full review
F5
  • Very low memory usage. Can handle many more connections than alternatives (like Apache HTTPD) due to low overhead. (event-based architecture).
  • Great at serving static content.
  • Scales very well. Easy to host multiple Nginx servers to promote high availability.
  • Open-Source (no cost)!
Read full review
Cons
Amazon AWS
  • Kinda of costlier when compared to rivals providing the same service
  • The setup of Distribution is kinda little complicated, need good exposure before setting up the service
  • Sometimes we can go with S3 Delivery service rather than Cloudfront if the website is providing static content and its way cheaper
Read full review
Apache
  • Using tomcat manager to troubleshoot is not very informative. Error messages are vague, you have to dig into log files for more information about the problems.
  • Is great for simple web applications, but may not work for heavy development which may require a full J2EE stack, might like JBoss better.
  • Security in tomcat is not straightforward, as I discovered that you have to understand how to set up realms in tomcat in order to hash passwords, which I was not overly familiar with, which is a big deal when setting up users in the tomcat-users.xml file.
Read full review
F5
  • Customer support can be strangely condescending, perhaps it's a language issue?
  • I find it a little weird how the release versions used for Nginx+ aren't the same as for open source version. It can be very confusing to determine the cross-compatibility of modules, etc., because of this.
  • It seems like some (most?) modules on their own site are ancient and no longer supported, so their documentation in this area needs work.
  • It's difficult to navigate between nginx.com commercial site and customer support. They need to be integrated together.
  • I'd love to see more work done on nginx+ monitoring without requiring logging every request. I understand that many statistics can only be derived from logs, but plenty should work without that. Logging is not an option in many environments.
Read full review
Likelihood to Renew
Amazon AWS
No answers on this topic
Apache
We have a huge knowledge of the product within our company and we're satisfied with the performance.
Read full review
F5
Great value for the product
Read full review
Usability
Amazon AWS
Easy way to integrate a CDN within the AWS infrastructure. It allows further customization based on company needs.
Read full review
Apache
Tomcat has a very rich API set which allows us to implement our automation script to trigger the deployment, configure, stop and start Tomcat from the command line. In our projects, we embedded Tomcat in our Eclipse in all of the developer's machines so they could quickly verify their code with little effort, Azure Webapp has strong support for Tomcat so we could move our application to Azure cloud very easy. One drawback is Tomcat UI quite poorly features but we almost do not use it.
Read full review
F5
This tool is really easy to use and configure. Consumes very less system resources. It is highly modular and configurable. You can easily use it with other tools like certbot for SSLs. You can configure basic security with configuration and headers
Read full review
Reliability and Availability
Amazon AWS
No answers on this topic
Apache
Tomcat doesn't have a built-in watchdog that ensures restart upon failure, so you have to provide it externally. A very good solution is java service wrapper. The community edition is able to restart Tomcat upon out of memories exceptions.
Read full review
F5
No answers on this topic
Performance
Amazon AWS
No answers on this topic
Apache
Tomcat support to customize memory used and allow us to define the Connection pool and thread pool to increase system performance and availability, Tomcat server itself consume very little memory and almost no footprint. We use Tomcat in our production environment which has up to thousands of concurrent users and it is stable and provides a quick response.
Read full review
F5
No answers on this topic
Support Rating
Amazon AWS
CloudFront is a good CDN solution. It can be a bit complicated to implement depending on your needs, but AWS tech support is great. You get to avoid a ton of upfront costs by going with CloudFront. It works best in conjunction with other AWS services in your infrastructure. Once you set it up, you won't need to do much to maintain it. It just works.
Read full review
Apache
Well, in actuality, I have never needed support for Apache Tomcat since it is configured and ready-to-go with no configuration needed on my end.
Read full review
F5
Community support is great, and they've also had a presence at conferences. Overall, there is no shortage of documentation and community support. We're currently using it to serve up some WordPress sites, and configuring NGINX for this purpose is well documented.
Read full review
Alternatives Considered
Amazon AWS
Amazon has always been creative and leading, and I have been using its services for years. They are very reassuring and have fast and responsive support--you can call them from any time zone to respond quickly. High security on servers, open hands on changes, and increasing and decreasing server resources and features.
Read full review
Apache
Eclipse Jetty is the best alternative for Apache Tomcat because which is also an open-source and lightweight servlet container like Tomcat. A major advantage of this over Tomcat is that Jetty server can easily be embedded with the source code of web applications. Since it requires less memory to operate, you may realize that it is very efficient.
Read full review
F5
I have found that [NGINX] seems to perform better throughout the years with less issues although I've used Apache more. I would definitely recommend [NGINX] for any high volume site and I've seen this to usually be the case from most provided web hosts who will pick [NGINX] over alternatives
Read full review
Scalability
Amazon AWS
No answers on this topic
Apache
It's very easy to add instances to an existing deployment and, using apache with mod proxy balancer, to scale up the serving farm
Read full review
F5
No answers on this topic
Return on Investment
Amazon AWS
  • RoI for using CloudFront is immense. You can use it for all your certificate management and static asset management of your websites using CloudFront.
  • It is as good or better than any other CDN provider with multi-region support across the world using AWS regions.
Read full review
Apache
  • Tomcat is cheap and very quick to deploy, so it has benefited much when situation needs applications to be deployed quickly without wasting time on licensing and installations.
  • Plenty of documentation available so no vendor training is required. Support contract is not needed as well.
Read full review
F5
  • By using Nginx, we can host multiple web services on a single server, keeping our infrastructure costs lower.
  • Nginx maintains our HTTPS connections, allowing us to keep our promise to our customers that their data is safe in transit.
  • Due to Nginx's extremely low failure rate, our web addresses always return something meaningful, even when individual services go down. In sense, this means we are "always online" and allows us to maintain brand and support our customers even in the face of catastrophe.
Read full review
ScreenShots

NGINX Screenshots

Screenshot of Overview of the NGINX Application PlatformScreenshot of NGINX Controller - MonitoringScreenshot of NGINX Controller - Configuration