Apache HTTP Server vs. Apache Tomcat

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Apache HTTP Server
Score 8.2 out of 10
N/A
Apache Web Server (Apache HTTP Server) is an open source HTTP web server for modern operating systems including UNIX and Windows.N/A
Apache Tomcat
Score 8.8 out of 10
N/A
Tomcat is an open-source web server supported by Apache.N/A
Pricing
Apache HTTP ServerApache Tomcat
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Apache HTTP ServerApache Tomcat
Free Trial
NoNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details——
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Apache HTTP ServerApache Tomcat
Considered Both Products
Apache HTTP Server
Chose Apache HTTP Server
By having a similar purpose, which is to publish and manage access to services, sites, and/or web systems, I have had to implement them to analyze their qualities and virtues, but stability, the power of implementation of different solutions and to be able to expand through own …
Chose Apache HTTP Server
To be quite honest I often select Apache because it is the world's most commonly used web server and I have been using it for more than 20 years across many organizations. I have never been burned using Apache. Apache rises above IIS in functionality, configurability, and the …
Chose Apache HTTP Server
I've used Microsoft's IIS and IBM's HTTP server. The major and a clear advantage of Apache web server over these products is that it’s free and has no licensing issues. Being in the industry for quite sometime (oldest web server) a lot of products and customizations have been …
Apache Tomcat
Chose Apache Tomcat
Apache Tomcat is a much wider open standard than Microsoft IIS. It also seems to use fewer resources and is simpler to maintain. Troubleshooting when an issue arises is difficult. We had trouble managing the Tail logs when something strange happened. Logging is very complex and …
Chose Apache Tomcat
It's clear that JBoss is a full JEE stack implementation while Tomcat isn't, but if you don't need the whole JEE stack there are many lightweight alternatives that implement the required feature with Tomcat.
Top Pros
Top Cons
Features
Apache HTTP ServerApache Tomcat
Application Servers
Comparison of Application Servers features of Product A and Product B
Apache HTTP Server
-
Ratings
Apache Tomcat
8.9
24 Ratings
11% above category average
IDE support00 Ratings9.122 Ratings
Security management00 Ratings8.624 Ratings
Administration and management00 Ratings8.424 Ratings
Application server performance00 Ratings8.224 Ratings
Installation00 Ratings9.924 Ratings
Open-source standards compliance00 Ratings9.324 Ratings
Best Alternatives
Apache HTTP ServerApache Tomcat
Small Businesses
NGINX
NGINX
Score 9.0 out of 10
NGINX
NGINX
Score 9.0 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
NGINX
NGINX
Score 9.0 out of 10
NGINX
NGINX
Score 9.0 out of 10
Enterprises
NGINX
NGINX
Score 9.0 out of 10
NGINX
NGINX
Score 9.0 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Apache HTTP ServerApache Tomcat
Likelihood to Recommend
8.0
(20 ratings)
8.9
(24 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(1 ratings)
Usability
-
(0 ratings)
8.0
(3 ratings)
Availability
-
(0 ratings)
6.0
(1 ratings)
Performance
-
(0 ratings)
9.0
(2 ratings)
Support Rating
9.3
(2 ratings)
9.1
(3 ratings)
Configurability
-
(0 ratings)
8.0
(1 ratings)
Ease of integration
-
(0 ratings)
9.0
(1 ratings)
Product Scalability
-
(0 ratings)
9.0
(1 ratings)
User Testimonials
Apache HTTP ServerApache Tomcat
Likelihood to Recommend
Apache
As I mentioned earlier, the Apache HTTP Server has a small disadvantage compared to the competition (NGINX) in terms of performance. If you run websites that really have a lot of visitors, NGINX might be the better alternative.
On the other hand, the Apache HTTP Server is open source and free. Further functionalities can be activated via modules. The documentation is really excellent.
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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.
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Pros
Apache
  • Street Cred: Apache Web Server is the Founder for all of Apache Foundation's other projects. Without the Web Server, Apache Foundation would look very different. That being said, they have done a good job of maintaining the code base, and keeping a lot of what makes Apache so special
  • Stability: Apache is rock-solid. While no software is perfect, Apache can parse your web sources quickly and cleanly.
  • Flexibility: Need to startup your own Webpage? Done. Wordpress? Yup. REST Endpoint? Check. Honeypot? Absolutely.
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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.
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Cons
Apache
  • The default configurations which comes with Apache server needs to get optimized for performance and security with every new installation as these defaults are not recommended to push on the production environment directly.
  • Security options and advanced configurations are not easy to set up and require an additional level of expertise.
  • Admin frontend GUI could be improved to a great extent to match with other enterprise tools available to serve similar requirements.
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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.
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Likelihood to Renew
Apache
No answers on this topic
Apache
We have a huge knowledge of the product within our company and we're satisfied with the performance.
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Usability
Apache
No answers on this topic
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.
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Reliability and Availability
Apache
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.
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Performance
Apache
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.
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Support Rating
Apache
I give this rating because there is so much Apache documentation and information on the web that you can literally do anything. This has to do with the fact that there is a huge Open Source community that is beyond mature and perhaps one of the most helpful to be found. The only thing that should hold anyone back from anything is that they can not read. RTFM, my friend. And I must say that the manual is excellent.
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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.
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Alternatives Considered
Apache
I has a lot more features, except that IIS is more integrated in a Windows environment. But now with .net core also possible from Apache it would work anywhere really. Only in a full Windows environment where full integration is needed I would chose to go for IIS. Otherwise Apache it is.
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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.
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Scalability
Apache
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
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Return on Investment
Apache
  • Works as intended, so it's less to worry about.
  • Works great on elastic environments (like EC2).
  • As an Open Source project, you can get support for almost any problem you can have.
  • Configuration files, while powerful, can be tricky to dominate for some.
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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.
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