Apache Tomcat vs. F5 BIG-IP DNS

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Apache Tomcat
Score 8.0 out of 10
N/A
Tomcat is an open-source web server supported by Apache.N/A
F5 BIG-IP DNS
Score 9.0 out of 10
N/A
F5 BIG-IP DNS (formerly BIG-IP Global Traffic Manager) secures DNS infrastructure.N/A
Pricing
Apache TomcatF5 BIG-IP DNS
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Apache TomcatF5 BIG-IP DNS
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 TomcatF5 BIG-IP DNS
Features
Apache TomcatF5 BIG-IP DNS
Application Servers
Comparison of Application Servers features of Product A and Product B
Apache Tomcat
9.2
24 Ratings
14% above category average
F5 BIG-IP DNS
-
Ratings
IDE support10.022 Ratings00 Ratings
Security management9.024 Ratings00 Ratings
Administration and management8.224 Ratings00 Ratings
Application server performance8.124 Ratings00 Ratings
Installation10.024 Ratings00 Ratings
Open-source standards compliance10.024 Ratings00 Ratings
Best Alternatives
Apache TomcatF5 BIG-IP DNS
Small Businesses
NGINX
NGINX
Score 9.2 out of 10
NGINX
NGINX
Score 9.2 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
NGINX
NGINX
Score 9.2 out of 10
NGINX
NGINX
Score 9.2 out of 10
Enterprises
NGINX
NGINX
Score 9.2 out of 10
NGINX
NGINX
Score 9.2 out of 10
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User Ratings
Apache TomcatF5 BIG-IP DNS
Likelihood to Recommend
9.0
(24 ratings)
9.3
(17 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
10.0
(1 ratings)
9.1
(2 ratings)
Usability
8.0
(3 ratings)
8.3
(6 ratings)
Availability
6.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Performance
9.0
(2 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
9.1
(3 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Configurability
8.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Ease of integration
9.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Product Scalability
9.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
Apache TomcatF5 BIG-IP DNS
Likelihood to Recommend
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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F5
Less appropriate: - Not best bet for startup’s as their budget is always tight - Not good for those companies where the engineers are not highly skilled otherwise the use Irules and security policies will not be utilised in optimal manner as it requires more cpu resources to work especially irules - For companies fully on cloud doesn’t best fit as I already highlighted cloud require more improvements when it comes to seamless performance Best Suited -Large enterprise companies where budget is not an issue - Companies whose traffic Rate Per Second is very high as it can handle huge RPS without latency - Companies whose business is surely depends on their availability
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Pros
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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F5
  • Routing the traffic to multiple data centers deployed in different locations
  • Examines the servers health, performance metrics and do evaluation on the basis of geography as well to redirect queries to optimal destination
  • Provides rate limiting feature to mitigate DDos and DNS flood attacks
  • Best in routing the traffic to multiple clouds including on prem resources
  • Faster results of the queries and reduced latency is one of the biggest advantages of F5 BIG-IP DNS
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Cons
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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F5
  • I'd like to see better reporting capabilities on the decision-making process for DNS resolutions. Currently there are plenty of log messages for that, but I'd like to see tighter integration into the GUI.
  • It could be an improvement to better discriminate features intended for AA vs LDNS functionality within the GUI.
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Likelihood to Renew
Apache
We have a huge knowledge of the product within our company and we're satisfied with the performance.
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F5
We use this heavily and it is one of the best products out there for this type of use case. We already have LTMs and to leverage GTM on top of that is just a piece of cake. Everything is so well integrated its amazing
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Usability
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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F5
Most important usability of F5 BIG-IP DNS is it’s stability which other vendors lack -As mentioned earlier as well, it’s scalability is humongous as it can honour millions of request per second without latency - irules feature makes it top and worthy to fight with top contenders like cloudflare and Cisco - Moreover it’s stable even when the Rate Per second is high and at the same time, DDos occurs - Interface is user friendly for simple tasks but requires more manual work - TAC should provide more assistance when it comes to normal support as well but they do offer professional support license for tasks which other vendor assist on normal license as well
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Reliability and Availability
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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F5
No answers on this topic
Performance
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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F5
No answers on this topic
Support Rating
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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F5
No answers on this topic
Alternatives Considered
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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F5
As I mentioned, the GSLB capability, being able to do intelligent DNS by having access to monitor specific endpoints associated to my current BIG-IP infrastructure, I believe that brings a huge value, then combine fast responses and security.
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Scalability
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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F5
No answers on this topic
Return on Investment
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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F5
  • Saved almost 1.2 million USD for one of critical activities as downtime could have posed this but due to failover based on health checks saved these bucks
  • Business impact which can be caused due to DDos attacks avoided
  • High cost licensing as mentioned earlier as well
  • Analytical limitations as F5 has also mentioned multiple it’s not an analytical tool
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