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
Cisco Umbrella
Score 8.9 out of 10
N/A
Cisco now offers OpenDNS Umbrella Web Filtering. Cisco acquired OpenDNS in August 2015, and rebranded the product as Cisco Umbrella.N/A
NGINX
Score 9.1 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
Apache TomcatCisco UmbrellaNGINX
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Apache TomcatCisco UmbrellaNGINX
Free Trial
NoYesYes
Free/Freemium Version
NoYesYes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoYesYes
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup feeOptional
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Apache TomcatCisco UmbrellaNGINX
Considered Multiple Products
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.
Cisco Umbrella

No answer on this topic

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
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
Apache TomcatCisco UmbrellaNGINX
Application Servers
Comparison of Application Servers features of Product A and Product B
Apache Tomcat
9.2
24 Ratings
14% above category average
Cisco Umbrella
-
Ratings
NGINX
8.7
32 Ratings
9% above category average
IDE support10.022 Ratings00 Ratings7.617 Ratings
Security management9.024 Ratings00 Ratings8.627 Ratings
Administration and management8.224 Ratings00 Ratings8.827 Ratings
Application server performance8.124 Ratings00 Ratings9.327 Ratings
Installation10.024 Ratings00 Ratings8.929 Ratings
Open-source standards compliance10.024 Ratings00 Ratings9.025 Ratings
Best Alternatives
Apache TomcatCisco UmbrellaNGINX
Small Businesses
NGINX
NGINX
Score 9.1 out of 10

No answers on this topic

Apache HTTP Server
Apache HTTP Server
Score 9.1 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
NGINX
NGINX
Score 9.1 out of 10

No answers on this topic

Apache Tomcat
Apache Tomcat
Score 8.0 out of 10
Enterprises
NGINX
NGINX
Score 9.1 out of 10
Zscaler Internet Access
Zscaler Internet Access
Score 8.7 out of 10
Apache Tomcat
Apache Tomcat
Score 8.0 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Apache TomcatCisco UmbrellaNGINX
Likelihood to Recommend
9.0
(24 ratings)
8.9
(109 ratings)
8.9
(50 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
10.0
(1 ratings)
8.0
(15 ratings)
9.1
(1 ratings)
Usability
8.0
(3 ratings)
7.6
(10 ratings)
8.3
(3 ratings)
Availability
6.0
(1 ratings)
8.7
(11 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Performance
9.0
(2 ratings)
9.9
(2 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
9.1
(3 ratings)
7.0
(63 ratings)
8.1
(4 ratings)
Online Training
-
(0 ratings)
8.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Implementation Rating
-
(0 ratings)
9.5
(11 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Configurability
8.0
(1 ratings)
8.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Ease of integration
9.0
(1 ratings)
9.5
(10 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Product Scalability
9.0
(1 ratings)
8.0
(2 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Vendor post-sale
-
(0 ratings)
8.1
(3 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Vendor pre-sale
-
(0 ratings)
8.1
(3 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
Apache TomcatCisco UmbrellaNGINX
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.
Read full review
Cisco
We tested multiple products, and what stood out about Umbrella was the following: Multiple domains are protected, and an unlimited number of protected IPs (Public). If you need to protect fewer numbers, other products may suit you, as they're cheaper.
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
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
Cisco
  • So for example, we had the problem in the past. We are connecting users to our own managed data centers. We had seven locations around the world, put them with Cisco, any connect to our on-prem data center and let them out to the internet. So that's causing some high latency bad experiences with teams and so on. And with Umbrella we can directly connect the user to the cloud and to the internet so the users have a good experience with speed with latency and it's much better than back hauling the traffic to their own company and then processing them there.
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
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
Cisco
  • The smart search feature in Cisco Umbrella is great addition for sure which helps us to identify malicious domain just by searching the URL and there is scoring system of Cisco Umbrella which mark the URL in low, medium and high risk. Sometimes Cisco Umbrella mark well known and good domain as malicious whether sometimes they mark malicious sites/domain as low risk. So, it's something that they should focus on, I think.
  • The live activity search is great for checking internet activities, but the filtering options could be improved. It would be helpful if we could filter by multiple parameters at once like combining username, destination IP and time range.
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
Apache
We have a huge knowledge of the product within our company and we're satisfied with the performance.
Read full review
Cisco
First off I never give anything a "10" unless it's perfect. LOL - I grade on the curve. I think OpenDNS/Umbrella is a very good product. I think that fact that Cisco absorbed them is one of the proofs of that. I have used the product back when it was free for companies our size. I have not always appreciated the cost - but in the post pandemic cyber chaos, I believe the cost benefit ratio is still very high. I have honestly not looked at other products because Umbrella continues to work to my satisfaction. I consider Umbrella to be one of the key layers in my cyber security strategy.
Read full review
F5
Great value for the product
Read full review
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.
Read full review
Cisco
Better features and easy to manage system with great customer support and overall usability is great as it works for hybrid environment with ease as it is having features for on prem users as wells as cloud users with great customer support and great team of trained engineers to support our opeartions.
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
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
Cisco
Cisco umbrella services in the cloud are always available. However, the weakness is the VM installed in the data center that are the first resolvers. If the VMs become unavailable for any reason or the vSphere goes down, then all DNS is affected
Read full review
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.
Read full review
Cisco
our experience with cisco products has always been awesome and same is the case with cisco umbrella .Under umbrella cisco provides flexible and scalable software solution to use across different dept and sites . These softwares are very user friendly ,pages load quickly as these applications are designed for minimum latency and reports are also provided quickely
Read full review
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.
Read full review
Cisco
Whilst the support is good once you get through to them, it's email only and the response is slow. This is a issue, because its a core system that needs to work. We have had issues in the past where several of our companies have gone down due to Umbrella and support is nowhere to be seen. It is very difficult to know whether Umbrella is having service issues, since they do not regularly update customers on the status of their services, such as is seen by providers such as Microsoft (status.umbrella.com just seems to show up all of the time, I'm not sure it's even updated)
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
Online Training
Apache
No answers on this topic
Cisco
Quite easy to understand training modules prepared by knowledgeable trainers. Training modules have included all the desired features of these softwares and the content delivery is very good from the respective module trainers and it explains in details the features and apart from that further training material support is also provided if needed.
Read full review
F5
No answers on this topic
Implementation Rating
Apache
No answers on this topic
Cisco
At the time we were forced to move from Cloud Web Security to Cisco Umbrella, Cisco Umbrella was far from being a direct replacement. It was frustrating and difficult to migrate due to the lack of functionality. This has since been addressed, however we now have legacy rulesets that were built as bandaids that cannot be removed. Hopefully the migration to Secure Access will address this.
Read full review
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.
Read full review
Cisco
Cisco was the right balance of cost and innovation. For us, we had already been users of Umbrella, Cisco Meraki, and DUO. So, it seemed to make sense to invest in the partners we have already entrusted. Since we were a previous Sonicwall customer, we looked closely at them, but they seemed a few steps behind in their feature set. Cato was on the expensive side, and we didn't have a good experience during the ZScaler demonstrations.
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
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
Cisco
Cisco umbrella provides fleaxible and scalable software solutions which are easy deploy across multiple departments and sites wherever needed and this softwares are very easy to use and provides the best interface along with cisco support for other devices apart from cisco infrastructure but still there is scope for improvement on the inclusion of latest features
Read full review
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.
Read full review
Cisco
  • Provide an additional layer of DNS security by vetting web traffic
  • Help to understand who is consuming bandwidth so we can make adjustments as needed.
  • The cost of a single incident from bad web surfing or searches could be enormous. Umbrella helps to avoid these scenarios.
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