Apache Tomcat vs. IBM Cloud Pak for Applications

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Apache Tomcat
Score 8.2 out of 10
N/A
Tomcat is an open-source web server supported by Apache.N/A
IBM Cloud Pak for Applications
Score 7.3 out of 10
N/A
IBM Cloud Pak® for Applications (CP4Apps) is an end-to-end hybrid cloud application platform, providing flexibility for deployments, building new cloud-native applications, refactoring and re-platforming existing applications. Designed to leverage a collection of application runtimes, modernization tools and a Kubernetes container platform to adapt to their landscape needs.N/A
Pricing
Apache TomcatIBM Cloud Pak for Applications
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Apache TomcatIBM Cloud Pak for Applications
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 TomcatIBM Cloud Pak for Applications
Features
Apache TomcatIBM Cloud Pak for Applications
Application Servers
Comparison of Application Servers features of Product A and Product B
Apache Tomcat
9.2
24 Ratings
14% above category average
IBM Cloud Pak for Applications
-
Ratings
IDE support10.022 Ratings00 Ratings
Security management9.024 Ratings00 Ratings
Administration and management8.324 Ratings00 Ratings
Application server performance8.124 Ratings00 Ratings
Installation10.024 Ratings00 Ratings
Open-source standards compliance10.024 Ratings00 Ratings
Best Alternatives
Apache TomcatIBM Cloud Pak for Applications
Small Businesses
NGINX
NGINX
Score 9.4 out of 10
Visual Studio
Visual Studio
Score 8.8 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
NGINX
NGINX
Score 9.4 out of 10
Visual Studio
Visual Studio
Score 8.8 out of 10
Enterprises
NGINX
NGINX
Score 9.4 out of 10
Visual Studio
Visual Studio
Score 8.8 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Apache TomcatIBM Cloud Pak for Applications
Likelihood to Recommend
9.0
(24 ratings)
7.5
(3 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
10.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Usability
8.0
(3 ratings)
-
(0 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 TomcatIBM Cloud Pak for Applications
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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IBM
Well suited for customers who are looking for cloud-adoption, and finally to meet the challenges of business innovation for the competitive advantage through DevOps.
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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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IBM
  • Provides a fantastic range of Application runtimes allowing the most suitable runtime to be selected for the app being implemented.
  • After using Transformation Advisor for quite a while, it is an indispensable tool to help modernize, specifically from WebSphere and Tomcat, towards the lightweight, fast and efficient Liberty runtime.
  • The simplicity of the licensing by wrapping many products into a single offering with a different VPC weighting.
  • Allows us to modernize our runtime from WebSphere Application Server (or ND) to WebSphere Liberty core without sacrificing our WAS licenses.
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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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IBM
  • User Experience and Learning Curve
  • Integration with Third-party Tools
  • Pricing and Licensing Model
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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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IBM
No answers on this topic
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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IBM
No answers on this topic
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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IBM
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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IBM
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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IBM
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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IBM
Our customer mission-critical core banking applications like Temenos T24 run on best of the breed IBM WebSphere Application Server which is java based-application server. IBM has kept up the promise of providing support, fixpack, and any update. As far as I know, at least by 2030, IBM is committed to continue with WHE which gives customers confidence in their current investments.
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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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IBM
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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IBM
  • We have been able to migrate apps away from the expensive WAS-ND to the more cost-effective WAS-base without throwing away our WAS-ND licenses. With a 1:4 ratio of WAS-ND to WAS-base we've been able to we've been able to save in excess of 75% on licensing charges for these apps.
  • By having a license model based on VPC ratios (1:4:8 - WAS-ND:WAS-base:Liberty core) we've been able to move away from using license pooling resulting in over-allocating (i.e. wasting) CPU cores for each license pool, to using consolidated license pools hosting a combination of WAS-ND, WAS-base and Liberty-core. This has allowed us to reduce our licensing costs accordingly.
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