Apache Tomcat vs. IBM WebSphere Hybrid Edition

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Apache Tomcat
Score 8.8 out of 10
N/A
Tomcat is an open-source web server supported by Apache.N/A
IBM WebSphere Hybrid Edition
Score 8.2 out of 10
N/A
WebSphere Hybrid Edition from IBM is a collection of WebSphere application runtimes and modernization tools that provides support for on-premise and major public cloud deployments, in virtual machines, containers and Kubernetes. The user can choose any WebSphere edition and deploy Liberty and application modernization tools to help move to a cloud-native architecture, modernize existing applications and support an existing WebSphere estate.
$88.50
per month
Pricing
Apache TomcatIBM WebSphere Hybrid Edition
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
Application Server
$88.50
per month
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Apache TomcatIBM WebSphere Hybrid Edition
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 WebSphere Hybrid Edition
Considered Both Products
Apache Tomcat
Chose Apache Tomcat
Commercial application servers are available that support enterprise application needs, but many times this is overkill for most web applications running in the cloud, particularly for independent software vendors. The capabilities and management tools provided with these …
Chose Apache Tomcat
Tomcat stacks up against the others very well due to its adoption in the open source community, low total cost of ownership, maintenance, and ease of deployment. It's much more lightweight than Websphere or Weblogic and provides most of the features most developers would need, …
IBM WebSphere Hybrid Edition
Chose IBM WebSphere Hybrid Edition
Both Apache Tomcat and Hybris have been in use, and we have provided support for both tomcat and IIS-based systems. Companies with a substantial investment in IBM technology will find this application particularly useful. Support and licensing fees might be prohibitive, …
Chose IBM WebSphere Hybrid Edition
IBM Websphere was better suited for our needs as we are a primarily Java shop, and it provided better customization and potential ROI. It also requires less downtime, and support is easier than Weblogic. Also, Websphere is better suited for a hybrid environment.
Chose IBM WebSphere Hybrid Edition
IBM WebSphere Hybrid Edition was more responsive to our needs, offered better customization options, and we projected better ROI.
Chose IBM WebSphere Hybrid Edition
Magento and Hybris are both also being used, we have also supported tomcat and IIS solutions
Chose IBM WebSphere Hybrid Edition
WebSphere Application Server admin console is very detailed and there are a huge number of configurations available to maintain and configure. JBoss is complex where stand vs full configuration is confusing sometimes. Modularity proved complex there, so I love WebSphere …
Chose IBM WebSphere Hybrid Edition
Websphere Application Server provides better Security, high availability, easy troubleshooting, and good 24/7 support. Websphere Application Server has an easy to use interface.
Chose IBM WebSphere Hybrid Edition
IBM support is better than Oracle, from past experience. Weblogic and WebSphere Application Server are somewhat similar versus the open source JBOSS. For many applications we had selected WAS to have a supported platform and used some of the competitors in other various use …
Chose IBM WebSphere Hybrid Edition
JBoss, Tomcat, Glassfish are some of the alternatives. I did not select it, it was my team's decision.
Chose IBM WebSphere Hybrid Edition
Websphere Application Server supports enterprise Java open standards, streamlines deployment, has very flexible management capabilities and better reliability and availability.
Chose IBM WebSphere Hybrid Edition
I recommended WebSphere because of my expertise on it and the great IBM support.
Chose IBM WebSphere Hybrid Edition
I did not choose IBM WAS, it was a coporate decision. We are glad that we have been using this for a number of years and are quite happy as a corporation. However, it does take more time to learn WAS because of its complexity in terms of installation, various features and …
Top Pros

No answers on this topic

Top Cons

No answers on this topic

Features
Apache TomcatIBM WebSphere Hybrid Edition
Application Servers
Comparison of Application Servers features of Product A and Product B
Apache Tomcat
9.0
24 Ratings
12% above category average
IBM WebSphere Hybrid Edition
8.1
29 Ratings
1% above category average
IDE support9.222 Ratings8.224 Ratings
Security management8.724 Ratings8.729 Ratings
Administration and management8.424 Ratings8.129 Ratings
Application server performance8.224 Ratings8.429 Ratings
Installation9.924 Ratings7.928 Ratings
Open-source standards compliance9.424 Ratings7.124 Ratings
Best Alternatives
Apache TomcatIBM WebSphere Hybrid Edition
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 TomcatIBM WebSphere Hybrid Edition
Likelihood to Recommend
8.9
(24 ratings)
8.6
(31 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
10.0
(1 ratings)
8.5
(4 ratings)
Usability
8.0
(3 ratings)
9.0
(4 ratings)
Availability
6.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Performance
9.0
(2 ratings)
8.0
(1 ratings)
Support Rating
9.1
(3 ratings)
8.7
(4 ratings)
Configurability
8.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Ease of integration
9.0
(1 ratings)
8.0
(1 ratings)
Product Scalability
9.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
Apache TomcatIBM WebSphere Hybrid Edition
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
IBM WebSphere Hybrid edition is well-suited for the development and deployment of large enterprise-level applications such as Electronic Health Records that are used in our organization. IBM WebSphere is appropriate for organizations that require strong security and compliance as it provides a high level of security and compliance features. This works well with organizations that are subject to strict regulatory requirements, such as hospitals.
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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
  • IBM WebSphere Hybrid Edition has done marvelous in building and deploying Java Enterprise applications.
  • It also does well in automating deployment and scaling. This has made it easier for our organization to deploy updates to our applications.
  • IBM WebSphere Hybrid Edition does well in security by providing features that protect enterprise applications.
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.
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IBM
  • Ease of use in terms of deployment, give simple interface to do simple stuff like Tomcat, JBoss or GlassFish.
  • Takes long time to start the server.
  • The Liferay wars need to be decorated and then deployed. Perhaps we could simplify that.
  • Some of the concepts are good for complexity that WAS can handle but could be simplified and better documented, like concepts of well and profile, context, etc.
  • A Liferay war file created using Liferay Developer studio runs fine in Tomcat, however that may not run in WAS 7.x because it needs to be decorated. I had one war for a Liferay portlet with a simple cron job, and had hard time running to WAS server. It was running on the latest free download done on my friends m/c. Other times I have seen that there are issues running a war file that runs on Tomcat but runs on WAS after lot of customization for WAS.
  • The corporations like this however, the product may need better vibrant community of users where issues can be discussed.
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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
Mostly we will be renewing unless the strategic direction changes drastically or there are other complelling external circumstances. We've been on a multi year project to modernize our legacy applications and that effort will continue for the foreseeable future.
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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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IBM
WebSphere Application Server is used across our organization. Most projects use this for Java products and applications. Being robust and scalable makes it even more usable. We love using WebSphere Application Server due to its configuration management ability made simple and vast across all java related parameters. It is dependent on the features and upgrades and IBM releases some great upgrades to WebSphere Application Server.
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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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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
Deploys fairly quick enough and like the roll-out update feature decreasing the downtime and also plays well with other integration tools as well.
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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
IBM was quick to respond when we had an issue with our specific infrastructure. We raised a PMR, which they picked up quickly and updated us about every step of the way. We had an appropriate fix for quite a business critical issue within a fortnight, which was impressive!
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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
Cleo Integration Clould has many bells and whistles; however, when we added more maps and trading partners, it really slowed down. We found that the Cleo support was very slow to respond and there was a language barrier. IBM Websphere had better customer support and its processing was much faster than Cleo Integration Cloud
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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
  • Continuous uptime of the business applications we manage
  • It's now much simpler for me to build and deploy cloud-native applications.
  • Because it can offload for me management and maintenance of the application server to IBM I can focus on the development, deployment and testing of the applications which is more important
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