Apache Tomcat vs. Octopus Deploy

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.

Incentivized

Octopus Deploy is a well though [the] solution to the deployment orchestration problem. It is a reliable and robust solution that is relatively simple to understand. [Its] UI is friendly and easy to use, The support and documentation [are] excellent and the product seems to fit into any organization’s process very well and with less effort than other products in this space. I actually find it a pleasure to work with [every day] and I am glad to have it as an integral part of our process.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Octopus integrates nicely with TeamCity, our build server.
• Octopus uses the same deployment packages across environments and makes it easy to track their progress across those environments.
• Octopus makes it easy to handle configuration across environments which is usually a particularly difficult task.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• UI is very fluffy and padded. It looks pretty but it could benefit from a more compact, information-focused design
• Deployment process options are not always laid out in an intuitive manner. Choosing which steps to exclude, which environments or targets to deploy to, etc., is not immediately clear
• Lack of useful reports and metrics for tracking active deployments and historical data

Incentivized

We have a huge knowledge of the product within our company and we're satisfied with the performance.

Incentivized

Would be a 10 except for the retirement of the free Community Edition.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

Octopus Deploy has greatly helped us to improve our reliability and frequency of our deployments and given us the confidence to deploy much more often, with a direct benefit to customers. Cross-platform support and release to Cloud require more focus on the product side.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

Octopus Deploy is a software that runs very effectively, is easy to use, does not require such a high learning curve, provides the necessary tools to carry out the functions it offers, making it a very flexible software, it also allows that can be configured according to the needs of the user and provides integrations with other very advantageous tools since they are carried out in a very favorable way.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

Octopus Deploy support has always been there for us, even when using the free tier, we get responsive hands-on help. We haven't needed to use that level of support since the documentation is clearly written, and help is readily available within the interface itself. Using Octopus Deploy is a truly joyful experience.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

There aren't really any competitors in the land of ASP.NET. Deployment is too ad-hoc. Other tools exist that have massive downsides, like Web Deploy. Most aren't even supported anymore. You could argue that containers (Docker) are a competitor, but containers cannot be used for everything and solve a somewhat different problem. Octopus Deploy is even able to help with containers. To us, Octopus Deploy was really the only really polished solution.

Incentivized

It's very easy to add instances to an existing deployment and, using apache with mod proxy balancer, to scale up the serving farm

Incentivized

Great support from professional services.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• While not an inexpensive product, it has proven to be a good value. I don't have firm ROI numbers but our PROD deployment quality has improved, and we now measure deployment times in "person-minutes" rather than "person-hours".
• Our defect rate due to missed configuration items has been significantly reduced.
• Octopus has enhanced our ability to enforce SDLC separation-of-duties.

Incentivized