Apache Tomcat vs. Red Hat OpenShift

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
Red Hat OpenShift
Score 8.7 out of 10
N/A
OpenShift is Red Hat's Cloud Computing Platform as a Service (PaaS) offering. OpenShift is an application platform in the cloud where application developers and teams can build, test, deploy, and run their applications.
$0.08
per hour
Pricing
Apache TomcatRed Hat OpenShift
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Apache TomcatRed Hat OpenShift
Free Trial
NoYes
Free/Freemium Version
NoYes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Apache TomcatRed Hat OpenShift
Top Pros
Top Cons
Features
Apache TomcatRed Hat OpenShift
Application Servers
Comparison of Application Servers features of Product A and Product B
Apache Tomcat
8.9
24 Ratings
10% above category average
Red Hat OpenShift
-
Ratings
IDE support9.022 Ratings00 Ratings
Security management8.624 Ratings00 Ratings
Administration and management8.424 Ratings00 Ratings
Application server performance8.224 Ratings00 Ratings
Installation9.924 Ratings00 Ratings
Open-source standards compliance9.324 Ratings00 Ratings
Platform-as-a-Service
Comparison of Platform-as-a-Service features of Product A and Product B
Apache Tomcat
-
Ratings
Red Hat OpenShift
7.7
91 Ratings
6% below category average
Ease of building user interfaces00 Ratings7.575 Ratings
Scalability00 Ratings8.691 Ratings
Platform management overhead00 Ratings6.783 Ratings
Workflow engine capability00 Ratings7.274 Ratings
Platform access control00 Ratings7.685 Ratings
Services-enabled integration00 Ratings7.677 Ratings
Development environment creation00 Ratings8.083 Ratings
Development environment replication00 Ratings7.778 Ratings
Issue monitoring and notification00 Ratings7.181 Ratings
Issue recovery00 Ratings7.980 Ratings
Upgrades and platform fixes00 Ratings8.384 Ratings
Best Alternatives
Apache TomcatRed Hat OpenShift
Small Businesses
NGINX
NGINX
Score 9.1 out of 10
AWS Lambda
AWS Lambda
Score 8.7 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
NGINX
NGINX
Score 9.1 out of 10
IBM Cloud Private
IBM Cloud Private
Score 9.5 out of 10
Enterprises
NGINX
NGINX
Score 9.1 out of 10
IBM Cloud Private
IBM Cloud Private
Score 9.5 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Apache TomcatRed Hat OpenShift
Likelihood to Recommend
8.9
(24 ratings)
8.6
(100 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
10.0
(1 ratings)
8.9
(9 ratings)
Usability
8.0
(3 ratings)
8.4
(7 ratings)
Availability
6.0
(1 ratings)
5.5
(1 ratings)
Performance
9.0
(2 ratings)
7.8
(20 ratings)
Support Rating
9.1
(3 ratings)
7.4
(8 ratings)
Implementation Rating
-
(0 ratings)
8.6
(2 ratings)
Configurability
8.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Contract Terms and Pricing Model
-
(0 ratings)
7.4
(2 ratings)
Ease of integration
9.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Product Scalability
9.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Professional Services
-
(0 ratings)
7.3
(1 ratings)
User Testimonials
Apache TomcatRed Hat OpenShift
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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Red Hat
Well, in our case, because I have two use cases, one is with the operator, which obviously is super easy with OpenShift because it's just click, click start aside from the issue from the operator. But that's a different interview. And the other point is for the web portal that our portal team uses, it's very easy. Two perform a task needed for them to do their deployment, their pipelines, and their daily Java.
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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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Red Hat
  • Scales very well.
  • It provides you with a landing pad to modernize what you have in a phased approach so you don't have to do it all at once, right? You can take small pieces of work and implement those on OpenShift over time. It enables us to be able to implement things like GI ops configuration as a service, and infrastructure as a service using the tools that are native to OpenShift, which gives us far greater reliability and consistency as far as monitoring for any kind of drift and configuration or unauthorized changes. So it pretty much gives us a lot of visibility on things that are otherwise relatively difficult to see using the old means of doing what we do. So it provides us with a modern set of tools to accomplish all those objectives.
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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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Red Hat
  • Network of observability, so having one single screen to see to have some network-related metrics for the pod levels. Also at the cluster itself level and more importantly is ease of use for troubleshooting when there's any timeout. This has been the single kind of issue I've been facing for my three years of experience with OpenShift and it hasn't been an easy task for such troubleshooting.
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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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Red Hat
Leverage OpenShift Online constantly at both the free and paid tiers. While AWS is convenient, it often brings more administration than I want to deal with for a quick application (i.e. Drupal or Wordpress blog). OpenShift also simplifies the DNS registration and ability to share application environments with team members
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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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Red Hat
As I said before, the obserability is one of the weakest point of OpenShift and that has a lot to do with usability. The Kibana console is not fully integrated with OpenShift console and you have to switch from tab to tab to use it. Same with Prometheus, Jaeger and Grafan, it's a "simple" integration but if you want to do complex queries or dashboards you have to go to the specific console
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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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Red Hat
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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Red Hat
Applications deployed to OpenShift clusters stay responsive when peak load hits or when the traffic dies down - since the platform reacts by scaling out or scaling in the deployed applications elastically - achieved through' policy sense and response automation - leveraging monitoring, measuring (metrics), auto-scaling to meet SLAs, SLOs, and SLIs. This approach works for stateless or stateful business logic hosting applications. The deployed applications perform consistently, stably, and securely across many deployment platforms - public clouds, private data centers, at the edge, or on factory floors - hosted by bare metal or virtual environments.
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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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Red Hat
Their customer support team is good and quick to respond. On a couple of occassions, they have helped us in solving some issues which we were finding a tad difficult to comprehend. On a rare occasion, the response was a bit slow but maybe it was because of the festival season. Overall a good experience on this front.
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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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Red Hat
We had some existing apps and were looking for a platform to modernize our app deployments and scale for future growth. Based on Kubernetes, OpenShift offers more flexibility and customization. We could deploy any type of containerized application, not just Cloud Foundry-specific ones. I particularly liked the built-in security and its focus on rapid and automated deployments. Moreover, our cloud strategy isn't set in stone. OpenShift's flexibility means we could deploy on-prem, in multiple public clouds, or use a hybrid approach - something other products couldn't offer as expected.
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Contract Terms and Pricing Model
Apache
No answers on this topic
Red Hat
It's easy to understand what are being billed and what's included in each type of subscription. Same with the support (Std or Premium) you know exactly what to expect when you need to use it. The "core" unit approach on the subscription made really simple to scale and carry the workloads from one site to another.
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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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Red Hat
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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Red Hat
  • I'll say a lot of positive impact because when we started making this product aware to all the application domains in our business, they saw how easy to use. I mean we are giving a lot of control to the development team, how they can scale their application, how can they check the health of the application, and what action they can take if they are in any kind of failure or even meeting the business's SLA. So there are a lot of capabilities and those are really new features they can use. Those I think are a good use of OpenShift.
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