What users are saying about

Apache Tomcat vs Oracle GlassFish Server

Apache Tomcat
88 Ratings
Oracle GlassFish Server
12 Ratings

Apache Tomcat

88 Ratings
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Score 8.5 out of 101

Based on 88 reviews and ratings

Oracle GlassFish Server

12 Ratings
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Score 8.3 out of 101

Based on 12 reviews and ratings

Likelihood to Recommend

Apache Tomcat

Tomcat is more than enough to deploy most of the mid-end web applications without any problem but for the high-end applications which require high scalability and high availability, which might need some tune-ups with the support of expertise in this regard. Otherwise, you may realize numerous performance issues, memory leaks, server crashes etc.

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Oracle GlassFish Server

Glassfish is well suited for large-scale cluster deployments and integrates well with F5 load balancers.

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Feature Rating Comparison

Application Servers

Apache Tomcat
8.4
Oracle GlassFish Server
8.8
IDE support
Apache Tomcat
8.8
Oracle GlassFish Server
8.6
Security management
Apache Tomcat
7.7
Oracle GlassFish Server
8.1
Administration and management
Apache Tomcat
7.2
Oracle GlassFish Server
9.1
Application server performance
Apache Tomcat
8.5
Oracle GlassFish Server
9.1
Installation
Apache Tomcat
9.2
Oracle GlassFish Server
8.8
Open-source standards compliance
Apache Tomcat
9.0
Oracle GlassFish Server
9.3

Pros

Apache Tomcat

  • 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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Oracle GlassFish Server

  • The product offers Java EE support.
  • As the version supported by Oracle we have an extensive documentation, the Oracle GlassFish server online documentation library, patches ,and support from the supplier.
  • Ease of use through the administration console.
  • Integration with the NetBeans development interface.

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Cons

Apache Tomcat

  • 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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Oracle GlassFish Server

  • One of the areas where we found Glassfish adaptation difficult for our company was the lack of documentation and community forums covering important issues.
  • We ran into a roadblock with OAuth 2.0 implementation and did not get great support on that issue.

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Likelihood to Renew

Apache Tomcat

Apache Tomcat 10.0
Based on 1 answer
We have a huge knowledge of the product within our company and we're satisfied with the performance.

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Oracle GlassFish Server

No score
No answers yet
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Usability

Apache Tomcat

Apache Tomcat 8.0
Based on 2 answers
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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Oracle GlassFish Server

No score
No answers yet
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Reliability and Availability

Apache Tomcat

Apache Tomcat 6.0
Based on 1 answer
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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Oracle GlassFish Server

No score
No answers yet
No answers on this topic

Performance

Apache Tomcat

Apache Tomcat 9.0
Based on 2 answers
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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Oracle GlassFish Server

No score
No answers yet
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Support

Apache Tomcat

Apache Tomcat 9.0
Based on 1 answer
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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Oracle GlassFish Server

No score
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Alternatives Considered

Apache Tomcat

Apache Tomcat is more lightweight and much quicker to deploy, so compared to JBoss or Weblogic it's much more efficient and cost effective for deploying small apps. The instances start up almost immediately and almost no maintenance is needed from the admins. There is also no cost incurred on dealing with licensing costs

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Oracle GlassFish Server

At the time we did a small proof of concept with both platforms and Oracle Glassfish had more intuitive administration and configuration functions

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Scalability

Apache Tomcat

Apache Tomcat 9.0
Based on 1 answer
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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Oracle GlassFish Server

No score
No answers yet
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Return on Investment

Apache Tomcat

  • It has decreased license costs significantly. Throughout my application stacks, I have well over 90 instances deployed. If I did that on a non-opensource application server, my costs would be much higher and my ROI much less.
  • When moving my applications to AWS, it has also provided an even better ROI because it's even easier to deploy and maintain on a managed cloud provider.

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Bryan Salerno
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Oracle GlassFish Server

  • Glassfish which initially spun off from an Open Source project has a community edition which is free to use and offers great ROI.
  • In comparison to cloud offerings like AWS and Google App Engine, Glassfish requires more cost upfront for installation and management.

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Pricing Details

Apache Tomcat

General

Free Trial
—
Free/Freemium Version
—
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
—
Entry-level set up fee?
No

Oracle GlassFish Server

General

Free Trial
—
Free/Freemium Version
—
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
—
Entry-level set up fee?
No

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