Apache Tomcat vs. Red Hat JBoss Enterprise Application Platform

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 JBoss EAP
Score 7.0 out of 10
N/A
N/AN/A
Pricing
Apache TomcatRed Hat JBoss Enterprise Application Platform
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Apache TomcatRed Hat JBoss EAP
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 TomcatRed Hat JBoss Enterprise Application Platform
Considered Both Products
Apache Tomcat
Chose 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 …
Chose Apache Tomcat
It's clear that JBoss is a full JEE stack implementation while Tomcat isn't, but if you don't need the whole JEE stack there are many lightweight alternatives that implement the required feature with Tomcat.
Red Hat JBoss EAP
Chose Red Hat JBoss Enterprise Application Platform
JBoss does practically everything Apache Tomcat and Weblogic does in terms of our requirements, but JBoss is more suited for larger enterprise J2EE apps compared to Tomcat. Boot time is not as quick as Tomcat, but still relatively fast for our deployments. The system can also …
Chose Red Hat JBoss Enterprise Application Platform
We selected JBoss because of compatibility with EJB's. We currently are trying to reduce our footprint and will highly consider using Tomcat.
Chose Red Hat JBoss Enterprise Application Platform
Jboss supports JEE standards and provides features like high availability, clustering, hot deployments, configurable features. you can quickly add or remove needed features and cut jboss footprint and reduce boot time.
Top Pros
Top Cons
Features
Apache TomcatRed Hat JBoss Enterprise Application Platform
Application Servers
Comparison of Application Servers features of Product A and Product B
Apache Tomcat
9.0
24 Ratings
12% above category average
Red Hat JBoss Enterprise Application Platform
8.6
8 Ratings
7% above category average
IDE support9.222 Ratings8.18 Ratings
Security management8.724 Ratings8.68 Ratings
Administration and management8.424 Ratings8.18 Ratings
Application server performance8.224 Ratings8.68 Ratings
Installation9.924 Ratings9.58 Ratings
Open-source standards compliance9.424 Ratings8.68 Ratings
Best Alternatives
Apache TomcatRed Hat JBoss Enterprise Application Platform
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 TomcatRed Hat JBoss Enterprise Application Platform
Likelihood to Recommend
8.9
(24 ratings)
8.1
(8 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
10.0
(1 ratings)
5.0
(1 ratings)
Usability
8.0
(3 ratings)
8.5
(3 ratings)
Availability
6.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Performance
9.0
(2 ratings)
8.7
(3 ratings)
Support Rating
9.1
(3 ratings)
5.2
(2 ratings)
Configurability
8.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Ease of integration
9.0
(1 ratings)
8.5
(3 ratings)
Product Scalability
9.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
Apache TomcatRed Hat JBoss Enterprise Application Platform
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
JBoss EAP is subscription based/open source platform. It's very reliable and great for deploying high transaction Java based enterprise applications. It integrates well with third party components like mod_cluster and supports popular Java EE web-based frameworks such as Spring, Angular JS, jQuery Mobile, and Google Web Toolkit.
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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
  • MOD_CLUSTER integration. JBoss EAP integrates pretty well with mod_cluster. This is an intelligent load balancer especially useful in highly clustered environments.
  • Supports enterprise-grade features such as high availability clustering, distributed caching, messaging etc.
  • Supports deployment in on-premise, virtual and hybrid cloud environments.
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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
  • Jboss CLI is a great tool but we had trouble using it to get values that are displayed on Jboss GUI. It also has limitations parsing the applications.xml files and we had to use a mix of jboss-cli and linux bash commands to automate certain application administrative tasks.
  • JBoss doesn't really provides performance tuning recommendations. It would have been nice if it could learn from the current demand vs current settings for things like connection pool, server configurations, garbage collection etc.
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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
We are planning to migrate away from Jboss to Tomcat as Jboss has shown not interest in supporting OSGi which is heavily used at our shop
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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
JBoss overall is easy to use. The installation and deployment of applications are quick. Documentations and support are also readily available.
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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
Usually, Red Hat JBoss Enterprise Application Platform is good at performance and well suited for high traffic Java EE-based applications, but we have faced hard times performance tuning it for our specific needs. The product would be nicer if they would add a performance diagnostic and recommendations feature to it.
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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
Fast response.
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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 selected JBoss because of compatibility with EJB's. We currently are trying to reduce our footprint and will highly consider using Tomcat.
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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
  • Improved delivery timelines due to easy out of the box setup.
  • It is a cheap subscription-based/open-source Java EE-based application server. This reduces the overall cost of delivery.
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