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Tomcat is an open-source web server supported by Apache.https://dudodiprj2sv7.cloudfront.net/product-logos/Q7/TS/6S3BR8W0MTLL.jpegTomcat - small but powerfulOur organization use Tomcat to deploy mostly light Java based web applications. Many of our applications are being deployed in Apache Tomcat, due to the ease of deployment and cost factoring. We use Tomcat as our main applications server due to its performance and light weight.,Lightweight. Does not require many resources to run. Stable. Once tuned almost no maintenance is required for the instance. Ease of deployment. Easy to install and set up. Documentations are widely available Cost. Open sourced!,Mostly CLI based. GUI console although exist but not as user-friendly and basic. Custom configurations are not as intuitive and may have a steep learning curve.,8,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.,Red Hat JBoss Enterprise Application Platform and Oracle WebLogic Application Server,Red Hat JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, Oracle WebLogic Application ServerDeploy apps with Apache TomcatWe are using Apache Tomcat to deploy our web application; it's a robust servlet container which performs really well in production.,Embedded Tomcat works like a charm for spring-boot apps It has all that's needed to deploy apps in prod The configuration is quite simple to implement and there is tons of documentation available on the internet,Ability to manage Tomcat using a web console Support for JEE would be appreciated,10,It's free which is awesome There are tons of resources available on the internet when some config needs to be done Large community supporting the product which makes it easier to find solutions to common problems,,IntelliJ IDEA, IntelliJ WebStorm, Visual Studio IDETomcat wide-scale use!Apache Tomcat is being used in my organization to run seven of my ten applications. It has been our preferred solution for an application server for years as a lightweight and stable solution for hosting applications. It is currently being standardized across the whole company; however, we standardized on it years ago. It solves the problem of providing low-cost application servers that require very little maintenance but also provides excellent scalability at the web tier. The desire to drive down costs, while still providing solid secure solutions was a driving business factor in choosing to move to Tomcat.,It is very lightweight and not resource intensive, which leads to fast start-up times It is very stable, I have not had an outage related to Tomcat in over 10 years and no longer even have support contracts for it. It's very scalable, especially in a cloud solution where you can perform auto-scaling and add nodes within short periods of time.,Configuration could be made easier, but then again it's open source.,10,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.,WebSphere Application Server, Oracle WebLogic Application Server and JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform,Oracle Database 12c, Apache Kafka, Docker, Kubernetes, iManage Work, Jenkins, JIRA Software, Atlassian Confluence,90Speed up the launch of your light-weighted Web application/serviceWe use tomcat bundled with the SpringBoot in Fedex IT departments, majorly for small/middle-scaled and light-weighted web application and RESTful based micro services. Those light applications are supposed to be containerized to support the cloud-native initiative. Also for a quick POC purpose, we use Tomcat as the light solution to host some pure servlet based codes.,tomcat is very light-weighted, that means a small memory footprint and a very quick starting time It also supports the modern security demands well Using the version bundled with the SpringBoot, saving the extra deployment efforts, making your single JVM application become the quick web service solution easily,tomcat is just part of the J2EE specification implementation, majorly focusing on the servlet (front-end) part. If you requires the full J2ee stack, like EJB support, you need consider other containers like Weblogic tomcat's cluster level support is very limited tomcat's admin/configuration is not so intuitive, and default logging needs a lot of improvement,7,tomcat makes the POC much more efficient, speeding up the early phase of decision making, and concept proof, shortened the project planning phase required time tomcat saves the extra training and resources for web container management, typically when it is used with bundled Spring Boot,Oracle WebLogic Application Server,Oracle Database 12c, TIBCO Enterprise Message Service, TIBCO ActiveSpacesQuick Review on TomcatMy organization offers a web product for mobile operators to expose their own web APIs as a managed service, which is expected to be highly performed since it handles millions of transactions on daily basis. So Apache Tomcat is a part of it by deploying all the web applications/services associated with the product.,Apache Tomcat is the best lightweight servlet container for j2ee web applications. Unless you want advanced j2ee features, Tomcat is the right choice. Since this is open source, it is freely available for anyone to use.,Apache tomcat does not come with the implementations of full j2ee stack. Developers who need the advanced features may realize that tomcat lacks some functionalities. Tomcat may raise memory issues if is not tuned up.,9,Since Tomcat is open source, no cost is needed for running this software. There is no big issue in installing, updating and uninstalling. So in overall, maintaining this software is very easy. Troubleshooting issues may not be easy sometimes. So it takes time and can affect the business negatively.,Eclipse Jetty,No,Price Product Features Product Usability Prior Experience with the Product
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Apache Tomcat
75 Ratings
Score 8.2 out of 101
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Apache Tomcat Reviews

Apache Tomcat
75 Ratings
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Score 8.2 out of 101
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November 30, 2018

Apache Tomcat Review: "Tomcat - small but powerful"

Verified User
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Review Source
Our organization use Tomcat to deploy mostly light Java based web applications. Many of our applications are being deployed in Apache Tomcat, due to the ease of deployment and cost factoring. We use Tomcat as our main applications server due to its performance and light weight.
  • Lightweight. Does not require many resources to run.
  • Stable. Once tuned almost no maintenance is required for the instance.
  • Ease of deployment. Easy to install and set up. Documentations are widely available
  • Cost. Open sourced!
  • Mostly CLI based. GUI console although exist but not as user-friendly and basic.
  • Custom configurations are not as intuitive and may have a steep learning curve.
Tomcat is open source and free to use so it's very good for developers to deploy their applications without incurring additional cost to business. Due to it being lightweight it's more suited to smaller scale deployments, simple web applications instead of a full stack Java app.
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Rene Enriquez profile photo
April 20, 2018

User Review: "Deploy apps with Apache Tomcat"

Rene Enriquez
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Review Source
We are using Apache Tomcat to deploy our web application; it's a robust servlet container which performs really well in production.
  • Embedded Tomcat works like a charm for spring-boot apps
  • It has all that's needed to deploy apps in prod
  • The configuration is quite simple to implement and there is tons of documentation available on the internet
  • Ability to manage Tomcat using a web console
  • Support for JEE would be appreciated
It's really good if you want to deploy web Java applications where only a servlet container is needed. However, it is not well suited to deploy JEE applications.
Read Rene Enriquez's full review
Bryan Salerno profile photo
April 06, 2018

Apache Tomcat Review: "Tomcat wide-scale use!"

Bryan Salerno
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Review Source
Apache Tomcat is being used in my organization to run seven of my ten applications. It has been our preferred solution for an application server for years as a lightweight and stable solution for hosting applications. It is currently being standardized across the whole company; however, we standardized on it years ago. It solves the problem of providing low-cost application servers that require very little maintenance but also provides excellent scalability at the web tier. The desire to drive down costs, while still providing solid secure solutions was a driving business factor in choosing to move to Tomcat.
  • It is very lightweight and not resource intensive, which leads to fast start-up times
  • It is very stable, I have not had an outage related to Tomcat in over 10 years and no longer even have support contracts for it.
  • It's very scalable, especially in a cloud solution where you can perform auto-scaling and add nodes within short periods of time.
  • Configuration could be made easier, but then again it's open source.
It's well suited for typical web and application workloads. It is not well suited where you do not need advanced application server functionality, such as persistence. There are also scenarios where you may wish to use even more lightweight technologies such as "play" and "akka" which have some of the functionality built into them.
Read Bryan Salerno's full review
yixiang Shan profile photo
February 16, 2018

Apache Tomcat Review: "Speed up the launch of your light-weighted Web application/service"

yixiang Shan
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Review Source
We use tomcat bundled with the SpringBoot in Fedex IT departments, majorly for small/middle-scaled and light-weighted web application and RESTful based micro services. Those light applications are supposed to be containerized to support the cloud-native initiative. Also for a quick POC purpose, we use Tomcat as the light solution to host some pure servlet based codes.
  • tomcat is very light-weighted, that means a small memory footprint and a very quick starting time
  • It also supports the modern security demands well
  • Using the version bundled with the SpringBoot, saving the extra deployment efforts, making your single JVM application become the quick web service solution easily
  • tomcat is just part of the J2EE specification implementation, majorly focusing on the servlet (front-end) part. If you requires the full J2ee stack, like EJB support, you need consider other containers like Weblogic
  • tomcat's cluster level support is very limited
  • tomcat's admin/configuration is not so intuitive, and default logging needs a lot of improvement
tomcat is suitable for small/middle business [that wants a] light and portable solution and [wants] to be containerized and hosted in the public cloud. If you need more advanced needs like JMS or global transaction management, tomcat is not your best option for sure.
Read yixiang Shan's full review
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January 24, 2018

Apache Tomcat: "Quick Review on Tomcat"

Verified User
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Review Source
My organization offers a web product for mobile operators to expose their own web APIs as a managed service, which is expected to be highly performed since it handles millions of transactions on daily basis. So Apache Tomcat is a part of it by deploying all the web applications/services associated with the product.
  • Apache Tomcat is the best lightweight servlet container for j2ee web applications.
  • Unless you want advanced j2ee features, Tomcat is the right choice.
  • Since this is open source, it is freely available for anyone to use.
  • Apache tomcat does not come with the implementations of full j2ee stack.
  • Developers who need the advanced features may realize that tomcat lacks some functionalities.
  • Tomcat may raise memory issues if is not tuned up.
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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November 09, 2017

"Apache Tomcat Review"

Gregory Hanson
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Review Source
Tomcat is utilized across our enterprise as a solid, complaint, j2ee web container.
  • Tomcat easily integrates with Apache HTTP server over jk_mod.
  • Web app deployment is simplistic.
  • The application can be easily replicated across installations.
  • The server is compact and can be deployed into various enterprise schemes, including virtual servers, cloud, docker containers, with little administration necessary.
  • Tomcat can help facilitate micro services and make deployment management easier.
  • Adding more default logging and log rotation capabilities outside of standard OS level Crontab would be appreciated
  • The management console is an under utilized web app and for the most part could be discarded. If required, the app could be brought in but is mostly unnecessary overhead.
  • Adding a mobile manager may also help users that are less inclined to get directly on the server.
Webapp deployment is accelerated using Tomcat. No matter whether you develop in an IDE or build code to be deployed for testing or production, Tomcat offers a quick development and deployment solution. With Tomcat you can easily manage web components with little fuss. Integration with 3rd party monitoring is a plus.
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August 07, 2017

Apache Tomcat Review: "Stable, Lightweight HTTP servlet container for Web Apps and APIs"

Verified User
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Review Source
Tomcat is being used as an application server across the organization. Most of our backend web applications and RESTful APIs run on Tomcat platform. Tomcat is baked into the AMI that is created for AWS and our web applications are pushed into the AMIs using Chef scripts. Then the tomcat server is brought up and applications are deployed.
  • Tomcat is used for writing backend web applications in Java, Spring etc.
  • They are also used to host our APIs. Our Spring or RestEasy API frameworks run are used to build APIs and Tomcat is the application server where they are hosted.
  • Tomcat is a fairly stable and lightweight application server and it being open source lot of organizations are using it to host their applications.
  • I have seen the use of Tomcat decline in recent years because of serverless technical platforms like Lambdas on AWS. Also Spring Boot and Jetty servers can run web applications/APIs by bringing container bundled into the app and without a need for separate server deployment and management. Same is the case with Spring boot, though in Spring Boot you could use embedded Tomcat too. But I have seen developers using Jetty more.
Anywhere where you need HTTP thread handling like a web application or restful APIs, Tomcat would be a good option. Each individual instance of Tomcat can handle tens of thousands of requests per second (depending on your web infra and request/response latency).
However new embedded servers like Jetty are being widely adopted. Another embedded server framework - Netty, is being used to develop servlet containers by developers for event based microservices.
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Candy Carrizales profile photo
April 12, 2017

Review: "Apache Tomcat 7,-great lightweight container for simple web apps"

Candy Carrizales
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Review Source
We are using tomcat as a middleware web server for some of our Ellucian products including Degree Works and XE. It will soon be replacing all of our middleware products, particularly Oracle Fusion Middleware.
  • Deploying and un deploying .war files is simple using either tomcat manager or the tomcat scripts
  • Setting up is extremely easy, does not take much experience to set up the first time
  • Startup and shutdown scripts are easily customizable.
  • 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.
For us, we use it as a javlet container, which makes deploying java applets super simple. Much of what we do is customized, so our system admins are able to mod some of the .war files, which are easily deployed by myself of the other dba. Again, this is for simple java applets, so for us it's perfect. However, for extensive development which require more java libraries, a heavier container may be needed. But I can't say for sure, because we don't develop to that extent, as we only administer ERP systems; at least from our end here.
Read Candy Carrizales's full review
omar ghaznavi profile photo
July 19, 2017

Apache Tomcat Review: "Tomcat eats Glassfish for breakfast"

omar ghaznavi
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Review Source
It is used by our IT department as a main web server. Most of our Java apps are hosted on this web container. We also use Tomcat to run our F5 application. So it acts as the main traffic controller for our domain.
  • It's a lightweight Java servlet container. Has minimal memory footprint.
  • It is fast and robust.
  • Has good security features built in.
  • Tomcat needs to improve its offerings for cluster based environments.
  • They need to start providing support for Java EJBs
I found Tomcat to be ideal for testing out Java EE applications on the localhost environment. It has very easy integration with leading IDEs like Eclipse and Netbeans. Tomcat can be improved for handling JNDI connections and database connection pooling.
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Jin Hwang profile photo
June 23, 2017

Review: "Apache Tomcat very reliable SSL encrypted web server for Non Profits."

Jin Hwang
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Review Source
Apache Tomcat is being used to serve as an SSL encrypted web server that hosts an attendance and billing system for a non-profit private school that serves 256 students from parents and other school districts. The attendance and billing system has to be flexible to accommodate students and many school districts that send students to this school. It connects to MySQL which hosts the database and J2E development environment.
  • Lightweight Web Server.
  • SSL Encryption.
  • Widely used and supported in the community.
  • The UI is limited and very basic.
  • Troubleshooting is sometimes difficult.
  • Logging produces too much data and hard to find what caused a problem.
Apache Tomcat is well suited in environments similar to ours. We needed a flexible way for teachers and staff to enter attendance and produce billing to the other school districts. It is not recommended for environments where technical staff is limited and where troubleshooting technical problems is limited to very basic IT knowledge.
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Clifford Chen profile photo
April 24, 2017

Apache Tomcat Review: "Happy with Tomcat"

Clifford Chen
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Review Source
We use Tomcat as our web application server to develop marketing content. It is a solid tool with a reliable enduring track record which is something we need for our enterprise. Its popularity across the community helps us leverage what has been done already to speed up our own development by not re-inventing the wheel.
  • Very stable, with solid application code, there is confidence in Tomcat's uptime.
  • Good platform for integrating different pieces of Java technology.
  • Very configurable.
  • Would be nice to have some tools to make common configuration easier (e.g. SSL).
  • Would be nice to make the learning curve less steep for those new to Tomcat.
  • Would be nice to make configuration less difficult (perhaps JSON instead of XML).
Tomcat is great if you have a large library of existing Java assets that you need in your web application. It is also nice to be able to leverage all sorts of existing Java tools to just get the job done. It perhaps may not be the best technology if you're starting from scratch and looking to implement a front-end only application architecture.
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David McCann profile photo
August 03, 2016

Apache Tomcat Review: "Tomcat - quick, easy Servlet hosting"

David McCann
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Review Source
Apache Tomcat served as the Servlet Container for any web-based applications written in Java. It was used throughout the organization for a number of different products.
  • Apache Tomcat is easy to install and get rolling quickly with a basic single-application deployment
  • Tomcat provides a lot of fine-grained configuration around administrator permissions, and security in a multi-app environment
  • Tomcat's management API actually makes it pretty easy to manage automatic code updates and self-updating code
  • As an apache product, it would be nice to automate the common install/configuration/deployment of httpd alongside Tomcat, where httpd serves static files and only passes control to Tomcat in the case that a servlet needs to be invoked.
  • Another nice-to-have would be the ability to, at installation time, specify the jar/war/folder that should be served from ROOT, rather than having the management interface be the default.
Tomcat is well suited for simple Servlet-based applications that use more modern approaches to web-based applications (a simple servlet entry point, backed by web MVC resources). For EJB-style applications, perhaps WebLogic might be more appropriate.
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October 11, 2016

Apache Tomcat Review: "Tomcat Servers"

Verified User
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Review Source
Tomcat was our main server. We used it both in our local machines and we ran it in our Amazon Web Services host. This was only being used by the engineering team because no other teams needed to know what server we were running. In addition, it was only our web team that dealt with the actual server.
  • The server is easy to install, start up and shut down.
  • It integrates very cleanly with Eclipse.
  • It's supported by AWS which makes deployments very smooth.
  • Because it's Java-based, you typically must re-compile to make use of updates which can drastically increase development time.
  • It was slightly painful to get set up in Eclipse relative to other newer solutions.
  • It would be nice if it were easier and more intuitive to make changes to the server configurations.
If you want to use Java or the Spring framework, you need to be using Tomcat. However, this is probably best for larger companies. If you're a startup looking to move quickly, it may not be the best choice. However, it is well tested and universally supported, so I would highly suggest using it if you are set on being a Java shop.
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June 23, 2016

Apache Tomcat Review: "Excellent software! Free, Reliable, Open Source"

Verified User
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Review Source
In my company this software is used to deploy every web app that we produce. Each department of my company develops web apps that are suitable for Apache Tomcat; this software is our official servlet container. We configured it to handle hundreds of concurrent sessions, SSL connections, and redeploy web apps on the fly and so on.
  • Very configurable to handle web apps deployed in many different places
  • Very reliable and extensible
  • It's used all over the world, it's very well documented and you can easily find solutions for your problems
  • Sometimes it's not that easy to configure, we had problems configuring the SSL connection
  • It doesn't have an EJB container
Apache Tomcat is a very famous software, it's extensively used by the community, it's open source. All these peculiarities make this software very reliable so you can use it in production environments, no worries. If for some reason you need weird configurations, then it may be better to adopt a paid software with official support.
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May 10, 2016

Apache Tomcat Review: "Free and lightweight application server"

Verified User
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Review Source
Apache Tomcat is the most widely adopted application server used in our company. We have currently over 2000 Tomcat 6 and Tomcat 7 instances and we're starting the adoption of Tomcat 8. Tomcat is used to run internal applications and hosted applications.
  • It's very easy to install and requires few customizations in order to be production grade.
  • Very low memory consumption compared to, for example, to JBoss.
  • Nearly immediate start up time.
  • It lacks a built-in feature to provide auto-recovery in case of failure, for example,OutOfMemoryError.
  • In our company, we've been forced to use external tools like Monit or Java service wrapper.
It's more appropriate for highly scalable stateless applications since it's very easy to add instances to your deploy. Session clustering is not natively implemented, so if you've stateful applications you'll need some externally provided persistency layer.
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Apache Tomcat Scorecard Summary

Likelihood to Recommend (75)
8.2
Likelihood to Renew (1)
10.0
Usability (1)
6.0
Availability (1)
6.0
Performance (1)
9.0
Product Scalability (1)
9.0

Feature Scorecard Summary

IDE support (14)
8.1
Security management (15)
7.5
Administration and management (15)
6.9
Application server performance (15)
8.6
Installation (15)
8.9
Open-source standards compliance (15)
8.9

About Apache Tomcat

Tomcat is an open-source web server supported by Apache.
Categories:  Application Server

Apache Tomcat Integrations

Turbonomic (formerly VMTurbo)

Apache Tomcat Technical Details

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