IIS vs Tomcat comparison

Microsoft and Apache are both solutions in the Application Server category. Microsoft is ranked #5 with an average rating of 8.6, while Apache is ranked #1 with an average rating of 8.9. Microsoft holds a 5.9% mindshare in AppS, compared to Apache’s 16.7% mindshare. Additionally, 90% of Microsoft users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 94% of Apache users who would recommend it.

IIS

Read 59 IIS reviews

3,167 Views
1,203 Comparison Views

90% willing to recommend

Tomcat

Read 52 Tomcat reviews

2,705 Views
2,705 Comparison Views

94% willing to recommend

IIS

Tomcat

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Feb 2, 2025

IIS and Tomcat compete in the web server and application server category. IIS seems to have the upper hand in environments that require seamless integration with Windows, while Tomcat stands out in cross-platform flexibility and cost-effectiveness.

Features: IIS offers seamless compatibility with Microsoft applications, robust security features, and high performance. In contrast, Tomcat is lightweight, open-source, and excels in cross-platform capabilities, providing easy configuration for Java applications.

Room for Improvement: IIS struggles with compatibility beyond Microsoft platforms and has complex advanced configurations. Tomcat faces challenges with performance in handling static content and scalability for high-traffic applications, along with documentation complexity.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: IIS is integrated with Windows Server, providing straightforward on-premises deployment and decent technical support. Tomcat's deployment is flexible across platforms, yet support mainly relies on its strong open-source community.

Pricing and ROI: IIS is bundled with Windows Server, offering cost benefits to Microsoft users but can be expensive with additional licensing. Tomcat is free and open-source, providing a low-cost solution for Java applications, though enterprise support may lead to additional expenses.

To learn more, read our detailed IIS vs. Tomcat Report (Updated: September 2025).

Buyer's Guide

IIS vs. Tomcat

September 2025

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Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

ROI

Sentiment score

6.9

IIS offers positive ROI with authentication benefits, affordability, and security, though user-friendly improvements are suggested for accessibility.

Sentiment score

8.7

Tomcat delivers quick ROI with minimal investment, offering scalability, ease of deployment, and significant time and cost savings.

It should be more user-friendly overall, because unless you know how IIS works as a Microsoft product, a system admin cannot just manage it.

Krishnakumar Natarajan

Systems Engineer at Atos

For more quotes and insights, download the IIS report

No quotes available

For more quotes and insights, download the Tomcat report

Customer Service

Sentiment score

6.6

Microsoft support gets mixed reviews; praised for efficiency and resources, but criticized for slow response and entry-level understanding.

Sentiment score

6.3

Tomcat's support relies heavily on community and documentation, with limited formal assistance but effective community engagement and consultation services.

Microsoft provides a lot of online documentation to consult before speaking to an expert.

reviewer1256511

Relationship Manager at a financial services firm with 5,001-10,000 employees

There are typically no significant issues.

Ibrahim Sherif

IT System Administrator at Bouri

I would rate the support from Microsoft very high because I definitely got all the help during the testing time of the development kit while we were configuring features on our on-premises server.

Krishnakumar Natarajan

Systems Engineer at Atos

For more quotes and insights, download the IIS report

They are proactive in looking into the tickets we create in case we have unresolved queries.

Sanjay Sahu

Project Manager at Capgemini

For more quotes and insights, download the Tomcat report

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score

7.0

IIS is scalable for varied applications, though dependent on hardware, with improvements in clustering and flexible service management.

Sentiment score

7.6

Tomcat offers high scalability and adaptability, excelling in cloud environments with positive user feedback on its reliability.

I would rate the scalability of IIS as a six, mainly due to integration issues since it cannot integrate with other environments.

reviewer1256511

Relationship Manager at a financial services firm with 5,001-10,000 employees

It depends on the server environment and the presence of a UPS for power backup.

Ibrahim Sherif

IT System Administrator at Bouri

For more quotes and insights, download the IIS report

No quotes available

For more quotes and insights, download the Tomcat report

Stability Issues

Sentiment score

7.8

IIS is stable, reliable, and highly rated by users, with occasional compatibility issues with non-Microsoft technologies.

Sentiment score

7.9

Tomcat is stable and reliable for small applications, needing careful configuration and updates for optimal performance with high traffic.

It was secured for us, as we launched the product, and people were accessing it from India and Virginia, and we had no problem.

Krishnakumar Natarajan

Systems Engineer at Atos

I would give it a nine out of ten for stability.

reviewer1256511

Relationship Manager at a financial services firm with 5,001-10,000 employees

I would rate IIS's stability as an eight out of ten.

Ibrahim Sherif

IT System Administrator at Bouri

For more quotes and insights, download the IIS report

No quotes available

For more quotes and insights, download the Tomcat report

Room For Improvement

IIS struggles with compatibility, user-friendliness, integration, performance, security, and documentation challenges, posing significant user and scalability issues.

Tomcat struggles with compatibility, scalability, speed, unfriendly interface, high memory use, and needs better security, documentation, and performance.

If I compare IIS to other web servers such as Apache, which can be deployed in other environments like Linux, I find IIS is mostly used for simple things.

reviewer1256511

Relationship Manager at a financial services firm with 5,001-10,000 employees

It should be more user-friendly because unless you know how IIS works as a Microsoft product, a system admin cannot just manage it.

Krishnakumar Natarajan

Systems Engineer at Atos

It's influenced by the server's service performance.

Ibrahim Sherif

IT System Administrator at Bouri

For more quotes and insights, download the IIS report

Tomcat needs a more robust logging error details feature; the current logging feature is available, but it should be more user-friendly.

Sanjay Sahu

Project Manager at Capgemini

For more quotes and insights, download the Tomcat report

Setup Cost

IIS licensing is bundled with Windows Server, offering flexible options but may incur extra costs for services and fees.

Tomcat is cost-effective, open-source, with potential additional costs for licenses and optional paid support services.

If you have a Windows license, there is no additional cost for IIS.

Ibrahim Sherif

IT System Administrator at Bouri

We never had any pricing issue, but I don't know if it is competitive or not.

Krishnakumar Natarajan

Systems Engineer at Atos

For more quotes and insights, download the IIS report

No quotes available

For more quotes and insights, download the Tomcat report

Valuable Features

IIS is user-friendly, efficient, secure, and integrates well with Microsoft, offering scalability and control for IT administrators.

Tomcat is popular for its lightweight, high performance, scalability, and open-source compatibility, ideal for Java-based applications.

It is easy to publish websites with SSL, and it integrates well within the local environment and cloud.

Ibrahim Sherif

IT System Administrator at Bouri

The configurations are simple, making it very easy to use and to set up everything.

reviewer1256511

Relationship Manager at a financial services firm with 5,001-10,000 employees

The best features of IIS are that you can design your own website and manage it yourself, creating as many websites as you want.

Krishnakumar Natarajan

Systems Engineer at Atos

For more quotes and insights, download the IIS report

The advantages of Tomcat include its flexibility; we can increase the heap memory and the size of sessions as per our custom needs.

Sanjay Sahu

Project Manager at Capgemini

For more quotes and insights, download the Tomcat report

Categories and Ranking

IIS

Ranking in Application Server

5th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Application Infrastructure (1st)

Tomcat

Ranking in Application Server

1st

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

7.7

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of September 2025, in the Application Server category, the mindshare of IIS is 5.9%, down from 7.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Tomcat is 16.7%, down from 20.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Application Server Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Tomcat	16.7%
IIS	5.9%
Other	77.4%

Application Server

Featured Reviews

Krishnakumar Natarajan

Systems Engineer at Atos

Designs and manages multiple websites while ensuring data backup and disaster recovery

I have experience with AWS, and I am most familiar with the server environment, as we just use the server environment and then use Microsoft products on an AWS environment. I have experience with Windows Server IIS, which I ran on my own on-premise data center. The website was developed and then hosted, and through IIS, we managed the servers. The manageability within the IIS environment is not very difficult. For server management, you need to ensure data backup, data restore, and you have a DR configured to keep the database intact. It was done on-premises, so I had no problem doing that. If you have to go to the cloud, then you should have the storage connected to the IIS server and also have a DR set up for that. I didn't use Microsoft Azure tools, but since it is a Microsoft product, Azure has all the portability, so you don't have to worry about compatibility on the cloud. On a scale of 1-10, I would rate this solution a 10.

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Erick Karanja

Technical Lead at Cellulant Kenya

Offers high availability, straightforward deployment and easy to use

Tomcat could be a little bit more innovative. Tomcat could come up with a framework that's more lightweight and purely targeted at Java applications. Some other solutions are doing better right now, maybe because they have come up with MicroProfile, which I think is moving forward. It may actually beat Tomcat because of the lightweight nature of the framework, the MicroProfile. They're coming up with new solutions. So, for the future of Tomcat and to maintain the market share they might be looking for, they need to come up with initiatives to ensure that several of us have a lightweight framework to deploy applications on.

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

16%

Financial Services Firm

15%

Government

Comms Service Provider

Financial Services Firm

25%

Government

12%

Computer Software Company

12%

Comms Service Provider

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	28
Midsize Enterprise	11
Large Enterprise	21

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	22
Midsize Enterprise	4
Large Enterprise	28

Questions from the Community

Which is better - IIS or NGINX Plus?

IIS is a flexible, secure, and manageable web server to host anything on the web. IIS’s scalable and open architecture can handle the most demanding tasks. From media streaming to web applications,...

See all answers

What do you like most about IIS?

The product is flexible.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for IIS?

If you have a Windows license, there is no additional cost for IIS. However, you may need to pay for SSL publishing at times.

See all answers

What do you like most about Tomcat?

Tomcat's ease of use has positively impacted project timelines. Tomcat already has high availability – it doesn't go down so often and doesn't require a lot of maintenance. As long as your applicat...

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What needs improvement with Tomcat?

Regarding improvements in Tomcat, I personally haven't used it very extensively, but all Apache products are very useful for our web applications. Although the web server setup is a little differen...

See all answers

What is your primary use case for Tomcat?

We use Tomcat for various purposes, and our company finds it to be perfect; we are getting all the solutions out of that. There is still no chance of any migration to any other technology, but addi...

See all answers

Comparisons

Apache Web Server vs IIS

Compared 29% of the time

NGINX Plus vs IIS

Compared 26% of the time

Oracle WebLogic Server vs IIS

Compared 10% of the time

Red Hat JBoss Enterprise Application Platform (EAP) vs IIS

Compared 6% of the time

Microsoft .NET Framework vs IIS

Compared 5% of the time

More IIS Competitors

Oracle WebLogic Server vs Tomcat

Compared 26% of the time

Red Hat JBoss Enterprise Application Platform (EAP) vs Tomcat

Compared 21% of the time

IBM WebSphere Application Server vs Tomcat

Compared 18% of the time

Caucho Resin vs Tomcat

Compared 5% of the time

Oracle GlassFish vs Tomcat

Compared 4% of the time

More Tomcat Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

IIS

September 2025

Download IIS product report

Buyer's Guide

Tomcat

August 2025

Download Tomcat product report

Also Known As

Windows Server IIS

No data available

Overview

Internet Information Services (IIS) provides a secure, easy-to-manage, modular and extensible platform for reliably hosting websites, services and applications. With IIS, you get choice and control without giving up reliability or security.

Microsoft

Tomcat is a reliable and efficient web server, popular for hosting and running Java-based applications. It is praised for its scalability, compatibility with different operating systems and development frameworks, and its ability to handle heavy workloads.

Users appreciate Tomcat's ease of use, robust performance, reliable server functionality, seamless integration with various platforms, extensive documentation, and strong community support.

Apache

Sample Customers

Erste Bank Group, NJVC, Samsung Electronics, Sheraton Hotels and Resorts, Tata Steel Europe, Urban Software Institute

1. Adobe Systems 2. Amazon 3. Apple 4. AT&T 5. Bank of America 6. Boeing 7. Cisco Systems 8. Citigroup 9. Dell 10. eBay 11. Facebook 12. General Electric 13. Google 14. Hewlett-Packard 15. IBM 16. Intel 17. JPMorgan Chase 18. Microsoft 19. Netflix 20. Oracle 21. PayPal 22. Salesforce 23. Samsung 24. Sony 25. Target 26. Twitter 27. Uber 28. Verizon 29. Visa 30. Volkswagen 31. Walmart 32. Yahoo

Buyer's Guide

IIS vs. Tomcat

September 2025

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