Try our new research platform with insights from 80,000+ expert users

Red Hat JBoss Enterprise Application Platform (EAP) vs Tomcat comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jul 27, 2025

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
5.7
Red Hat JBoss offers cost-effective, scalable solutions with rapid ROI and automation, outpacing Oracle WebLogic in financial benefits.
Sentiment score
8.7
Tomcat delivers quick ROI with minimal investment, offering scalability, ease of deployment, and significant time and cost savings.
This flexibility translates to a lower total cost of ownership.
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
6.2
Red Hat JBoss EAP support is knowledgeable and reliable, but response time varies; strong community aids troubleshooting.
Sentiment score
6.3
Tomcat's support relies heavily on community and documentation, with limited formal assistance but effective community engagement and consultation services.
We receive support from RDS and Red Hat, and the response time and quality meet our expectations.
Users can find discussions about common problems, solutions, and documentation within the community.
They are proactive in looking into the tickets we create in case we have unresolved queries.
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
6.7
Red Hat JBoss EAP is scalable and efficient, supporting various organizational sizes, though some seek better load balancing documentation.
Sentiment score
7.6
Tomcat offers high scalability and adaptability, excelling in cloud environments with positive user feedback on its reliability.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
7.2
Red Hat JBoss EAP is stable, reliable under heavy loads, and performs well in diverse environments like AWS and Google Cloud.
Sentiment score
7.9
Tomcat is stable and reliable for small applications, needing careful configuration and updates for optimal performance with high traffic.
 

Room For Improvement

Red Hat JBoss EAP needs enhanced customization, better deployment, improved integration, cloud readiness, and expanded microservices and MLOps features.
Tomcat struggles with compatibility, scalability, speed, unfriendly interface, high memory use, and needs better security, documentation, and performance.
Making it lighter and more modular would probably be beneficial.
I would like to see improved booting of applications altogether on one page to manage all data instances from one location, similar to an AWS console.
Tomcat needs a more robust logging error details feature; the current logging feature is available, but it should be more user-friendly.
 

Setup Cost

Red Hat JBoss EAP provides flexible, cost-effective subscriptions with competitive pricing, appealing to enterprises for support and additional features.
Tomcat is cost-effective, open-source, with potential additional costs for licenses and optional paid support services.
JBoss is the cheaper option out of the three when compared to WebSphere and WebLogic.
The price is somewhat high for an enterprise, however, it depends on organizational negotiations.
 

Valuable Features

Red Hat JBoss EAP provides scalable, flexible enterprise solutions with seamless Java integration, robust security, and cross-platform support.
Tomcat is popular for its lightweight, high performance, scalability, and open-source compatibility, ideal for Java-based applications.
Built-in metrics and subsystem isolation, where every subsystem logging, messaging, or web services can be tuned independently, provide fine-grained control over performance and behavior.
It allows for simple modification of applications and provides better clustering capabilities.
JBoss is more flexible and keeps up with modern technologies, supporting newer versions of different libraries.
The advantages of Tomcat include its flexibility; we can increase the heap memory and the size of sessions as per our custom needs.
 

Categories and Ranking

Red Hat JBoss Enterprise Ap...
Ranking in Application Server
3rd
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.5
Number of Reviews
29
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Tomcat
Ranking in Application Server
1st
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.7
Number of Reviews
52
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of September 2025, in the Application Server category, the mindshare of Red Hat JBoss Enterprise Application Platform (EAP) is 16.6%, down from 18.2% 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
ProductMarket Share (%)
Tomcat16.7%
Red Hat JBoss Enterprise Application Platform (EAP)16.6%
Other66.7%
Application Server
 

Featured Reviews

Srinadh  Puli - PeerSpot reviewer
Automation aids installation while management consolidation needs improvement
We are currently using Ansible for Jira installations and all the management tasks. We perform some tasks manually, however, Ansible helps in automating some of these processes I find JBoss to be lightweight and easier to manage compared to WebSphere. It allows for simple modification of…
Erick  Karanja - PeerSpot reviewer
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.
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Application Server solutions are best for your needs.
866,483 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
30%
Computer Software Company
11%
Government
10%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
25%
Government
12%
Computer Software Company
12%
Comms Service Provider
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business8
Midsize Enterprise3
Large Enterprise17
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business22
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise28
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about JBoss?
The product's initial setup phase is easy.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for JBoss?
My advice is to carefully review the licensing options before setting up JBoss. While using the free version WildFly, most companies go for the paid Red Hat JBoss version, which comes with extra fe...
What needs improvement with JBoss?
JBoss can be improved significantly, especially regarding deployment overlays that need updates to apply quick fixes or environment-specific changes without redirecting the archive. Enhancements in...
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...
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...
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...
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Tata Sky, Nissan, Swedish Board of Agriculture, Novamedia, American Product Distributors, Advanced Micro Devices, Emirates Group, E*TRADE
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
Find out what your peers are saying about Red Hat JBoss Enterprise Application Platform (EAP) vs. Tomcat and other solutions. Updated: July 2025.
866,483 professionals have used our research since 2012.