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Traefik VS Apache Tomcat

Compare Traefik VS Apache Tomcat and see what are their differences

Traefik logo Traefik

Load Balancer / Reverse Proxy

Apache Tomcat logo Apache Tomcat

An open source software implementation of the Java Servlet and JavaServer Pages technologies
  • Traefik Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-07-13
  • Apache Tomcat Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-01-24

Traefik features and specs

  • Dynamic Configuration
    Traefik allows for dynamic configuration changes without needing restarts, making it easy to manage in rapidly evolving environments.
  • Kubernetes Integration
    Traefik has native support for Kubernetes, simplifying the process of managing ingress controllers and load balancing in containerized environments.
  • Service Discovery
    It supports automatic service discovery via various backends, including Docker, Consul, and Kubernetes, making it easy to integrate into many architectures.
  • HTTPS Support
    Traefik can automatically obtain and renew SSL/TLS certificates using Let's Encrypt, ensuring secure communications.
  • Middleware
    It supports middleware for handling tasks such as authentication, rate limiting, and retries, offering more control over traffic management.
  • Dashboard
    Traefik includes a built-in dashboard for monitoring and visualizing the routing configuration and health of services.

Possible disadvantages of Traefik

  • Complexity
    The flexibility and range of features can make Traefik complex to configure and understand for beginners.
  • Performance Overhead
    The additional abstraction layer can introduce some performance overhead, which might be a concern in high-performance environments.
  • Limited Advanced Features
    Although Traefik covers many standard use cases, it may lack some advanced features that are found in more specialized load balancers.
  • Documentation
    While improving, the documentation can sometimes be lacking in depth or clarity, which can lead to difficulties in configuration and troubleshooting.
  • Community Support
    Although there is an active community, it may not be as vast or responsive as that of some other more established software like NGINX or HAProxy.
  • Proprietary Features
    Some advanced features are only available in the enterprise edition, which might be a constraint for users looking for a completely open-source solution.

Apache Tomcat features and specs

  • Open Source
    Apache Tomcat is an open-source software, which means it is freely available for use and modifications. This can significantly reduce the cost of ownership and allows for customization.
  • Community Support
    Being a widely-used open-source server, Tomcat has a large and active community of developers and users who contribute to its documentation, plugins, and forums, providing extensive support.
  • Lightweight
    Tomcat is designed to be a lightweight servlet container, making it faster and less resource-intensive compared to full-blown Java EE application servers.
  • Integration with Popular Frameworks
    Tomcat integrates well with popular Java frameworks such as Spring and Hibernate, making it easier for developers to deploy and manage web applications.
  • Easy to Set Up and Configure
    Tomcat is relatively easy to set up and configure, making it suitable for both development and production environments.
  • Frequent Updates
    Regular updates and patches are released to improve performance, security, and compatibility, ensuring the server is up-to-date with the latest web technologies.

Possible disadvantages of Apache Tomcat

  • Limited Functionality
    While Tomcat is a powerful servlet container, it lacks some of the advanced features found in full-fledged Java EE application servers, which might be necessary for complex enterprise applications.
  • Resource Management
    Tomcat's default configuration might not be suitable for high traffic web applications, requiring significant tweaking and tuning to handle heavy loads effectively.
  • Documentation Quality
    The documentation, while extensive, can sometimes be hard to navigate and understand, especially for beginners. This can slow down the learning curve.
  • Limited Built-in Tools
    Compared to other full-stack application servers, Tomcat comes with limited built-in tooling for monitoring, load balancing, and clustering, often requiring third-party solutions.
  • Security Concerns
    As with any open-source project, security vulnerabilities may emerge. It requires constant monitoring and timely updates to ensure security.
  • Lack of EJB Support
    Tomcat does not support Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB), limiting its use in scenarios where EJB is a crucial component of the architecture.

Traefik videos

Traefik: A Scalable and Highly Available Edge Router by Damien Duportalt

More videos:

  • Review - Playing around with Traefik
  • Review - Rocket.Chat on Amazon EKS with Traefik. By Aaron Ogle, Lead Cloud Architect

Apache Tomcat videos

Introducing Apache Tomcat 8.5

More videos:

  • Review - Webinar: Introduction to Apache Tomcat 8
  • Review - Tcat - The Leading Enterprise Apache Tomcat Application Server

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Traefik and Apache Tomcat)
Web Servers
43 43%
57% 57
Web And Application Servers
Application Server
0 0%
100% 100
Load Balancer / Reverse Proxy

User comments

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Reviews

These are some of the external sources and on-site user reviews we've used to compare Traefik and Apache Tomcat

Traefik Reviews

Top 5 Open Source Load Balancers in 2024
Traefik's prowess extends beyond the conventional, equipped with a robust set of middlewares that elevate its capabilities. Going beyond load balancing and reverse proxy roles, Traefik serves as a comprehensive solution for modern cloud-native applications, including API gateway, orchestrator ingress, east-west service communication, and more.
10 Awesome Open Source Load Balancers
Traefik is a reverse proxy and L7 load balancer. Written in Go, it’s designed to support microservices and container-powered services in a distributed system. It has native support for Docker Swarm and Kubernetes orchestration, as well as service registries such as etcd or Consul. It also offers extensive support for WebSocket, HTTP/2, and gRPC services. Traefik integrates...
Top 5 Open-Source Load Balancers 2021
The modern and efficient, Traefik is an open-source reverse proxy and load balancer that provides a simple routing platform without engaging any complexities. Most popular among the Github Fanclub, Traefik owns approximately 27.7k Github stars.
Source: linuxways.net
The 5 Best Open Source Load Balancers
Traefik bills itself as the “cloud native edge router.” It’s a modern microservices-focused application load balancer and reverse proxy written in Golang. With its emphasis on support for several modern container orchestration platforms, batteries-included logging, and several popular metric formats, Traefik is a top choice for container-based microservices architectures.
Source: logz.io

Apache Tomcat Reviews

FOSS | Top 15 Web Servers 2021
Java programs are run using Apache Tomcat. To be more precise, it is a Java servlet – a Java software component that expands the functionality of a web server. Apache Tomcat, released under the Apache License version 2, is used by 0.1% of websites worldwide.
Source: www.zentao.pm
4 Open Source Application Servers (Comparison and Review)
Apache Tomcat is an open-source implementation of several Java technologies. It is the result of a collaboration of the finest developers worldwide. You can get involved with the development in a number of ways.
Source: shadow-soft.com
Top 5 open source web servers
Apache Tomcat is an open source Java servlet container that functions as a web server. A Java servlet is a Java program that extends the capabilities of a server. Although servlets can respond to any types of requests, they most commonly implement applications hosted on Web servers. Such web servlets are the Java counterpart to other dynamic web content technologies such as...
Source: opensource.com
Top 10 Open Source Java and JavaEE Application Servers
It is built upon a modular kernel powered by OSGi, and runs straight on top of the Apache Felix implementation. It is also capable of running with Equinox OSGi or Knopflerfish OSGi runtimes. HK2 abstracts the OSGi module system to provide components, which can also be viewed as services and injected into the run time and uses a derivative of Apache Tomcat as the servlet...

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Traefik should be more popular than Apache Tomcat. It has been mentiond 38 times since March 2021. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

Traefik mentions (38)

  • Adventures in Homelabbing: From Cloud Obsession to Self-Hosted Shenanigans
    I began to self-host a Minecraft server using Crafty Controller, an Excalidraw instance, Docmost to replace Notion, Plane to replace Jira, and Penpot to replace Figma. To be able to access them from the internet, I used Nginx Proxy Manager to set up reverse proxies with SSL. You can use Traefik or Caddy instead, but I enjoyed the ease-of-use of NPM. For a dashboard solution, I started with Homarr, but later... - Source: dev.to / 28 days ago
  • Nginx vs Traefik: Which Reverse Proxy is Right for You?
    Before diving into the specifics of Nginx and Traefik, let’s quickly define what a reverse proxy is. A reverse proxy sits between the client (browser or other services) and your backend services (web servers or applications). It handles incoming requests, routes them to the appropriate backend service, and forwards the response to the client. Reverse proxies are typically used for:. - Source: dev.to / 4 months ago
  • Opening Pandora's Container - How Exposing the Docker Socket Paves the Way to Host Control (Part 1)
    You may wonder why one would even want to expose the Docker socket when there are clearly risks involved. A popular usecase besides accessing remote Docker daemons (which you can actually expose over a TCP socket) are applications that either need control of the daemon to manage other containers, like for example Portainer, or tools that need information about containers for auto discovery purposes, like Traefik.... - Source: dev.to / 8 months ago
  • The Home Server Journey - 3: An Actually Global "Hello"
    I emphasize usually because K3s is different and comes with a Traefik-based ingress controller by default. Taking that into account, as much as I like NGINX outside the container's world, I'd rather keep things simple and use what's already in place. - Source: dev.to / 8 months ago
  • Running Docker based web applications in Hashicorp Nomad with Traefik Load balancing
    In previous post, we discussed creating a basic Nomad cluster in the Vultr cloud. Here, we will use the cluster created to deploy a load-balanced sample web app using the service discovery capability of Nomad and its native integration with the Traefik load balancer. The source code is available here for the reference. - Source: dev.to / about 1 year ago
View more

Apache Tomcat mentions (17)

  • Java News: WildFly 36, Spring Milestones, and Open Liberty Updates
    Versions 11.0.6 and 9.0.104 of Apache Tomcat deliver new features and improvements. The release notes can be found for both versions. - Source: dev.to / 22 days ago
  • Artifactory: Centralizing Artifact Management for DevOps Success
    Download and Install Tomcat Before downloading, confirm the latest Tomcat build package from the official website. - Source: dev.to / 7 months ago
  • How to Deploy Applications Using Tomcat on a Web Server
    First, download the latest version of Tomcat from the official Apache Tomcat website. Choose the version that suits your needs, typically the latest stable release. - Source: dev.to / 11 months ago
  • Spring Boot Monitoring with Open-Source Tools
    Manual instrumentation allows you to define your Spans within the code itself rather than relying on automatic instrumentation finding the entry point for a trace. Manual instrumentation is especially helpful for applications that don’t use an application server such as Tomcat, JBoss, or Jetty. - Source: dev.to / over 1 year ago
  • Issue with chatgpy
    99% is a huge exaggeration. Two essential deployment tools off the top of my head: Https://tomcat.apache.org/ Https://docs.jboss.org/author/display/AS71/Developer%20Guide.html. Source: about 2 years ago
View more

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Traefik and Apache Tomcat, you can also consider the following products

nginx - A high performance free open source web server powering busiest sites on the Internet.

Microsoft IIS - Internet Information Services is a web server for Microsoft Windows

AWS Elastic Load Balancing - Amazon ELB automatically distributes incoming application traffic across multiple Amazon EC2 instances in the cloud.

Apache HTTP Server - Apache httpd has been the most popular web server on the Internet since April 1996

Haproxy - Reliable, High Performance TCP/HTTP Load Balancer

LiteSpeed Web Server - LiteSpeed Web Server (LSWS) is a high-performance Apache drop-in replacement.