Overview

NGINX

Stacks114.7K

Followers61.9K

Votes5.5K

GitHub Stars28.4K

Forks7.6K

Microsoft IIS

Stacks15.6K

Followers7.7K

Votes236

Apache Tomcat

Stacks16.8K

Followers12.6K

Votes201

GitHub Stars8.0K

Forks5.3K

Apache Tomcat vs Microsoft IIS vs nginx: What are the differences?

Apache Tomcat vs Microsoft IIS and nginx

Apache Tomcat, Microsoft IIS, and nginx are popular web server software used to host and serve web applications. These servers have different features and capabilities that set them apart from each other. The key differences between Apache Tomcat, Microsoft IIS, and nginx are:

Purpose and Functionality:
- Apache Tomcat is a powerful Java-based web server and servlet container. It is mainly used to run Java web applications.
- Microsoft IIS (Internet Information Services) is a web server software developed by Microsoft. It supports a wide range of web technologies and is commonly used to host ASP.NET applications.
- nginx is a lightweight yet efficient web server known for its high performance and scalability. It can handle a large number of simultaneous connections and is often used to serve static content and act as a reverse proxy.
Operating System Compatibility:
- Apache Tomcat is a cross-platform server, supporting various operating systems such as Windows, Linux, and macOS.
- Microsoft IIS, being a product of Microsoft, is primarily designed to run on Windows operating systems. It does not have official support for other operating systems.
- nginx is also cross-platform and runs on multiple operating systems, including Windows, Linux, and macOS.
Web Application Support:
- Apache Tomcat is specifically tailored for Java web applications and supports the Java Servlet, JavaServer Pages (JSP), and Java Expression Language (JSTL) technologies.
- Microsoft IIS supports a wide range of web technologies such as ASP.NET, PHP, Python, and Node.js. It provides extensive features and integration with the Microsoft ecosystem.
- nginx can serve various web applications written in different programming languages, including but not limited to PHP, Python, Ruby, and Go. It is known for its ease of configuration and flexibility.
Performance and Scalability:
- Apache Tomcat provides good performance for Java-based web applications but may face limitations in handling a large number of concurrent requests.
- Microsoft IIS is designed to work efficiently with Windows and provides good performance with ASP.NET and other Microsoft technologies. It can handle a significant number of concurrent connections.
- nginx is renowned for its high performance and ability to handle a large number of concurrent connections. It utilizes an event-driven architecture, making it extremely efficient and scalable.
Configuration and Administration:
- Apache Tomcat can be configured using XML-based configuration files, and it provides a web-based management interface called Tomcat Manager.
- Microsoft IIS offers a graphical user interface (GUI) for easy configuration and administration. It also provides a command-line interface and can be managed through PowerShell commands.
- nginx utilizes a simple and intuitive configuration file format. It has a command-line interface and provides mechanisms for dynamic configuration reload without downtime.
Community and Support:
- Apache Tomcat has a large and active community, providing extensive documentation, tutorials, and support through forums and mailing lists.
- Microsoft IIS benefits from the strong Microsoft ecosystem and has a vast user base. It offers official documentation, support forums, and resources.
- nginx has gained popularity due to its performance and ease of use. It has an active community, provides detailed documentation, and offers commercial support options.

In summary, Apache Tomcat focuses on running Java web applications, Microsoft IIS is tailored for Windows-based environments and ASP.NET applications, while nginx excels in performance and scalability, offering support for various programming languages and serving static content efficiently. The choice of a web server depends on specific requirements, technology stack, and performance needs.

Advice on NGINX, Microsoft IIS, Apache Tomcat

Daniel

Co-Founder at Polpo Data Analytics & Software Development

May 25, 2021

Decided

For us, NGINX is a lite HTTP server easy to configure. On our research, we found a well-documented software we a lot of support from the community.

We have been using it alongside tools like certbot and it has been a total success.

We can easily configure our sites and have a folder for available vs enabled sites, and with the nginx -t command we can easily check everything is running fine.

289k views289k

Comments

Hari

Mar 3, 2020

Needs advice

I was in a situation where I have to configure 40 RHEL servers 20 each for Apache HTTP Server and Tomcat server. My task was to 1. configure LVM with required logical volumes, format and mount for HTTP and Tomcat servers accordingly. 2. Install apache and tomcat. 3. Generate and apply selfsigned certs to http server. 4. Modify default ports on Tomcat to different ports. 5. Create users on RHEL for application support team. 6. other administrative tasks like, start, stop and restart HTTP and Tomcat services.

I have utilized the power of ansible for all these tasks, which made it easy and manageable.

419k views419k

Comments

greg00m

Mar 9, 2020

Needs advice

I am diving into web development, both front and back end. I feel comfortable with administration, scripting and moderate coding in bash, Python and C++, but I am also a Windows fan (i love inner conflict). What are the votes on web servers? IIS is expensive and restrictive (has Windows adoption of open source changed this?) Apache has the history but seems to be at the root of most of my Infosec issues, and I know nothing about nginx (is it too new to rely on?). And no, I don't know what I want to do on the web explicitly, but hosting and data storage (both cloud and tape) are possibilities. Ready, aim fire!

766k views766k

Comments

Detailed Comparison

NGINX	Microsoft IIS	Apache Tomcat
nginx [engine x] is an HTTP and reverse proxy server, as well as a mail proxy server, written by Igor Sysoev. According to Netcraft nginx served or proxied 30.46% of the top million busiest sites in Jan 2018.	Internet Information Services (IIS) for Windows Server is a flexible, secure and manageable Web server for hosting anything on the Web. From media streaming to web applications, IIS's scalable and open architecture is ready to handle the most demanding tasks.	Apache Tomcat powers numerous large-scale, mission-critical web applications across a diverse range of industries and organizations.
Statistics
GitHub Stars 28.4K	GitHub Stars -	GitHub Stars 8.0K
GitHub Forks 7.6K	GitHub Forks -	GitHub Forks 5.3K
Stacks 114.7K	Stacks 15.6K	Stacks 16.8K
Followers 61.9K	Followers 7.7K	Followers 12.6K
Votes 5.5K	Votes 236	Votes 201
Pros & Cons
Pros 1452 High-performance http server 894 Performance 730 Easy to configure 607 Open source 530 Load balancer Cons 10 Advanced features require subscription	Pros 83 Great with .net 55 I'm forced to use iis 27 Use nginx 18 Azure integration 15 Best for ms technologyes ms bullshit Cons 1 Hard to set up	Pros 79 Easy 72 Java 49 Popular 1 Spring web Cons 3 Blocking - each http request block a thread 2 Easy to set up

What are some alternatives to NGINX, Microsoft IIS, Apache Tomcat?

Apache HTTP Server

The Apache HTTP Server is a powerful and flexible HTTP/1.1 compliant web server. Originally designed as a replacement for the NCSA HTTP Server, it has grown to be the most popular web server on the Internet.

Unicorn

Unicorn is an HTTP server for Rack applications designed to only serve fast clients on low-latency, high-bandwidth connections and take advantage of features in Unix/Unix-like kernels. Slow clients should only be served by placing a reverse proxy capable of fully buffering both the the request and response in between Unicorn and slow clients.

Passenger

Phusion Passenger is a web server and application server, designed to be fast, robust and lightweight. It takes a lot of complexity out of deploying web apps, adds powerful enterprise-grade features that are useful in production, and makes administration much easier and less complex.

Gunicorn

Gunicorn is a pre-fork worker model ported from Ruby's Unicorn project. The Gunicorn server is broadly compatible with various web frameworks, simply implemented, light on server resources, and fairly speedy.

Jetty

Jetty is used in a wide variety of projects and products, both in development and production. Jetty can be easily embedded in devices, tools, frameworks, application servers, and clusters. See the Jetty Powered page for more uses of Jetty.

lighttpd

lighttpd has a very low memory footprint compared to other webservers and takes care of cpu-load. Its advanced feature-set (FastCGI, CGI, Auth, Output-Compression, URL-Rewriting and many more) make lighttpd the perfect webserver-software for every server that suffers load problems.

Swoole

It is an open source high-performance network framework using an event-driven, asynchronous, non-blocking I/O model which makes it scalable and efficient.

Puma

Unlike other Ruby Webservers, Puma was built for speed and parallelism. Puma is a small library that provides a very fast and concurrent HTTP 1.1 server for Ruby web applications.

Caddy

Caddy 2 is a powerful, enterprise-ready, open source web server with automatic HTTPS written in Go.

Cowboy

Cowboy aims to provide a complete HTTP stack in a small code base. It is optimized for low latency and low memory usage, in part because it uses binary strings. Cowboy provides routing capabilities, selectively dispatching requests to handlers written in Erlang.