Our engineering team primarily uses Tomcat to host several of our older internal Java web applications and a few core REST APIs that feed data to our main administrative dashboards. It typically sits behind an Nginx reverse proxy in our production environment, serving as the dependable workhorse for our servlet and JSP-based projects.The absolute best thing about Tomcat is that it just quietly does its job without demanding a massive server footprint. Compared to full-blown enterprise application servers, it boots up incredibly fast and is highly focused on doing exactly what it was designed to do. Because it has been an industry standard for so long, the community support is basically unmatched. If you run into a weird deployment error or a specific thread-hanging issue, chances are high that someone else solved that exact same problem on a forum ten years ago. Furthermore, being completely free and open-source means we can spin up as many instances as we need across our testing and staging environments without ever worrying about complex licensing roadblocks. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Honestly, configuring Tomcat can sometimes feel like stepping back in time. Everything relies on heavily nested XML files, which can be a real pain to read and edit when you just want to make a simple tweak to a server port or adjust a database connection pool. The built-in manager dashboard is visually stuck in the early 2000s, and while it is functional, it isn't exactly intuitive for newer developers joining the team. Additionally, tuning the Java garbage collection and memory allocation settings for applications that experience sudden spikes in traffic often requires a lot of frustrating trial and error before the server remains perfectly stable under load. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.