GlassFish Wiki : GlassFishVsTomcat

Below is a table, originally created by Roger Keays (you can see the original blog post here), comparing the feature sets of Glassfish and Tomcat. See a missing or inaccurate entry? It's a wiki, so jump in and help us keep this up-to-date and accurate!

Pri	Standard features	Tomcat	GlassFish	Comment
1	Adoption levels	high	good	Glassfish is new
2	Scalable	ok	yes	Glassfish has grizzly
2	Latest Web Tier JCP Specs. JSF 1.2, JSP 2.1, JSTL 1.2.	6.0.24	yes	TC 6 is not STABLE yet
2	Apache httpd integration through module	yes	yes	ajp hack no longer needed in v3
3	Includes Java EE 5 Container	no	yes	Weblogic is available with EE 5 (WLS) and without (WLX), only different license files
3	Dependency injection	no	yes
3	Container managed transactions	no	yes
3	OpenJPA entities enhanced automatically	no	yes
4	JDBC authentication	yes	yes	In GlassFish v1 ur1
1	Support for virtual hosting	yes	yes
1	Deploy same webapp to multiple hosts	yes	yes
1	Configure same webapp differently	yes	yes	Possible in Tomcat's `context.xml` or `server.xml`
2	Per virtual host logging	ok	yes	Tomcat's JULI is a bit buggy `#1`, `#2`
2	Each host has their own authentication realm	yes	yes
3	Each host has their own deployment dir	yes	no
4	Each host has a jailed manager	yes	no
4	Support for alternate docroots	no	yes
4	Each host can listen on a different port	ok	yes	Tomcat requires an additional `<Service>` containers `#3`
5	Each host can listen on an arbitrary combination of ports	no	yes	For Tomcat, a host in one `<Service>` cannot share ports with a host in another `<Service>` `#4`

GlassFish and Tomcat Comparison

References