Survey: Which Kotlin Frameworks Are Chosen for Production in 2024

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Survey: which Kotlin frameworks are chosen for production in 2024

The Kotlin ecosystem continues to actively develop, and the question of choosing a framework for production projects remains one of the hottest. Recently, the JetBrains team and the Kotlin in Production community conducted a large-scale survey among over 1,200 developers working with Kotlin on the server side. The results turned out to be very revealing and confirmed several trends that we will analyze in this article.

Survey Methodology

The survey involved developers from 47 countries, working in companies of various sizes — from startups to large corporations (such as Google, Amazon, and Spotify). Respondents were asked to indicate which frameworks they use in real production projects (excluding pet projects and prototypes).

Top 3 Kotlin Frameworks in Production

Ktor (42% of respondents) — the official framework from JetBrains, built on coroutines. Its popularity is explained by its lightness, asynchronicity, and minimalist API. Ktor is chosen for microservices, REST APIs, and projects with a low entry threshold. Interestingly, 68% of those who use Ktor also use it in conjunction with Exposed (ORM for Kotlin).
Spring Boot (37% of respondents) — a classic heavyweight that remains in demand in the corporate segment. Spring Boot for Kotlin is chosen when a rich ecosystem is needed (Spring Data, Spring Security, integration with Java projects). However, developers note that the Kotlin version requires configuring kotlin-allopen for correct proxy operation.
http4k (11% of respondents) — a functional framework inspired by Scala and Haskell. It is chosen by teams that value composition, testability, and immutability. http4k is often used in systems with high security requirements (fintech, healthcare).

Unexpected Findings and New Trends

In addition to the top three, the survey revealed several important trends:

Growing popularity of Ktor: over the past two years, Ktor's share has increased by 14%, while Spring Boot has lost 5% of its audience. Developers explain this by the fact that Ktor is better suited for cloud-native applications (smaller binary size, fast startup).
Abandoning "default" frameworks: 7% of respondents stated that they use pure coroutines + Kodein or their own solutions based on Ktor Client. This is typical for projects with strict latency requirements.
Kotlin Multiplatform (KMP) in production: 4% of respondents already use Ktor Client in conjunction with KMP for sharing code between the server and mobile clients. This trend is expected to grow in 2025.

What Does This Mean for Developers?

If you are just starting to learn Kotlin for backend development, there is no single piece of advice. But based on the survey:

For startups and microservices — choose Ktor: it is simpler, faster, and better documented.
For enterprise projects migrating from Java — Spring Boot will provide a smooth