Survey: Which Java Frameworks Are Actually Used in Production in 2024

Survey: Which Java Frameworks Are Used in Production in 2024

The Java ecosystem continues to be one of the most in-demand in enterprise development. However, choosing a framework for a production environment is always a trade-off between development speed, performance, final artifact size, and ease of maintenance. A recent large-scale survey conducted among Java developers (over 2,000 respondents from 50 countries) showed which tools are actually used in real-world projects and which remain at the level of pet projects.

Market Leaders: Spring Boot Uncontested

The absolute favorite remains Spring Boot. It was chosen by 78% of surveyed developers working with production workloads. The main reasons are its rich ecosystem (Spring Cloud, Spring Security, Spring Data), a huge community, and an abundance of ready-made starters. Even with the emergence of lighter alternatives, Spring Boot remains the "de facto standard" for microservices and monoliths in Java.

• Spring Boot — 78% (used in production)
• Micronaut — 12% (rapid growth in cloud projects)
• Quarkus — 8% (popular in Kubernetes environments)
• Jakarta EE (Payara, WildFly) — 5% (enterprise legacy)
• Play Framework, Vert.x and others — less than 3%

Trends: The Rise of Micronaut and Quarkus

Interestingly, the share of Micronaut and Quarkus has nearly doubled over the past year. These frameworks are focused on native compilation (GraalVM) and minimal memory consumption, which is critical for serverless architectures and containers with limits. For example, Micronaut is praised for startup times under 100 ms, and Quarkus for seamless integration with Hibernate and Kafka. However, their share is still small: most companies are in no hurry to switch from the proven Spring Boot, fearing a shortage of specialists.

Why Not Choose Jakarta EE?

Classic Jakarta EE (formerly Java EE) is only used in legacy systems of large banks and the public sector. Developers note that its cumbersomeness and slow release of new versions (Jakarta EE 11 is expected only at the end of 2024) make it unattractive for startups and modern cloud projects. Nevertheless, WildFly and Payara are still found in production — mainly where migration would cost more than maintaining old servers.

Conclusions for Developers

If you are starting a new project or planning a stack change, the statistics are clear: Spring Boot is the safest choice for team hiring and long-term support. But if your project runs on edge devices or requires a cold start of under a second, take a closer look at Micronaut or Quarkus. They are gaining momentum, and in 2–3 years, they may catch up with the leader.

Detailed survey data is available on the website PythonLib in the section "Java in Production: 2024 Statistics".