Survey: Which Kotlin Frameworks Are Chosen for Production in 2024

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Survey: Which Kotlin frameworks are used in production

Kotlin confidently occupies a niche as a modern language for backend and Android. But which tools do developers choose for real projects? We conducted a survey among professional Kotlin developers and users of our site to find out which frameworks and libraries are working in production right now. More than 500 respondents took part in the survey. We share the key results.

Market leaders: Spring Boot and Ktor

Unsurprisingly, first place went to Spring Boot — chosen by 48% of participants. This is a mature framework with a huge community, integrations, and corporate support. However, the second result was a surprise: Ktor from JetBrains is used by 32% of respondents. Ktor is lightweight, asynchronous, and perfectly suited for microservices and APIs.

Spring Boot — 48% (industrial monoliths and microservices)
Ktor — 32% (high-load APIs and microservices)
Ktor + Exposed — 12% (web applications with databases)
Koin — 6% (DI framework, often paired with Ktor)
Others (Vert.x, http4k, Javalin) — 2%

Why choose Ktor?

Ktor attracts with its minimalism and native support for coroutines. Unlike Spring Boot, it doesn't drag along tons of dependencies. Developers note that Ktor is faster to learn, easier to deploy, and fits perfectly into the architecture of modern SaaS projects. At the same time, Spring Boot remains the king for legacy systems and projects where an "all-in-one" solution is required.

Trends: Exposed and Koin are gaining momentum

Special mention should be made of the ORM Exposed — it is used together with Ktor in every tenth project. Exposed provides a Kotlin-native DSL for working with databases and does not require Hibernate. And Koin is a lightweight DI library that surpasses Dagger and Hilt in popularity in the Kotlin community due to its simplicity and lack of code generation.

Conclusions for developers

If you are just starting your journey with Kotlin, feel free to choose Spring Boot: it remains the standard for enterprise. If your project is a microservice, chatbot, or high-load API, take a closer look at Ktor + Exposed + Koin. This stack is faster, lighter, and more modern.

And which framework do you use? Share in the comments — we plan to repeat the survey in six months and track the dynamics.