# Spring Boot 46 Hacker News commenters recommended Spring Boot and 41 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 11 of 13 months. **Verdict:** Recommended for quick, production-ready Java backends with strong documentation, a large community and an ecosystem that avoids looking elsewhere. Common caveat: heavy magic and indirection make it hard to trace and debug. ## Why people recommend it - Stable, proven, open source (6 comments): "huge documentation and the community. And Spring Boot is a proven powerful framework to work with." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47230288)) "with Spring Boot development is so easy, and even decade old projects are mostly easy to upgrade" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49713010)) "There exist stable solutions for all of this, at least in the java world." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46656408)) - Stay in the Java ecosystem (3 comments): "All of my projects are based on Spring and I don't really have to look outside of that ecosystem." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49712928)) "With Java & Spring the choice is always obvious." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47576149)) "I wouldn’t trade Java / Spring for the world." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47575358)) - Fast to ship production code (3 comments): "Its main advantage is that you can start shipping production-quality code very quickly" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47418203)) "Spring Boot can be a really quick way to get things done." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47580561)) "Its a high productivity framework to accomplish alot." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47575626)) - Excellent documentation and community (2 comments): "huge documentation and the community. And Spring Boot is a proven powerful framework to work with." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47230288)) "the documentation is very good which makes Claude use it well" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47827231)) ## What people warn about - Huge, bloated with unneeded dependencies (4 comments): "Spring Boot is a huge pile of various loosely coupled framework connectors" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47576750)) "It's a huge framework. But you probably don't need most of it." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47576207)) "numerous abstractions and deep and complex relationships between them just to support every technology and integration under the sun" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46391498)) - Heavy memory use and common defaults (4 comments): "you can do much better for resource usage if you’re willing to avoid the common defaults the community has embraced" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47968519)) "the services themselves took between 512 MB and 2 GB of memory to run (thanks to Java and Spring/Boot)" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45984643)) "most projects don't quite break even, and would be better off with something more lightweight" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49506536)) - Magic and indirection hide what runs (4 comments): "trying to reverse engineer the XML file is often difficult because you have to route through a bunch of Spring Boot magic" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45916314)) "trying to do the same with spring boot I am a week in and I had to open the jakarta specs to understand the magic" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46154097)) "Methods in stack traces that don't exist in source code but are magicked into existence by annotations." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48289460)) - Hard to search, breaking major upgrades (2 comments): "Spring specifically is really tough to search for due to its long history and large changes between major versions" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46206045)) "Spring Boot version upgrades across major versions and how verbose the configuration is" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45855768)) ## Alternatives hackers recommend - [Ruby on Rails](https://hackerapproved.com/p/ruby-on-rails.md): 337 recommend - [Django](https://hackerapproved.com/p/django.md): 277 recommend - [Next.js](https://hackerapproved.com/p/next-js.md): 127 recommend - [Phoenix Framework](https://hackerapproved.com/p/phoenix.md): 85 recommend - [Laravel](https://hackerapproved.com/p/laravel.md): 71 recommend ## Cite as Hacker Approved, "Spring Boot", https://hackerapproved.com/p/spring-boot/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).