Spring Boot
Ranked 9 of 63 web frameworks by recommenders
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.
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.
87 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 46
- criticize it
- 41
- approval share
- 53%
Recommended in 11 of 13 months
- November 2025: recommended
- December 2025: recommended
- January 2026: recommended
- February 2026: recommended
- March 2026: recommended
- April 2026: recommended
- May 2026: recommended
- June 2026: recommended
- July 2026: recommended
- August 2026: recommended
- September 2026: recommended
- October 2026: not recommended
- November 2026: not recommended (month in progress)
Why it doesn’t carry the badge
- 46 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, met.
- 1.1 recommenders for every criticNeeds 2 to 1 or better, not met.
- Recommended in 11 of 13 monthsNeeds 4 or more, met.
The same three rules apply to every product, and the badge can’t be bought. How the badge works
What people say about it
The reasons people give, with the number of comments that give each one. Open a reason to read what they said.
Why people recommend it
Each mark is one comment
Stable, proven, open source
“huge documentation and the community. And Spring Boot is a proven powerful framework to work with.”
Comment from 3 Mar 2026 in “Show HN: U2m.io – Free URL shortener with bulk API, QR codes, and geo analytics” “with Spring Boot development is so easy, and even decade old projects are mostly easy to upgrade”
Comment from 15 Sep 2026 in “Java 27” “There exist stable solutions for all of this, at least in the java world.”
Comment from 17 Jan 2026 in “IKEA for Software” - Comment from 22 Dec 2025 in “Your Supabase is public if you turn off RLS”
- Comment from 30 Mar 2026 in “Spring Boot Done Right: Lessons from a 400-Module Codebase”
- Comment from 17 Jun 2026 in “Tesco moving 40k server workloads off VMware amid Broadcom's abusive conduct”
Stay in the Java ecosystem
“All of my projects are based on Spring and I don't really have to look outside of that ecosystem.”
Comment from 15 Sep 2026 in “Java 27” “With Java & Spring the choice is always obvious.”
Comment from 30 Mar 2026 in “Spring Boot Done Right: Lessons from a 400-Module Codebase” “I wouldn’t trade Java / Spring for the world.”
Comment from 30 Mar 2026 in “Spring Boot Done Right: Lessons from a 400-Module Codebase” Fast to ship production code
“Its main advantage is that you can start shipping production-quality code very quickly”
Comment from 17 Mar 2026 in “Java 26 is here, and with it a solid foundation for the future” “Spring Boot can be a really quick way to get things done.”
Comment from 30 Mar 2026 in “Spring Boot Done Right: Lessons from a 400-Module Codebase” “Its a high productivity framework to accomplish alot.”
Comment from 30 Mar 2026 in “Spring Boot Done Right: Lessons from a 400-Module Codebase” Excellent documentation and community
“huge documentation and the community. And Spring Boot is a proven powerful framework to work with.”
Comment from 3 Mar 2026 in “Show HN: U2m.io – Free URL shortener with bulk API, QR codes, and geo analytics” “the documentation is very good which makes Claude use it well”
Comment from 19 Apr 2026 in “Vercel Says Internal Systems Hit in Breach”
What people warn about
Each mark is one comment
Huge, bloated with unneeded dependencies
“Spring Boot is a huge pile of various loosely coupled framework connectors”
Comment from 30 Mar 2026 in “Spring Boot Done Right: Lessons from a 400-Module Codebase” “It's a huge framework. But you probably don't need most of it.”
Comment from 30 Mar 2026 in “Spring Boot Done Right: Lessons from a 400-Module Codebase” “numerous abstractions and deep and complex relationships between them just to support every technology and integration under the sun”
Comment from 26 Dec 2025 in “Avoid Mini-Frameworks” - Comment from 10 Nov 2025 in “Modular monolith and microservices: Modularity is what matters”
Heavy memory use and common defaults
“you can do much better for resource usage if you’re willing to avoid the common defaults the community has embraced”
Comment from 30 Apr 2026 in “Functional Programmers need to take a look at Zig” “the services themselves took between 512 MB and 2 GB of memory to run (thanks to Java and Spring/Boot)”
Comment from 19 Nov 2025 in “Google Antigravity” “most projects don't quite break even, and would be better off with something more lightweight”
Comment from 31 Aug 2026 in “Why OOP Exists” - Comment from 10 May 2026 in “Show HN: Building a web server in assembly to give my life (a lack of) meaning”
Magic and indirection hide what runs
“trying to reverse engineer the XML file is often difficult because you have to route through a bunch of Spring Boot magic”
Comment from 13 Nov 2025 in “Kratos - Cloud native Auth0 open-source alternative (self-hosted)” “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”
Comment from 4 Dec 2025 in “Django 6” “Methods in stack traces that don't exist in source code but are magicked into existence by annotations.”
Comment from 27 May 2026 in “From Rust to Ruby” - Comment from 24 Dec 2025 in “Avoid Mini-Frameworks”
Hard to search, breaking major upgrades
“Spring specifically is really tough to search for due to its long history and large changes between major versions”
Comment from 9 Dec 2025 in “Has the cost of building software dropped 90%?” “Spring Boot version upgrades across major versions and how verbose the configuration is”
Comment from 8 Nov 2025 in “Dead Framework Theory”
Other web frameworks people recommend
The four most recommended other web frameworks, with the same counts for each, so you can compare like for like. The tick on each bar marks the 2 to 1 line the badge needs.
| Product | Recommend | Criticize | Approval | Months | Owned | Badge |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ruby on Rails | 337 | 145 | 70% | 12 | 14 yrs38 owners | Approved |
| Django | 277 | 97 | 74% | 12 | 15 yrs38 owners | Approved |
| Next.js | 127 | 256 | 33% | 12 | 3 yrs6 owners | — |
| Phoenix Framework | 85 | 11 | 89% | 12 | 8 yrs7 owners | Approved |
| Spring BootThis page | 46 | 41 | 53% | 11 | — | — |
What people said
40 of the 101 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“It works fine has all the bells and whistles when you're ready for them”
“with Spring Boot development is so easy, and even decade old projects are mostly easy to upgrade”
“All of my projects are based on Spring and I don't really have to look outside of that ecosystem.”
“most projects don't quite break even, and would be better off with something more lightweight”
“Java Spring Boot works excellently if you're willing to take the plunge”
“spring's boot (+collection of starters) might look the same to the uninitiated”
“With e.g. Spring Boot and Gradle you can have large projects with zero xml files needed.”
“there is no risk since spring boot is open source”
“Methods in stack traces that don't exist in source code but are magicked into existence by annotations.”
“Spring Boot 4.x, Spring AI 2.x - probably most boring stack”
“Everything else is bloated, slow and doesn't give you enough room for optimization.”
“you can do much better for resource usage if you’re willing to avoid the common defaults the community has embraced”
“the documentation is very good which makes Claude use it well”
“a naive non-standard solution for a solved problem, because you didn't want to read the manual for the standard implementation”
“Spring Boot can be a really quick way to get things done.”
“You can drop cloud spending by 10x factor and still use Spring Boot comfortably.”
“it worked before and it will probably work in the future”
“Spring Boot is a huge pile of various loosely coupled framework connectors”
“It's a huge framework. But you probably don't need most of it.”
“With Java & Spring the choice is always obvious.”
“SpringBoot doesn't support it either - the only option is to bundle the app and the server together during build”
“Its a high productivity framework to accomplish alot.”
“I wouldn’t trade Java / Spring for the world.”
“letting companies that don't really have software as a core competency to make reasonably performant and structured applications”
“there's genuine excitement still about Spring Boot and related technologies”
“Spring Boot auto configures an ObjectMapper for you and you probably want the customization it gives you”
“Its main advantage is that you can start shipping production-quality code very quickly”
“huge documentation and the community. And Spring Boot is a proven powerful framework to work with.”
“They weren’t optimizing for excitement. They were optimizing for survival.”
“There exist stable solutions for all of this, at least in the java world.”
“numerous abstractions and deep and complex relationships between them just to support every technology and integration under the sun”
“by forcing huge amounts of indirection you lose a lot of visibility of your call stack”
“will last a long time, be cheap+simple to host, easily extensible.”
“Spring Boot with JWT is a solid foundation for secure notes.”
“Spring specifically is really tough to search for due to its long history and large changes between major versions”
“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”
“the services themselves took between 512 MB and 2 GB of memory to run (thanks to Java and Spring/Boot)”
“trying to reverse engineer the XML file is often difficult because you have to route through a bunch of Spring Boot magic”
“pulling in unknown numbers of unneeded dependencies that could have an unexpected impact on your application at surprising times”
“Spring Boot version upgrades across major versions and how verbose the configuration is”
Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.