Best server JARs
What's the best JAR for your Minecraft server?
In this article, we'll discuss our top five Minecraft server JARs for both performance and features. Download links will be provided for each.
Pufferfish is a highly optimized Minecraft server JAR that includes many features useful to large servers. It includes async mob spawning, heavily optimised hoppers, and improved map rendering speed. It's also fully compatible with all Spigot and Paper plugins.
Paper is the most popular Minecraft server JAR file around. It started in Minecraft 1.8 to add additional optimisations to Minecraft, and has since grown to become the most popular Minecraft server fork. You can never go wrong with Paper.
If you want the performance of Pufferfish with even more non-vanilla features, Purpur is the JAR for you. Purpur's most popular feature is ridable entities, but it includes thousands of exciting features.
If you are interested in using the latest and greatest mods, Fabric is the server JAR for you. While you can have excellent modded Minecraft experiences with Fabric, there are also vanilla-compatible mods available that greatly improve client and server-side performance. If you want to maintain vanilla parity and improve performance for your server, we recommend using Fabric.
Sponge is an open source re-implemetation of the Minecraft server. The sponge server JAR allows you to create plugins using the Sponge plugin API, which is growing in popularity. Only a small handful of plugins support this though, so you may be better off using a more traditional server software.
What JARs should I avoid?
Vanilla: This is the classic Minecraft server experience. Unfortunately, it's quite buggy and slow so we don't recommend using it. Even if you don't want plugins, then PaperMC is still a great option.
Mohist: This allows you to run both plugins and mods. However, we do not recommend using it. Mohist tricks users into deleting official plugin JARs and installing unofficial modified builds, which is a potential security risk. If you'd really like to run a hybrid server, then Magma is a viable alternative.
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