Spring Boot VS Quarkus: Difference between Spring Boot and Quarkus
Spring Boot and Quarkus both are very important microservices. Spring Boot is an open-source project developed and managed by the Pivotal team. And, the Quarkus is also an open-source product developed by Red Hat engineers and managed by Red Hat. In this article of learning Spring Boot Series, we will discuss Spring Boot Vs Quarkus on the basis of several parameters such as core framework capabilities, memory consumption, cloud readiness, ease of development, performance, etc.
Before diving into the topic, let’s have a quick look at both technologies:
What is Spring Boot?
Spring Boot is a Java Framework for developing Java-based enterprise applications. It provides production-ready applications using some extensive features such as auto configurations, starters, etc. We can create fully-fledged Spring applications having one class inside it using Spring Boot. Due to its features, Spring Boot is one of the best technologies to create microservices.
Read more about What is Spring Boot.
What is Quarkus
The Quarkus is also a Java framework made for JVM that promises to deliver small artifacts, fast boot time, and lower first request time. It is an effective platform for serverless, cloud, and Kubernetes environments.
It is designed to work with popular Java frameworks, standards, and libraries such as Eclipse MicroProfile, and Spring, Apache Kafka, Hibernate, Camel, and more.
Quarkus provides dependency injection, which is based on CDI (Context and Dependency Injection). It is an extensive framework to configure, boot, and integrate into your application.
It also provides the correct information to GraalVM for native compilation of your application. The GraamVM is a universal virtual machine for running apps written in several languages, including Java and JavaScript.
Let’s compare both frameworks based on different parameters and performance:
Bootstrapping
To create an application with both these frameworks, we are not required any server/container. We can easily bootstrap our application by using the required tools for both such as an IDE, Installed Java version, etc.
Let’s see the bootstrapping options for both:
Spring Boot:
To get started with Spring Boot we have several choices, such as:
- Online Initializer (https://start.spring.io/).
- Spring Command Line Interface
- plugin for your favorite IDE such as Eclipse, IntelliJ, Visual Studio, or STS IDE (Most favorable choice)
To create a project using the Spring Boot, navigate to https://start.spring.io/ and fill project detail. Consider the below snap of the Spring starter page:
Click on the Generate option to generate a Spring Boot project. Now, import this project in your favorite IDE ( STS is recommended)
Quarkus:
To get started with Quarkus we have multiple choices, such as:
- The Maven and Gradle plugin
- The online starter tool (https://code.quarkus.io/) ( It is used to bootstrap your project from the Cloud)
- Using the plugin for your favorite IDE such as IntelliJ, JBoss Tools for Eclipse, Visual Studio, Eclipse Che, etc.
To create a project with Quarkus, navigate to https://code.quarkus.io/ and fill in project details. Consider the below snap of the quarkus starter page:
After filling in the details, click on the Generate your application and select the Download as a zip option. It will start downloading the project and pop-up the below window:
Now, Select Close and Extract the Zip file.
Now, we can import this project to our IDE.
Hence we can easily create a project using the Spring Boot and Quarkus. Getting started with both frameworks is pretty simple.
Let’s talk about its performance:
Memory Utilization
The Quarkus project requires less memory than the Spring Boot project. Quarkus uses ahead of Time compilation technique while building the application, which leads to the benefit of loading only the necessary classes which helps to start the application.
Dependency and REST endpoints
Both the projects have the same dependencies and REST Endpoints.
Boot-Time
The Boot-time of Quarkus is slightly faster than the Spring Boot.
Quarkus Pros and Cons
The comparison between the two tools is not just limited to their features. We must see their pros and cons and also see what problems they solve.
Let’s discuss some noticeable pros and cons of the Quarkus:
- The Quarkus is heavily documented. There are lots of simple documentation is available on the web for Quarkus . It also has several communities to help developers. However, the community support for Spring Boot is unbeatable.
- The Graal VM installation is quite complicated. We need to verify the OS-specific binaries and packages, which it absolutely is not a piece of cake.
- One of its major benefits for which it markets itself is the App Booting time is much faster than other frameworks. It provides a faster booting time by using the built-time metadata processing mechanism and building standalone native images using the Graal or Substrate VM.
- Its community forum is not filled with all the solutions to problems you may face in Quarkus.
- It is good for the serverless environment such as AWS lambda.
- Its boot time can seriously help you to reduce the overall cost for the execution.
- It is built on the top of known enterprise standards such as JAX-RS.
- It provides an optimized run-time for the applications using either executable or using the Java run-time environment.
- It provides faster hot reloads than Spring Boot.
- It provides quite interesting and up to date roadmaps.
Spring Boot Pros and Cons
Some noticeable pros and cons of Spring Boot are as follows:
- The Spring Boot project may take much time to start.
- It is largely dependent on starter modules.
- It contains lots of dependencies.
- Since it includes several dependencies so it may affect the boot time and overall performance of the project.
- It requires more memory than Quarkus.
- It is heavily documented
- It provides outstanding community support. Almost every solution you can find in its communities.
- Spring Boot provides faster I/O operations.
- It provides a template design pattern, which means we can include our dependencies within the pom.xml file.
- It reduces the effort of the developer with the help of its extensive features such as auto-configuration, YAML support, etc.
- It is secure.
See all advantages of Spring Boot.
Head to Head Comparisons between Spring Boot and Quarkus
Consider the below table for head differences between Spring Boot and Quarkus:
| Comparison | Quarkus | Spring Boot |
| Microservices | It embraces the Microprofile API, which is driven by a highly active and responsive community. It is innovative and purely developer-driven. | Spring Bot supports its own modules to develop modern Microservices architectures with the same goals. |
| Front-end development | It is easy to include basic built-in front-end options (Servlet) and some experimental ones (Qute). | It is based on a solid foundation of Spring MVC and includes mature templates such as ThymeLeaf. |
| Maturity | It is a new framework. The documentation and community is less active than Spring Boot. But it provides a production-ready Java application. | It is much more Mature than Quarkus, an open-source, feature-rich framework. It provides excellent documentation and huge community support. |
| Reactive apps | It provides the most advanced combination of traditional (imperative) programming model and event-based. | It provides a project Reactor which is a fully non-blocking foundation with back-pressure support included |
| Dependency Injection | It uses CDI. At the moment, only a subset of the CDI features is implemented | It uses its robust Dependency injection Container. |
| Data persistence | The Quarkus uses frameworks familiars to developers (Hibernate ORM) which can be further be accelerated with Panache. It is more innovative. | Spring Boot is based on Spring Data abstraction.it provides more maturity. |
| Speed | It provides faster Boot time, which is its main marketing feature. | It provides slower Boot time than Quarkus. It is generally slower than projects derived from Java Enterprise API due to abstraction from the top of Spring frameworks. |
Conclusion
As we have discussed almost every basics and bootstrapping of both frameworks. But you may still have a question that which one is good for you to learn and for your project. We will definitely clear you by our final note.
The first thing should be consideration of your requirements. Now, think about which one will meet your requirement.
Both frameworks is no doubt very extensive framework for developing and deploying the Java-based enterprise application.
The Quarkus is a new framework but is more innovative than Spring Boot. The main issue with the Quarkus framework is less community support. If you will get stuck during your work, then, you may face difficulty with your work. There are several Quarkus quick start projects at GitHub. It is strongly recommended to have a look at them before starting with it.
Comparatively, Spring Boot is a well-known name. It has a powerful development module with Spring’s power-packed technology. It is a reliable and stable framework. You can find a vast documentation and community support on the web related to Spring Boot. It helps you a lot while working with Spring Boot.
Now it all depends on you, which technology do you prefer.
Here, we are done with this article Spring Boot Vs Quarkus. Kindly share your thoughts.
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