Spring Boot vs Quarkus in 2025

Quarkus? I Almost Forgot About It

An agency recently contacted me for a contract requiring Java with Quarkus (and not Spring). Now, that was a surprise.

I remember being very interested in Quarkus when it was introduced in 2019, hailed as the "new hope" for reviving the components of dying Java EE servers. The framework, backed by Red Hat (still a cool company at the time), aimed to be the new kid on the block for microservices.

The idea was clever—reuse Java EE (now Jakarta EE) implementations in a new "cloud-native" platform leveraging GraalVM, blending the reliability of old standards with the efficiency of modern technologies.

The first demos were impressive. Conferences were buzzing with Quarkus promotions. Sure, there were initial issues—that’s expected—but maybe they slowed down its adoption.

In the past few years, I barely heard anything about Quarkus. It seemed to have disappeared from major company tech stacks. Then, last week, I saw a major Swiss insurance company looking for Quarkus developers. That got me curious—what’s the status of this framework today?

Job Market: Spring vs. Quarkus

The job market is a good indicator of a technology's adoption. So, I ran a quick search across job websites:

• jobs.ch

  • Java Spring: 128 jobs
  • Java Quarkus: 11 jobs

• itjobswatch.co.uk

  • Spring: 154 jobs
  • Quarkus: 1 job

• dice.com

  • Java and Spring: 1,635 jobs
  • Java and Quarkus: 0 jobs (yes, zero!)

Six years after its launch, Quarkus has barely made a dent in the job market. That’s a major risk for developers specializing in it. Sure, they can switch to Spring or other Java technologies, but betting your career on Quarkus seems like an uncertain move.

GitHub Activity

On GitHub, Quarkus is very active, with 100–200 commits per week—more than Spring Framework’s core repository. However, Spring is a massive ecosystem with multiple sub-projects (Spring Data, Security, etc.), so the total activity across the Spring ecosystem is much higher.

Still, Quarkus' ongoing development is a positive sign.

Ownership

Technically, both frameworks are open source, but let’s be honest—somebody has to pay the developers, and whoever pays decides the roadmap (how many times have we heard, "Google decided that this Angular feature..."?).

• Quarkus is backed (or "owned") by IBM.
• Spring is now backed by Qualcomm (and has changed owners so many times it’s hard to keep track).

For most developers, this doesn’t make much of a difference, but if you care about long-term stability, choosing who you trust more is important.

Stack Overflow: The Old AI

Before AI took over, Stack Overflow was the go-to resource for developers. It’s still useful for measuring adoption and community support.

• Quarkus: 4,800 questions
• Spring: 212,000 questions

Once again, the numbers don’t lie—Quarkus has limited adoption and support compared to Spring.

What Are the Advantages of Quarkus?

Despite its niche status, Quarkus still maintains an edge in some areas:

• Lower memory consumption: 30-40MB vs. Spring's 150MB.
• Faster startup time: 0.1 sec (native GraalVM) vs. 5-10 sec (Spring).

That said, now that de jure standards have disappeared from the Java world, the Jakarta EE base of Quarkus isn’t much of an advantage anymore.

My Opinion

Everyone has their own take, but for me, Quarkus could be a great fit for extreme microservices architectures (think Netflix-scale).

For the enterprise world, where I see most real-world use cases, saving a few MB per artifact isn’t significant. When you package everything into Docker containers with Linux, an extra 100MB is irrelevant.

The 0.1-second startup time is cool, but only applies when compiling to native GraalVM. In practice, during development, Quarkus is usually faster than Spring, but developers should focus on unit tests, not framework startup speed. And in production, rolling deployments ensure the new instance is ready before the old one shuts down—neutralizing Quarkus’ startup time advantage.

Conclusion

I love having alternatives in the Java ecosystem. Competition drives innovation. But I’m honestly surprised that Quarkus hasn’t gained real-world traction—it remains a niche framework.

If I were starting a new project today, I might give Quarkus a quick evaluation, but I’d almost certainly choose Spring. Using niche technologies in enterprise projects is risky—if key developers leave or unexpected issues arise, you could be in serious trouble.

What do you think? Should I start to evaluate seriously Quarkus? Any positive experience?