Minecraft Paper vs Spigot vs Purpur
Compare Paper, Spigot and Purpur for Minecraft servers, performance, configurability, plugin compatibility and which to pick.
Choosing your server jar is the first decision a new Minecraft server owner makes. Spigot was the standard for years; Paper replaced it; Purpur extends Paper. Here's the practical difference between them in 2026.
Spigot
The original optimised fork of Bukkit. Still maintained, still works, but has been overtaken by Paper in every benchmark for half a decade. Use Spigot if a specific plugin explicitly requires it (almost none do anymore).
Paper
Fork of Spigot by PaperMC with hundreds of performance patches and bug fixes. The modern default. Same plugins as Spigot work, plus Paper-only plugins. Has its own config (paper-global.yml, paper-world-defaults.yml) on top of Spigot's. Run Paper unless you have a specific reason not to.
Purpur
Fork of Paper with extra gameplay options. Useful if you want config switches like:
ridable mobs, ride pigs, cows, foxes.- Per-mob health/damage/spawn-rate.
- Disable the End fight, customise dragon drops.
- Fine-grained controls over villager AI.
Pure Paper compatibility , every Paper plugin works on Purpur. The trade-off is one extra layer between you and upstream Paper updates.
Folia
A separate PaperMC project that splits the main thread into per-region threads. Massive throughput gains for big servers, but as of 2026 most plugins still don't support it. Watch this space.
Performance comparison
Rough order, same hardware, same plugins:
- Folia , if your plugins support it (most don't yet)
- Pufferfish (Paper fork, async I/O patches)
- Purpur
- Paper
- Spigot
- Vanilla
The gap between Spigot and Paper is large. The gap between Paper and Purpur is small.
What to actually use
- Default pick: Paper.
- If you want extra gameplay tunables: Purpur.
- If you have a 200-player network and your plugin set is Folia-ready: Folia.
- Spigot: only if a single critical plugin doesn't support Paper (very rare today).
Switching
Stopping the server, replacing the jar, and restarting works between Spigot, Paper and Purpur , the world format and plugin API are the same. Always back up your world before swapping.
Prefer a server that's already tuned for this? Astroworld MC runs a hand-optimised Paper stack with custom plugins so you can just log in and play.