Minecraft Server Jar Compared: NeoForge vs Forge, Paper vs Fabric

Which Minecraft Server Jar to Run: All Seven Options Compared

There are seven realistic choices for a Minecraft Java server: vanilla, Paper, Purpur, Spigot, Fabric, Forge and NeoForge. It looks like a seven way decision. It is not. It is three questions, asked in this order.

1. Do you want plugins? Ranks, land claims, /home, an economy, a warp system. Then you want Paper, or Purpur, or (rarely) Spigot.
2. Do you want mods? New blocks, machines, dimensions, a pack from CurseForge or Modrinth. Then you want Fabric, Forge or NeoForge, and the pack itself tells you which one.
3. Do you want neither? Exact vanilla mechanics for a few friends, or a brand new release on day one. Then run vanilla.

The seven options side by side

Software	What it is	Plugins or mods	Performance vs vanilla	On a new Minecraft release	Who it suits
Vanilla	Mojang's own dedicated server.	Neither. Datapacks and resource packs only.	The baseline. Fine for a handful of players, falls over first under load.	Available immediately, including snapshots.	Small friend groups, snapshot testing, anyone who wants untouched mechanics.
Paper	The mainstream high performance server built on the Bukkit plugin API. PaperMC hard forked away from Spigot starting with 1.21.4.	Plugins (Bukkit, CraftBukkit, Spigot and Paper plugins).	Substantially better under player load, and it exposes real tuning knobs.	Usually a short wait after the release lands.	Almost every public server, SMP and network.
Purpur	A drop in replacement for Paper focused on configurability and optional gameplay features. Its API stack includes Pufferfish, Paper, Spigot and Bukkit.	Plugins. Paper plugins are expected to work.	Paper class, with a much longer list of settings to get wrong or right.	Follows Paper, so it arrives after Paper does.	Admins who want per mob toggles and gameplay switches without writing a plugin.
Spigot	The older CraftBukkit derived server. You compile it yourself with BuildTools rather than downloading a finished jar.	Plugins.	Better than vanilla, behind Paper.	Its own schedule, independent of Paper since the hard fork.	People pinned to it by one specific plugin or an old guide. New servers should start on Paper.
Fabric	A lightweight mod loader. Most mods also need the separate Fabric API mod.	Mods.	Entirely dependent on the mod list. A small performance focused set can be very fast; a heavy pack is not.	The loader updates quickly, but every mod you use has to update too.	Vanilla plus servers, performance mod stacks, small curated packs.
Forge	The long running mod loader with the deepest back catalogue, especially on 1.20.1 and older.	Mods.	Pack dependent. Large packs are heavy on memory and slow to start.	You wait for the pack, not just the loader.	Classic packs that are pinned to an older Minecraft version.
NeoForge	A fork of Forge run by most of the former Forge team. In practice it is where the Forge style ecosystem moved for 1.20.2 and newer.	Mods, in the Forge style.	Pack dependent, same as Forge.	Ships alongside current Minecraft versions.	Current version modpacks and anyone starting a Forge style server today.

The question you are actually asking

What you said	What to run	Why
"A normal survival world with a few friends."	Vanilla, or Paper.	Vanilla if you care about exact redstone and farm behaviour. Paper the moment you want a permissions plugin, a claim plugin or better tick performance.
"I want ranks, claims, /tpa and an economy."	Paper (or Purpur).	Every one of those is a plugin, and plugins only exist on the Bukkit side of the split.
"I want to run a modpack from CurseForge."	Whatever the pack page says, at the exact version it names.	The pack is compiled against one loader and one Minecraft version. Substituting Fabric for NeoForge, or a newer loader build, is the fastest way to a crash log.
"Best possible performance for a big player count."	Paper or a Paper fork, plus world pregeneration and a profiler.	Player count scaling is a plugin side problem. A mod loader does not help, and a large pack actively hurts.
"I want to play the newest snapshot the day it drops."	Vanilla.	Forks and loaders always land later, and plugins and mods land later still.
"I want plugins and mods together."	Pick a side.	Hybrid servers that claim to run both have a long history of breaking both. If you genuinely need both experiences, run two servers behind a proxy instead.

Plugins and mods are not the same thing

This is the paragraph that decides your server, so it is worth being precise about.

Plugins are jar files you drop into the server's plugins folder. They run on the server only. Players connect with a completely unmodified client, straight from the official launcher, and they do not install anything, download anything or know what plugins you are running. That is why public servers are overwhelmingly plugin servers: the friction for a new player is zero. Paper's own documentation is blunt about the folder rules too, subdirectories of plugins are not scanned, everything has to sit in the root of that folder.

Mods load code into the game itself, and Minecraft is split into two sides: the client and the headless dedicated server. Most content mods exist on both sides and have to be installed on the server and on every player's client, at matching versions, or the player is rejected at login. Some mods are explicitly server side only, some are client side only, and the mod's own project page says which. Putting a client only mod in a server's mods folder is one of the most common modded startup crashes there is, which is covered in client only class crashes.

So the practical difference is not really technical, it is social. Plugins mean anyone with the game can join in ten seconds. Mods mean every single player installs the same loader and the same pack, usually through a launcher, before they can connect at all.

NeoForge vs Forge

NeoForge is a fork of Minecraft Forge. The NeoForged project's own 2023 retrospective dates the announcement to 12 July 2023 and describes the motivations as disagreements between the team and the project's management, plus the freedom to refactor the modding API and the mod loading system in ways the previous project had resisted. Most of the people who had been maintaining Forge moved across.

What matters to you is where the split landed, and that is cleaner than the history suggests. NeoForged put out 1.20.1 builds only briefly and then stopped, on the reasoning that mods and packs for 1.20.1 had already shipped on Forge and that effort on that version was better spent on Forge. From 1.20.2 onward NeoForge is where the Forge style ecosystem went, and by their 2024 retrospective they were reporting over four thousand mods available on 1.21.1.

The rule of thumb that follows: 1.20.1 and older Forge style packs are Forge, 1.20.2 and newer Forge style packs are almost always NeoForge. You never have to guess, because the version strings differ. A Forge build looks like 1.20.1-47.x.y, leading with the Minecraft version. A NeoForge build folds the Minecraft version into its own number: the major is Minecraft's minor version, the minor is Minecraft's patch version and the last part is the build, so 20.2.59 is for Minecraft 1.20.2. After Minecraft moved to calendar style versions, NeoForge followed, so a build numbered 26.1.x targets Minecraft 26.1.

Neither is an upgrade path for the other. Mods are compiled against one loader, so a pack that targets Forge will not run on NeoForge and the reverse is equally true. Read the pack's page or its manifest, install the loader version it names, and do not round up to a newer build because it looks tidier.

Which jar do I actually download

There is no such thing as "the Minecraft server jar". The file differs per project, and three of the seven options do not hand you a single runnable jar at all.

• Vanilla: one runnable jar from Mojang's server download page. On our platform it lands as server.jar.
• Paper: a build specific jar from the PaperMC downloads page. Paper's documentation uses paper.jar as the example filename and starts it with a plain java -jar paper.jar style command. We store it as paper.jar.
• Purpur: the same shape, stored as purpur.jar.
• Spigot: you do not download Spigot. You download BuildTools and compile it, which produces a spigot-<version>.jar. SpigotMC points at a 2014 DMCA takedown as the reason, and calls BuildTools their legal workaround. We store the result as spigot.jar.
• Fabric: either the Fabric server launcher jar, which fetches the loader and the Minecraft server files on first run, or the Fabric installer, which writes a fabric-server-launch.jar into your server directory.
• Forge and NeoForge: an installer jar, run once with --installServer. It does not leave you a server jar. It leaves run.sh, run.bat, a user_jvm_args.txt for your memory settings, and argument files under libraries. You start the server with ./run.sh, not with java -jar.

Two mistakes cost people the most time here. The first is downloading the client jar out of the launcher's versions folder and trying to run it headless; it has no dedicated server entry point and it will not start. The second is expecting a Forge or NeoForge install to produce something you can point a java -jar command at, then editing a start command that the installer never intended you to use. In all seven cases the first launch also writes eula.txt and stops, and you have to accept the EULA before the second launch will do anything.

Switching later

Some moves are routine, some cost you a world. Back up first in every case, and test on a copy.

• Safe: vanilla to Paper, Purpur or Spigot. Paper describes itself as a drop in replacement for CraftBukkit and Spigot. Your world loads. Be aware that the Bukkit family changes some vanilla behaviour, so a few technical farms may need adjusting.
• Safe: Paper to Purpur and back. Purpur is designed as a Paper drop in. It adds its own config files, so keep the originals.
• One way in practice: Spigot to Paper is supported. Going back the other way is not guaranteed on modern versions, because Paper stopped following Spigot as of 1.21.4 and PaperMC warned admins at the time that returning to Spigot from those builds may not be possible.
• Loses things: plugin server to modded server. Plugins do not transfer at all. Permissions, claims, homes, balances and shop data live in plugin storage that no mod loader reads. The terrain survives, the systems built on top of it do not.
• Worst case: modded server to plugin server, or between mod loaders. Saved chunks contain blocks and entities that only exist while those mods are loaded. Remove the mods and those become missing content, and chunks can refuse to load or come back damaged. Treat this as starting a new world unless you are prepared to run cleanup tooling and accept losses.
• Not a setting: Forge to NeoForge, or Fabric to either. Every mod in the list has to exist for the target loader at that Minecraft version. This is a rebuild of the pack, not a switch.

Sizing follows the choice

A plugin server and a modded server are not in the same weight class. Vanilla, Paper and Purpur run a busy community on a modest heap, and what usually limits them is single thread CPU and chunk loading rather than memory. A large Forge or NeoForge pack routinely needs several times the memory of a comparable Paper server, starts far more slowly, and spikes hard during world generation and autosaves. Size the machine from the pack, not from the player count, and leave headroom outside the Java heap rather than handing the JVM every gigabyte you own.

Related guides

• Minecraft server setup for Java 21 and Java 25
• Modding a Minecraft server: Fabric and Forge
• Hardware sizing for modpack servers
• Choosing server plugins for a Paper stack
• Modded server will not start: client only class crashes
• Folia and Leaf: the Paper fork performance question
• Picking the Java runtime for your server jar
• JVM startup flags for Paper and Spigot

Run any of these seven on Supercraft Minecraft hosting. Vanilla, Paper, Purpur, Spigot, Fabric, Forge and NeoForge are all first class server types on our platform, each installed the way its own project intends, with daily backups, full file access and 4 region options.