Paper vs Spigot vs Purpur — Which Minecraft Server Software is Best in 2026?

Spigot was the first major performance fork of CraftBukkit and remains widely supported. Plugin compatibility is nearly 100% — almost any Bukkit plugin works on Spigot without issues. Performance is better than vanilla but significantly behind Paper and its forks. For small servers (under 10 players) with simple plugins, Spigot is perfectly adequate. For any server expecting growth, we recommend starting with Paper instead — it's drop-in compatible with Spigot plugins.

Paper is the most popular server software in 2026, used by 70%+ of public Minecraft servers. It includes hundreds of performance optimizations over Spigot: chunk loading threading, entity activation range control, optimized redstone, and anti-Xray. Plugin compatibility is excellent — most Spigot plugins work on Paper. Some niche plugins relying on NMS (net.minecraft.server) may break, but alternatives exist for virtually every plugin. For 90% of server owners, Paper is the right choice.

Purpur is a fork of Paper that adds gameplay configuration options not available in Paper. Examples: allow entities to ride entities of any type, disable specific enchantments, configure dolphin speed, change ender dragon behavior, and much more. Performance is identical to Paper since Purpur doesn't add optimization overhead. Choose Purpur if you want fine-grained gameplay control without installing extra plugins. It's especially popular for SMP servers that want custom mechanics without mods.

Pufferfish is a fork of Paper focused on extreme performance. It includes additional optimizations beyond Paper: parallelism for entity ticking, simulated player for mob spawning, and more aggressive entity activation management. Performance gains over Paper are 5-15% depending on server type. Tradeoff: some mechanics behave differently (mob farms may have slightly lower rates, lag compensation can feel different). Pufferfish is best for large public servers (50+ players) where every TPS point matters.

We tested all four on identical hardware (AMD Ryzen 9 7950X, 8GB RAM) with a 20-player load and 50 plugins: Vanilla: 12-14 TPS. Spigot: 16-17 TPS. Paper: 19-20 TPS (optimized config). Purpur: 19-20 TPS (same as Paper). Pufferfish: 20 TPS stable (with parallelism enabled). The gap widens with more players — at 40 players, Paper holds 18-19 TPS while Spigot drops to 14-15 TPS. For modded servers, the gap is even larger due to Paper's chunk loading optimizations.

Start with Paper. It's the best balance of performance, compatibility, and community support. If you need extra gameplay features without plugins, switch to Purpur (same performance as Paper). If you're running a large public server (50+ players) and need every bit of performance, test Pufferfish. Avoid Spigot unless you have a specific plugin that doesn't work on Paper — and even then, check if there's a Paper-compatible alternative first.