Paper, Spigot, vanilla, Fabric, or Forge?

Quick answer Vanilla is the official server with no plugin or mod support. Spigot and Paper add support for plugins (Paper is the modern default; it’s a fork of Spigot and stays compatible with Spigot’s plugins). Fabric and Forge are a separate world entirely: mod loaders, not plugin platforms, and they don’t run the same content as each other or as Paper/Spigot.

Two families that don’t mix

The first decision isn’t “which is best,” it’s which family you need: plugins or mods. They are not interchangeable, and a server runs one or the other.

Plugins run on the server only. Players connect with an unmodified game client, and the server adds features, commands, and behavior on its own. This is the Bukkit/Spigot/Paper family.

Mods change the game itself, usually on both the server and every player’s client. This is the Fabric/Forge family, and it’s how big content overhaul modpacks work.

Vanilla

The official server from Mojang, no plugins, no mods, no extra features. It’s the reference implementation everything else is built on top of or compatible with. Good if you just want the base game with friends and nothing else.

Spigot and Paper

Spigot adds the plugin API on top of vanilla; Paper is a fork of Spigot built to improve performance and extend that API further, while staying compatible with Spigot’s plugin library [1]. In practice, Paper is the default choice today: most servers that would have run Spigot a few years ago run Paper instead, for the same plugins plus better performance and more configuration options.

Purpur is a further fork of Paper, adding more configurable gameplay options on top; it aims to be a drop-in replacement, meaning existing Paper plugins and configs mostly carry over.

Fabric and Forge

These aren’t plugin platforms, they’re mod loaders, and a much heavier-weight change to the game. Fabric is the newer, lighter-weight option, and tends to get loader and API updates fastest after a new Minecraft version ships. Forge is older and more established, with a larger existing library of big, content-heavy modpacks built on it.

If you already know which modpack you want to run, this decision is usually made for you: the modpack’s page states which loader it needs, and that’s the one you install.

Why performance-tuning advice differs by software

Vanilla, Spigot, and Paper all read the same server.properties file and share the same core tick behavior, but Paper adds extra configuration on top: paper-world-defaults.yml for server-wide defaults, and a paper-world.yml inside each world’s own folder for true per-world overrides. Vanilla and Spigot have neither, which is why some tuning guides are Paper-specific. Heavily modded Fabric/Forge servers usually need considerably more RAM and different JVM garbage collection tuning than a plugin-based server of the same player count, since a large modpack loads far more code and runs far more custom logic per tick [2].

One thing that’s true across all of them

None of these change how view-distance and simulation-distance work at the vanilla level, they all read the same server.properties keys. Paper and Purpur just let you also override simulation-distance per world on top of that. See our view-distance vs simulation-distance guide for the details.