Paper VS fabric

Compare Paper vs fabric and see what are their differences.

Paper

The most widely used, high performance Minecraft server that aims to fix gameplay and mechanics inconsistencies (by PaperMC)

fabric

Essential hooks for modding with Fabric. (by FabricMC)
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Paper fabric
338 21
8,793 2,076
4.8% 2.7%
9.8 9.2
6 days ago 5 days ago
Java Java
GNU General Public License v3.0 or later Apache License 2.0
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

Paper

Posts with mentions or reviews of Paper. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-03-10.
  • PaperMC/Paper: The most widely used, high performance Minecraft server
    9 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 10 Mar 2024
  • How to Setup a Minecraft Server on Ubuntu: A Step-by-Step Guide
    2 projects | dev.to | 7 Jan 2024
    We will be downloading the Minecraft server files into this directory. To preface, there are numerous variations of server JARs that can be used (e.g. Spigot, Paper, Purpur each touting their own benefits). For this tutorial, we will be working with Paper, a fork of Spigot that is optimized for performance.
  • Create a personal server for a deleted game
    3 projects | /r/servers | 8 Dec 2023
    PaperMC, a minecraft server has over a quarter million lines of code Github link
  • "Private crash exploit" (container interaction packet abuse) lagging/crashing server
    1 project | /r/admincraft | 7 Dec 2023
    Paper fixed it here: https://github.com/PaperMC/Paper/commit/8493340be4fa69fa9369719272e5dff1b7a2f455
  • Can't connect to server after new motherboard
    2 projects | /r/MinecraftServer | 17 Nov 2023
    G:\DedicatedServers\test>java -Xms10G -Xmx10G -XX:+UseG1GC -XX:+ParallelRefProcEnabled -XX:MaxGCPauseMillis=200 -XX:+UnlockExperimentalVMOptions -XX:+DisableExplicitGC -XX:+AlwaysPreTouch -XX:G1NewSizePercent=30 -XX:G1MaxNewSizePercent=40 -XX:G1HeapRegionSize=8M -XX:G1ReservePercent=20 -XX:G1HeapWastePercent=5 -XX:G1MixedGCCountTarget=4 -XX:InitiatingHeapOccupancyPercent=15 -XX:G1MixedGCLiveThresholdPercent=90 -XX:G1RSetUpdatingPauseTimePercent=5 -XX:SurvivorRatio=32 -XX:+PerfDisableSharedMem -XX:MaxTenuringThreshold=1 -Dusing.aikars.flags=https://mcflags.emc.gs -Daikars.new.flags=true -jar paper-1.20.2-291.jar --nogui Starting org.bukkit.craftbukkit.Main System Info: Java 17 (OpenJDK 64-Bit Server VM 17.0.2+8-86) Host: Windows 10 10.0 (amd64) Loading libraries, please wait... [13:37:15 INFO]: Environment: Environment[accountsHost=https://api.mojang.com, sessionHost=https://sessionserver.mojang.com, servicesHost=https://api.minecraftservices.com, name=PROD] [13:37:15 INFO]: Found new data pack file/bukkit, loading it automatically [13:37:16 INFO]: Loaded 7 recipes [13:37:16 INFO]: Starting minecraft server version 1.20.2 [13:37:16 INFO]: Loading properties [13:37:16 INFO]: This server is running Paper version git-Paper-291 (MC: 1.20.2) (Implementing API version 1.20.2-R0.1-SNAPSHOT) (Git: ce7f068) [13:37:17 INFO]: Using 4 threads for Netty based IO [13:37:17 INFO]: Server Ping Player Sample Count: 12 [13:37:17 INFO]: [ChunkTaskScheduler] Chunk system is using 1 I/O threads, 6 worker threads, and gen parallelism of 6 threads [13:37:17 WARN]: [!] The timings profiler has been enabled but has been scheduled for removal from Paper in the future. We recommend installing the spark profiler as a replacement: https://spark.lucko.me/ For more information please visit: https://github.com/PaperMC/Paper/issues/8948 [13:37:18 INFO]: Default game type: SURVIVAL [13:37:18 INFO]: Generating keypair [13:37:18 INFO]: Starting Minecraft server on *:25555 [13:37:18 INFO]: Using default channel type [13:37:18 INFO]: Paper: Using Java compression from Velocity. [13:37:18 INFO]: Paper: Using Java cipher from Velocity. [13:37:18 INFO]: Preparing level "world" [13:37:22 INFO]: Preparing start region for dimension minecraft:overworld [13:37:22 INFO]: Time elapsed: 52 ms [13:37:22 INFO]: Preparing start region for dimension minecraft:the_nether [13:37:22 INFO]: Time elapsed: 29 ms [13:37:22 INFO]: Preparing start region for dimension minecraft:the_end [13:37:22 INFO]: Time elapsed: 28 ms [13:37:22 INFO]: Running delayed init tasks [13:37:22 INFO]: Done (6.045s)! For help, type "help" [13:37:22 INFO]: Timings Reset
  • Server crash
    3 projects | /r/Minecraft | 25 Oct 2023
    For more information please visit: https://github.com/PaperMC/Paper/issues/8948
  • Tnt duper not working [java] [1.20]
    1 project | /r/MinecraftHelp | 9 Jul 2023
  • [java] How do you host multiple Minecraft servers on the same IP?
    1 project | /r/MinecraftServer | 6 Jul 2023
    Go to papermc.io and download Waterfall or Velocity
  • Has this been happening to you guys ?
    1 project | /r/Minecraft | 1 Jul 2023
    This is actually a known issue which was mostly ignored: https://github.com/PaperMC/Paper/issues/3110
  • Breaking the Limits: How Folia Made 1k Player Minecraft Server a Reality
    6 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 26 Jun 2023

fabric

Posts with mentions or reviews of fabric. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2022-08-04.
  • Behind a proxy, how can I prevent clients with no mods or missing mods from entering?
    1 project | /r/fabricmc | 31 May 2023
    This is a topic that was partially addressed during 2019 https://github.com/FabricMC/fabric/issues/463
  • Creat astral brass not mixing
    1 project | /r/CreateMod | 27 May 2023
    Their reasoning is here
  • Recipe Datapack Help.
    1 project | /r/CreateMod | 9 May 2023
    https://github.com/FabricMC/fabric/issues/1166 Here’s the reasoning behind the 81,000 number
  • Fabric Hider?
    1 project | /r/fabricmc | 27 Mar 2023
    What error message are you getting, theres someone who had a simmilar issue and it turned out it was due to a problem with spigot server side. https://github.com/FabricMC/fabric/issues/849
  • Why users should care about QuiltMC?
    2 projects | /r/feedthebeast | 4 Aug 2022
    Fabric's Lead Developer as a Tyrant philosophy isn't necessarily bad; there are significant benefits to having a very unified vision and avoiding design by committee. But it necessarily limits throughput at that Tyrant, and in Fabric's case, that lead to a generally slow level of progress on a lot of important aspects, partly because people spent a lot of time in Discord talking about making a perfect Fluid API, or Config API, and never actually got around to making one, and partly because once they were made it'd spend the better part of a year with things sitting in PR or only as an issue. Forge had a similar problem back in the 1.6-1.7 days (until it finally just got in the habit of getting people sick of having to deal with dependencies and just merging in a best extant normal-person library), but Forge could get away with that when the alternative was vanilla. From a user's perspective, if you want a config system, or standardized (not-TechReborn) energy api, this matters.
  • fabric VS quilted-fabric-api - a user suggested alternative
    2 projects | 28 Jul 2022
  • Fabric API not working (zip file is empty error)
    1 project | /r/fabricmc | 27 Jun 2022
    FIX! I downloaded it using the same link using wget instead of curl, and it worked immediately. I have no clue why it worked with wget and not curl. Any further insight would be appreciated. Working command: wget https://github.com/FabricMC/fabric/releases/download/0.56.1%2B1.18.2/fabric-api-0.56.1+1.18.2.jar.
  • How to force client to have mod
    1 project | /r/fabricmc | 18 May 2022
    Since you develop the mod, you could probably set up a login network channel to send a small "I am installed" packet when a client logs in.
  • Help minecraft keeps crashing Exit code inside
    2 projects | /r/Minecraft | 12 May 2022
    https://github.com/Wurst-Imperium/Wurst7/issues/625 https://github.com/FabricMC/fabric/issues/2145
  • Anyone know where I can find the texture for these arrows?
    1 project | /r/fabricmc | 4 May 2022
    Their identifier is fabric:textures/gui/creative_buttons.png. They can be found on GitHub.

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Paper and fabric you can also consider the following projects:

Purpur - Purpur is a drop-in replacement for Paper servers designed for configurability, and new fun and exciting gameplay features.

MinecraftForge - Modifications to the Minecraft base files to assist in compatibility between mods. New Discord: https://discord.minecraftforge.net/

Arclight - A Bukkit(1.19/1.20) server implementation on Forge using Mixin. ⚡ ⚡⚡⚡⚡

EventBus - Event Bus

Waterfall - BungeeCord fork that aims to improve performance and stability.

hopperOptimizations - A mod that optimizes hoppers and their interactions with entities and inventories. It drastically reduces hopper lag without changing any behavior.

Airplane - A stable, optimized, well supported 1.17.1 Paper fork.

Pufferfish - A high-performance fork of Paper designed for large servers.

Tuinity - [Moved to: https://github.com/Tuinity/Tuinity]

Tuinity - Minecraft server software fork of Paper to improve performance without behavioural changes.

SportPaper - Performance-tuned Minecraft 1.8 server