Spigot is one of the earliest server jar files still maintained today. Purpur's most popular feature is ridable entities, but they include literally thousands of config options. If you want the performance of Pufferfish with even more crazy non-vanilla features, Purpur is the jar for you. It started in Minecraft 1.8 to add additional optimizations to Minecraft, and has since grown to become the most popular Minecraft server fork. Paper is the most popular Minecraft server jar file around. Standalone licenses are also available for purchase. Pufferfish+ is available to all Pufferfish Host customers for free.
Its companion fork, Pufferfish+, includes additional features like async pathfinding, async entity tracking, and some other miscellaneous improvements. It's also fully compatible with all spigot and paper plugins. It includes async mob spawning, heavily optimized hoppers, and improved map rendering speed. Pufferfish is a highly optimized Minecraft server jar that includes many features useful to large servers. Pufferfish is a fork developed by Pufferfish Host. We will discuss Paper/Spigot and its forks, as well as modded jars, and provide download links for each.
In this post, we will discuss the top 10 Minecraft server jars for both performance and features.