What the 2021 JVM Ecosystem Survey Reveals About Java, JDKs, and Tooling

1. Introduction

Welcome to our annual JVM ecosystem report! This report presents the results of the world’s largest yearly survey on the JVM ecosystem, conducted over six weeks and concluding in February–March 2021, with more than 2,000 Java developers responding.

This year’s survey is a collaboration between Snyk and Azul, streamlined to focus on the most important aspects for JVM developers. Participants could select multiple options, giving us a more comprehensive view of the current JVM ecosystem. We also examined open data sources such as GitHub and Google Trends to compare with the survey results.

We thank all participants for their insights on Java and JVM topics. By partnering with JVM community conferences and groups, we reached a broad developer audience, including Foojay.io, VirtualJUG, and other Java communities, resulting in a remarkable number of responses that provide a deep understanding of the JVM ecosystem. Demographic details are available at the end of the report.

Contributions from Josh Long of Tanzu VMware and Simon Ritter of Azul add expert stories that could not be captured by the survey alone.

Happy reading!

2. Report Highlights

Here are the main take‑aways before we dive deeper.

3. Production JDK Choices

44.1% of respondents use the free AdoptOpenJDK distribution in production. Oracle remains a major player, with its OpenJDK builds accounting for 28% and commercial Oracle JDK at 23%.

4. Developers Moving from Java 8 to Java 11

40% of participants use multiple Java versions in production. Consequently, 61.5% are running Java 11, and nearly 12% have adopted the latest version available during the survey (Java 15), indicating a clear trend toward newer Java releases.

5. Kotlin Becomes the Most Important JVM Language After Java

While Java remains the dominant JVM language with over 90% usage, Kotlin’s popularity has grown faster than expected, with 17.7% of developers using Kotlin in production.

6. IntelliJ IDEA Is the Leading IDE in the Java Ecosystem

JetBrains IntelliJ IDEA continues to dominate the Java ecosystem, remaining the most widely used IDE among JVM developers. Visual Studio Code and Apache NetBeans have also seen significant adoption.

More than half of the JVM community believes that using multiple IDEs together is beneficial for collaborative development.

7. Maven Remains the Most Popular Build System

Maven stays the top build system in the Java ecosystem, used by over 76% of developers, an increase from the previous year. Gradle holds the second spot with a 38.1% share, also higher than last year.

8. Spring Continues to Dominate the Java Ecosystem

Spring remains the leading framework, with over half of the market using Spring Boot and nearly one‑third using Spring MVC, underscoring Spring’s strong community support and developer adoption.

9. Follow Us

Follow the JAVA Architecture Diary public account for regular curated translations of industry articles and updates on popular software. Our team also maintains open‑source projects such as Pig, SpringBlade, Avue, JustAuth, IJPay, and Mica—feel free to star them!