Download a Minecraft Server JAR

If you want plain Minecraft without plugins or mods, pick Vanilla. If you want plugins (worldedit, economy, protection) with great performance, pick Paper. If you want Fabric mods, pick Fabric. If you want Forge mods or a big modpack, pick Forge or NeoForge (NeoForge is the actively-developed fork for 1.20.1 and newer). Spigot still exists but Paper is a drop-in replacement that runs faster.

Yes. Mojang publishes the vanilla server JAR for free download. Paper, Fabric, Forge and NeoForge are open-source projects with permissive licences. The only catch is Spigot: Mojang's agreement forbids redistributing Spigot binaries, so every Spigot download on the web — including ours — links to the getbukkit community mirror, where you're downloading the binary the user community built with BuildTools.

No. Every download button on this site points directly to the official CDN of the project that builds the software. Paper downloads come from api.papermc.io, vanilla comes from Mojang, Fabric from meta.fabricmc.net, and so on. We never proxy or cache the binary files themselves. This keeps you safe (no man-in-the-middle risk) and ensures you always get the exact build the project published.

We poll the official APIs on every page request (with a short edge cache to be gentle on upstream servers) and always show the newest build the project has published. Bookmark this page and you'll see new versions within an hour of release.

Minecraft 1.20.5 and newer require Java 21. Minecraft 1.17 through 1.20.4 requires Java 17. Older versions (1.12 through 1.16) run on Java 8 or 11. If in doubt, install Eclipse Temurin 21 — it's backwards-compatible with nearly everything from 1.17 onward.