When comparing Spring MVC vs ASP.NET Core, the Slant community recommends ASP.NET Core for most people. In the question“What are the best backend web frameworks?” ASP.NET Core is ranked 6th while Spring MVC is ranked 11th. The most important reason people chose ASP.NET Core is:
Thanks to breakthroughs in ROSLYN compiler and the efforts of the .NET COre developer team, code written in C# can reach speeds just a step behind C++.
Specs
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Pros
Pro Great documentation that covers almost everything
The official documentation covers virtually everything. The official website also has a series of great tutorials in video and text formats. There are links to Github repositories for Spring sample applications and there are also a lot of third-party tutorials out there for the fact that Spring MVC is so widely used by many experienced developers.
Pro Spring MVC has a massive community
Being the oldest and most used JVM web framework, means that Spring MVC has a massive community of followers who are very helpful and have provided numerous tutorials and answers on SO.
Spring even holds an annual conference called SpringOne. The Spring forums and SO are great places to ask and get help about anything Spring related. The website blog and newsletter keep developers informed on every news related with the framework.
Pro Spring apps are highly scalable
Applications are meant to scale as the framework is used in large-scale applications worldwide. Components like EhCache are used to scale memory cache and it also contains components used for parallel processing.
Batch enables processing of large volumes of records and job processing statistics.
Pro Spring has an extensive ecosystem
It is based and is dependent on the Spring Framework, therefore it benefits from tools like for example Roo and Spring Tool Suite and many more tools included in the Spring Framework. All Maven dependencies are available in a public Maven repository.
There are also 3rd-party solutions for Spring, such as MyEclipse which includes scaffolding capability for Spring MVC.
Pro Fast and getting faster
Thanks to breakthroughs in ROSLYN compiler and the efforts of the .NET COre developer team, code written in C# can reach speeds just a step behind C++.
Pro Multi platform
Can run on Windows, Linux and Mac (also Visual Studio Code editor).
Pro JSON optimization
In .NET Core 2.1 and 3.0, new APIs are added that make it possible to write JSON APIs that require less memory, using Span<T> and UTF8 strings, and improve throughput of applications like Kestrel, ASP.NET Core web server. See also Utf8JsonReader.
Pro Tutorials and documentation quality
Both microsoft and 3rd party tutorials are mostly of high quality and encourage you to use the industry best-practices.
Pro Built-in middleware
Built-in middleware featuring: Authentication, Cookie policy, Health Check, MVC, Session etc.
Pro Hosting
Ability to host on IIS, Nginx, Apache, Docker, or self-host in your own process.
Pro Ease of Use
Pro Security
It is a very secure platform.
Pro Tooling
Both VS and VSCode are powerful free IDEs that are well integrated with ASP.net Core. VS Community also allows for commercial use for projects with less than 5 developers.
Cons
Con Updating and code maintenance can be a grueling task if you are a beginner
Updating your project is manageable if you’re already familiar with the framework and the project itself, but if you’re just diving in it can be a little overwhelming and hard.
Con Bloated legacy DI API
Spring DI is bloated and rather complex in comparison to CDI.
Con Complex and not newbie friendly
Spring MVC architecture although simple has a lot of layers and abstractions which can be hard to debug if problems arise. It is also highly dependant on the Spring core.
It's an old and mature framework that has numerous amount of ways to extend and configure it – and this actually makes it fairly complex.
Con Lacking in UI development
While actually very good and with a very complete and rich feature set to develop and maintain code on the server side, it still doesn't provide any rich framework for building good user interfaces.
Con Unnecessarily slow, bloated, complex, convoluted, wordy, and verbose
Spring is convoluted and XML-ridden. Deploying things on the JVM has always been a pain in the nipple and nothing has changed much since the 90s. All things Java-related are wordy, verbose, and a waste of developer time.
Con Slow Prototyping
If you are looking to build a quick prototype fast and easy, Spring isn't going to help much. It's very large and quite hard to grasp if you are just beginning with it.