Paper, Fabric, Forge or Vanilla? A New Free Tool Answers It

If you have ever tried to set up a Minecraft server, you have hit this wall. Paper. Spigot. Purpur. Forge. Fabric. Vanilla. Every guide assumes you already know which one you want, and the ones that do explain it hand you a wall of text when what you actually wanted was to be told.

So we built a tool that just tells you: the Minecraft Server Type Picker. Four questions, one answer, free, no account needed.

Why this choice matters more than people expect

It is not a preference. It decides two things you cannot easily undo.

The first is what your players have to do to join. Plugins run only on the server, so if you pick Paper your friends click join with a normal Minecraft client and nothing else happens. Mods do not work that way: with Forge or Fabric, every single player needs the same loader and the same mod list installed before they can connect. That is a real barrier, and it is the difference between six friends playing tonight and six friends troubleshooting tonight.

The second is which add-ons exist for you at all. Forge mods and Paper plugins are separate worlds and they do not mix. Pick one and the other ecosystem is closed to you. Plenty of people discover this after building a server around the wrong one.

The combination nobody warns you about

Here is the one we made sure the tool answers, because it catches people out constantly: you cannot have Bedrock players and client-side mods on the same server.

Letting phone, console and Windows 10 players onto a Java server is done with Geyser, and Geyser is a plugin, which means Paper. Mods mean Forge or Fabric, which cannot run plugins. On top of that, a Bedrock client cannot load Java mods anyway. If you want your mates on console to join, that decision is made for you, and it is better to know now than three weekends in.

Tell the picker you want both and it says so plainly instead of quietly recommending something that cannot work.

What it actually asks

• What you are building: a public survival server, a small private one, minigames, a modpack, or a technical server for farms and redstone.
• Whether your players will install mods, or whether they should just be able to click join.
• Whether Bedrock edition players need to get in.
• And if you are going the mod route, whether you care more about performance and fast updates, or the biggest possible mod library.

Then it gives you the answer, what your players will need to install, which add-on ecosystem you are committing to, and a plain explanation of why. Where there is a catch, it tells you the catch.

Some answers are not the popular one

If you say you are running a technical server built around farms and redstone, it recommends Vanilla, and it tells you what you are giving up: no land claiming, no permissions, no anti-grief tooling. If you say you depend on old Spigot-only plugins, it says Spigot and then tells you to move to Paper once that plugin is replaced, because for anything new Paper runs the same plugins and performs better.

We would rather the tool talk you out of something than have you find out later.

If you want to try it on a real server

Minecraft trials with us start on the latest Paper build, free for 24 hours, no card required. If the picker pointed you at Forge or Fabric, you switch it in the panel's Version Manager in a couple of clicks, and we have a short guide on changing server software that covers what carries over and what does not.

The tool is here: Minecraft Server Type Picker. It sits alongside the rest of our free server tools, which need no account and work in the browser.

If it gives you an answer that seems wrong for your setup, tell us on the feedback page or in Discord. We would rather fix the advice than defend it.