Jakarta EE vs Spring Boot in 2026: I Migrated a Production Backend and the Tradeoffs Aren't What You'd Expect

Jakarta EE 11 launched with a refreshed pitch around portability, independent runtimes, and alignment with the latest JVM specs. The Java community responded with its usual enthusiasm: "Spring is bloated, we're going back to standards." I read all of it. And then I did something most people don't: I migrated a real module from a digital signature backend I had running in production on Spring Boot 3.x, ported it to Payara 6 with Jakarta EE 11, measured everything I could measure, and documented what went wrong.

My thesis is this: Jakarta EE isn't dead, but the real migration cost is consistently higher than synthetic benchmarks promise. Spring Boot wins on ecosystem; Jakarta EE wins on real portability.…