Comparison: Helidon vs Payara

Feature	Helidon 4	Payara Micro Enterprise 6.9.0
License	Apache License 2.0	Open Source with EULA
Release frequency	Regular	Monthly
Production Support	Yes (Only in combination with WebLogic or Coherence)	Yes
Standards Support	MicroProfile, Partial Jakarta EE	Microprofile, Jakarta EE Web Profile
Support For	MP Reactive Messaging, MP GraphQL, gRPC, JPA	JBatch, Jakarta EE Concurrency, JMS client, Kafka connectivity
Supported IDEs	Eclipse / NetBeans / IntelliJ IDE / VSCode	Eclipse / NetBeans / IntelliJ IDE / VSCode
Designed For	Microservices	Microservices, general applications
Project Creation	Helidon CLI, Maven, and Gradle archetypes	Maven and Gradle archetypes
Clustering	None	Automatic clustering in many environments including bare metal and Kubernetes
Configuration	YAML file	Asadmin commands
Request Tracing	Jersey, MicroProfile OpenTracing	MicroProfile OpenTracing, Servlet, CDI
Tracing Tools	Jaeger, OpenZipkin	Jaeger, OpenZipkin
Notifiers	None	Log files, SMTP, SNMP, CDI, Slack, New Relic, Datadog
Supported JVMs	JDK 11+, Graal VM Native compilation	Support and security updates for Java 7,8,11 and beyond; ARM-based JVMs

Feature

Helidon 4

Payara Micro Enterprise 6.9.0

License

Apache License 2.0

Open Source with EULA

Release frequency

Regular

Monthly

Production Support

Yes (Only in combination with WebLogic or Coherence)

Yes

Standards Support

MicroProfile, Partial Jakarta EE

Microprofile, Jakarta EE Web Profile

Support For

MP Reactive Messaging, MP GraphQL, gRPC, JPA

JBatch, Jakarta EE Concurrency, JMS client, Kafka connectivity

Supported IDEs

Eclipse / NetBeans / IntelliJ IDE / VSCode

Designed For

Microservices

Microservices, general applications

Project Creation

Helidon CLI, Maven, and Gradle archetypes

Maven and Gradle archetypes

Clustering

None

Automatic clustering in many environments including bare metal and Kubernetes

Configuration

YAML file

Asadmin commands

Request Tracing

Jersey, MicroProfile OpenTracing

MicroProfile OpenTracing, Servlet, CDI

Tracing Tools

Jaeger, OpenZipkin

Notifiers

None

Log files, SMTP, SNMP, CDI, Slack, New Relic, Datadog

Supported JVMs

JDK 11+, Graal VM Native compilation

Support and security updates for Java 7,8,11 and beyond; ARM-based JVMs

“Now, our engineering team is able to ignore performance maintenance and spend all their time building features.”

Brett Vasconcellos, CTO

Azul powers the largest banks in the world and with peak load demands of up to 50,000 transactions per second, Azul Prime will help ensure that we can deliver the best that artificially intelligent machines can offer.

Nuno Sebastiao, Chief Executive Officer

“Azul has a lot of involvement in OpenJDK, and have put a lot of really useful general information into this guide along with some details of the Azul specific version.”

Mark Stephens, IDR Solutions

“Real-time processing of transactions at Mastercard is not a nice to have, it is a must. And with credit card fraud running rampant, we have to be smarter and faster than the fraudster to protect our cardholders.”

Ted Boehm, Senior Technical Consultant

“Azul’s unique approach to application scalability is unmatched. With the Azul Java solution we saw tremendous improvements in application performance and response time consistency in our production website.”

Ron Cavallo, Director of Infrastructure, Saks Fifth Avenue

The time our engineers used to spend on Java issues is now going into building product.

Senior Manager, Cloud-Based Software Provider, Forrester Total Economic Impact™ of Azul Platform Prime, 2026

Payara Micro vs. Helidon

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