JWT vs Session vs OAuth2 in Spring Boot: Which One Should You Use?

JWT vs Session vs OAuth2 in Spring Boot: Which One Should You Use? Tags: java springboot security webdev If you've spent any time building APIs with Spring Boot, you've inevitably faced this question: how do I handle authentication? You Google it. You find three different approaches. Every Stack Overflow answer recommends something different. And you end up more confused than when you started. After 8 years building Java backends, I've used all three in production. Here's the honest breakdown — no hype, no "it depends" cop-outs. The three approaches Before comparing, let's make sure we're talking about the same things. Session-based auth stores the user's state on the server. After login, the server creates a session, stores it in memory (or Redis), and sends a session ID to the client via a cookie. Every request, the server looks up that session ID to identify the user. JWT (JSON Web Token) is stateless. After login, the server generates a signed token containing the user's identity a