Independent Research · Unvarnished Reviews
Unvarnished Reviews Research
The market has already been voting with its feet, and the trend is unusually well-documented for this category. Oracle supplied roughly 75% of the JDKs enterprises ran in 2020; that share fell to 34% in 2022, 29% in 2023, and 21% in 2024, tracking almost exactly with Oracle's January 2023 shift to per-employee Java SE pricing. Eclipse Temurin has been the primary beneficiary: One 2026 industry survey now places Temurin adoption at 31%, ahead of Oracle Java's 27%, a reversal of the two vendors' historical positions. Azul's 2025-2026 State of Java survey, a widely cited primary source in this space, found that 81% of organizations are migrating some or all of their Oracle Java environments to OpenJDK distributions, and 99% of surveyed organizations still actively use Java itself; this is a migration away from one vendor, not away from the language.
Java is free. It has been open source for nearly two decades, and identical, TCK-certified builds of it are available at zero cost from Amazon, Microsoft, IBM, the Eclipse Foundation, and Azul. Oracle's price for the same runtime is set by headcount: $10.50 per employee per month from 3,000 employees up, and since October 2026 a flat $10,000 a year for companies of 101-500 employees. Every employee counts, including the receptionist, the warehouse crew, and per the price list's definition, your contractors and outsourcers, whether or not any of them has ever heard of Java. A company running Java on thirty servers owes Oracle for its whole headcount. This is the only major software subscription we have reviewed where the metric has no relationship whatsoever to usage.
| Distribution | G2 Rating | Reviews (G2) | Trustpilot | Note |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Azul Platform Core (Zulu) | 4.9 / 5 | ~58 | No Trustpilot listing located | Highest-rated, smallest commercial vendor of the four |
| Amazon Corretto | 4.5 / 5 | ~116-123 | No Trustpilot listing located | Free; largest G2 review base among the OpenJDK builds |
| Oracle Java (JDK) | 4.4 / 5 | Not consistently reported | 1.3 / 5 (179 reviews, Oracle company listing, not Java-specific) | The commercial, subscription-billed option this report is about |
| Eclipse Temurin | Not meaningfully available | 2 | No Trustpilot listing located | G2 sample too thin to be representative; as a free, foundation-run distribution, most buyers don't formally review it the way they would a commercial product |
The rating pattern here reflects the category more than any real quality gap: Free, community-run distributions like Temurin are downloaded and deployed at massive scale but rarely formally reviewed, since there's no sales relationship prompting a review request. Treat the absence of a rating for Temurin as a data-availability gap, not a quality signal.
Its subscription bundles integrated support across the Java ecosystem, GraalVM entitlements and indemnification, which is defensible for organizations running WebLogic or Oracle-proprietary extensions.
The Universal Subscription is simple to count, with no processor counting and no true-up anxiety on the metric itself.
The price is set by headcount, not usage, and the definition of employee includes contractors, outsourcers and consultants, so a 500-person company with 80 contractors licenses 580.
Audits rising through 2024 and 2025 cite download history and public headcount, and Oracle's share of enterprise JDKs fell from roughly 75% in 2020 to 21% in 2024.
Support is priced per JVM or per core, a metric that tracks what you run, and extended support reaches back to Java 6, 7 and 8 for legacy estates.
It has the highest rating of the four at 4.9 out of 5, offers SLA-backed support wherever workloads run, and carries no Oracle audit exposure.
Pricing is quote-only because Azul publishes no rate card on its pricing page.
It is the smallest commercial vendor of the four, with only about 58 reviews, and support costs more than the free builds.
It is free, Amazon-supported, aligned to long-term support releases and run at Amazon scale internally.
It has the largest review base among the OpenJDK builds, about 116 to 123 reviews at 4.5 out of 5, and independent sources describe switching to it as a low-effort runtime swap.
Commercial support is available only through AWS Support plans and only for AWS-hosted workloads, so on-premises and multi-cloud estates fall outside the boundary.
Amazon has stated no plans for a standalone Corretto support tier.
It is free, community-governed and the most widely deployed community OpenJDK build, with a 2026 industry survey putting adoption at 31%, ahead of Oracle Java's 27%.
Independent sources describe it as the vendor-neutral default because it introduces no new dependency.
Support is community-only from the Eclipse Foundation, and commercial support exists only through third parties such as Azul, Red Hat and IBM.
It has almost no formal reviews, so its missing rating is a data gap rather than a quality signal.
In January 2023, Oracle replaced its per-processor and per-user Java SE licensing with the Java SE Universal Subscription, priced per employee per month. Oracle's FAQ now lists two schedules. SMB pricing, announced October 8, 2026, covers organizations with 1 to 2,999 employees: $100 a year up to 10 employees, $1,000 up to 100, $10,000 up to 500, and $10,000 plus $147.20 per employee above 500. Enterprise pricing for 3,000 or more employees starts at $10.50 per employee per month, with published tiers as low as $5.25. Before the SMB schedule, third-party trackers reported $15 per employee per month for organizations under 1,000 employees, a figure that still circulates. Total cost scales with headcount, never with Java footprint.
Two clauses do the real work. First, the definition of "employee": The price list counts all full-time, part-time, and temporary employees plus the employees of your agents, contractors, outsourcers, and consultants supporting your operations. Redress Compliance notes organizations routinely discover in audits that they undercounted: A 500-person company with 80 contractors and temps licenses 580.
Second, the enforcement. Java audit activity rose materially through 2024 and 2025, and Gartner has predicted that one in five Java-using organizations will face an Oracle audit by 2026. The tactics are distinctive: Palisade Compliance reports Oracle reps no longer ask how much Java you run. They arrive citing how many times your company downloaded Java from Oracle's site and your public headcount. A single developer pulling the Oracle JDK out of habit is the tripwire; your public employee count is the invoice.
Pre-2023 legacy contracts remain valid but cannot be expanded, a slow squeeze toward the employee metric at every renewal.
OpenJDK is the reference implementation, and the free distributions pass the same Technology Compatibility Kit as Oracle's build:
Migration, per Redress benchmarking across 30 to 40 Java estates, is rarely technical: Oracle-specific dependencies are uncommon outside WebLogic and a small set of JavaFX cases. The work is inventory and testing, not rewriting.
| Option | Metric | Per-Year | 3-Year |
|---|---|---|---|
| Oracle Java SE Universal, 500 employees (SMB schedule) | Headcount | $10,000 | $30,000 |
| Oracle, counted the way audits count (580 incl. 80 contractors) | Headcount | $21,776 | $65,328 |
| Azul support, 30 workloads (assumes 8 vCores each, $20 per vCore entry rate; quote-only) | vCores | ~$4,800 | ~$14,400 |
| Corretto or Temurin | N/A | $0 license | $0 license |
| Oracle Java SE Universal, 5,000 employees ($10.50 tier) | Headcount | $630,000 | $1,890,000 |
| Oracle, 5,000 employees plus 500 contractors (5,500 counted) | Headcount | $693,000 | $2,079,000 |
The Corretto/Temurin line is not free in the total sense: The real spend is a one-time migration: an estate inventory (which apps, which JDK versions, which download sources), swap and test, plus ongoing patch discipline your team now owns. For thirty standard workloads this is weeks of engineering time, not a program. There is no annual line item at all.
Per employee, the math depends on the tier. A 500-person company now pays Oracle $20 per person per year, while a 5,000-person company pays $126 per person per year, to run software that is free, in exchange for support most teams open a ticket against approximately never. The Azul line is an illustration built on an assumed footprint; Azul publishes no rate card on its pricing page, so get a written quote.
What does Oracle's subscription buy? Integrated support across the Java ecosystem, GraalVM entitlements, indemnification, and, for organizations deep in Oracle middleware, one throat to choke. If you run WebLogic, use Oracle-proprietary extensions, or your risk office requires the vendor of record for the runtime to be the runtime's steward, the subscription is defensible. And the Universal Subscription is, in fairness, simple: No counting processors, no true-up anxiety on the metric itself. You are buying an audit-shaped peace of mind, from the party conducting the audits. At the October 2026 SMB price the case for staying is stronger than it was: for a 500-person company, $10,000 a year may cost less than the migration effort, and the case for leaving strengthens as headcount passes 3,000.
The complexity picture here differs from a typical software migration. Because all four distributions build from the same OpenJDK source, independent sources consistently describe switching between them as largely a binary-compatible runtime swap, the harder work is auditing where Java runs across an estate, not the migration itself.
| Dimension | Oracle Java | Azul | Amazon Corretto | Eclipse Temurin |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Migration/swap effort | N/A, the incumbent | Low; binary-compatible runtime swap per independent sources, with Azul's migration tooling supporting the transition | Low; described consistently as a runtime swap and audit exercise rather than a rebuild, since Corretto tracks upstream OpenJDK closely | Low; the most widely deployed community OpenJDK build, independently described as the vendor-neutral default because it introduces no new dependency |
| Support model | Commercial, per-employee subscription with Oracle Premier Support | Broadest support portability of the three alternatives: Commercial SLA-backed support available regardless of where workloads run (on-premises, any cloud, hybrid), the closest structural analog to Oracle's support model | Real portability constraint independently documented across multiple sources: Commercial support is available only through AWS Support plans and only for AWS-hosted workloads; on-premises and multi-cloud estates fall entirely outside that boundary, and Amazon has stated no plans for a standalone Corretto support tier | Community-only from the Eclipse Foundation directly; commercial support is available, but only through third parties (including Azul, Red Hat, and IBM), an extra step organizations should budget planning time for if formal SLA coverage is required |
| Audit/discovery complexity | N/A, the incumbent | Same estate-discovery work applies regardless of destination distribution; not distribution-specific | Same estate-discovery work applies; the practical constraint is confirming which workloads are AWS-hosted before assuming Corretto's support boundary covers them | Same estate-discovery work applies; no distribution-specific complexity beyond the general audit effort every migration path requires |
The practical takeaway: The complexity in this decision isn't the swap itself, independent sources are consistent that a binary-compatible runtime change is comparatively simple. It's confirming where Java runs across the estate first, and matching that footprint against each distribution's support boundary. Corretto's support model is the one with a real, structural constraint worth planning around: Commercial support exists only for AWS-hosted workloads, a hard boundary for any organization with on-premises or multi-cloud Java, not a limitation Azul or Temurin's third-party support model shares.
Every finding below is independently documented and material enough to influence a purchasing decision.
Oracle Java
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Amazon Corretto
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Eclipse Temurin
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Azul
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Running Oracle JDK out of habit, no Oracle-specific dependencies: Migrate to Temurin or Corretto. Above 3,000 employees this is among the highest-ROI licensing moves in enterprise software, a six-figure to seven-figure recurring cost eliminated for a one-time testing effort. Below 500 employees the October 2026 SMB price of $10,000 a year narrows the savings, so weigh the migration effort against the license. Sweep your estate for Oracle download activity first; that history is what audits are built on.
Legacy Java 6/7/8 estates that need supported patches: Azul's extended support is the purpose-built answer, at a metric tied to your JVMs instead of your org chart.
WebLogic and deep Oracle middleware shops: You are the customer this subscription was priced for. Negotiate the tier, cap the escalator (8% annual escalators appear in the wild, cap it in writing), and above all challenge the employee count: The cheaper move in most reviews is not a better rate but a smaller counted estate.
Everyone: Establish a JDK provenance policy today: which distribution, which download source, documented per install. The companies that get hurt are the ones that cannot answer "where did this JDK come from" when the letter arrives.
Oracle's design bundles support and legal cover into a headcount-priced subscription, which is defensible for Oracle-committed enterprises and unnecessary for everyone else. Azul is designed for support portability and legacy coverage. Corretto and Temurin are designed as free OpenJDK builds, with Temurin vendor-neutral and Corretto bounded by AWS support. Because all four build from the same source, switching is largely a runtime swap, and the harder work is inventorying where Java runs.
Choose by dependency and footprint. Oracle-specific dependencies such as WebLogic fit the subscription. Legacy Java 6/7/8 estates fit Azul. AWS-centric estates fit Corretto. Everyone running Oracle JDK without Oracle-specific dependencies fits Temurin or Corretto, and organizations that need formal SLAs without Oracle fit Azul or third-party support for Temurin.
Oracle's metric is your payroll, not your Java usage, so cost scales with headcount: $20 per employee per year for a 500-person company under the October 2026 SMB schedule, $126 for a company of 3,000 or more at the entry enterprise rate. A 5,000-person company pays $1,890,000 over three years, rising to $2,079,000 once 500 contractors are counted, while migrating to Temurin or Corretto is a one-time inventory-and-test effort measured in weeks of engineering time for a standard estate, with patch discipline your team then owns.
Free trials and test-drives. Corretto, Temurin and Azul Zulu are free to download and use. Amazon Corretto is no cost with long-term support for versions 8, 11, 17, 21 and 25, and Eclipse Temurin is free with community support only. Azul Zulu is free, and Azul's paid Core and Prime subscriptions are priced per virtual core by quote with no trial listed. Run your real applications on a free build first, and buy support only if you need a guaranteed service level.