BungeeCord vs Velocity 2026: Best Minecraft Proxy Explained

A server network is several Minecraft servers behind one address: a lobby, a survival world, a minigame server. A proxy sits in front of them, handles the player's connection and moves players between the backend servers. The two proxies that matter in 2026 are BungeeCord and Velocity.

BungeeCord: The Original

BungeeCord, developed by md_5, has been the standard proxy since the early 2010s. It works, it is battle-tested, and its plugin ecosystem is huge. A lot of network-level plugins, such as cross-server chat, proxy-wide bans and permission bridges, were written for BungeeCord first.

Strengths:

• Large plugin ecosystem
• Years of documentation and forum answers
• Works with all common backend server types

Weaknesses:

• Its legacy IP forwarding has no authentication between proxy and backend (more on that below)
• Waterfall, the popular BungeeCord fork maintained by PaperMC, reached end of life in March 2024

Velocity: The Modern Standard

Velocity is built by the PaperMC team as a modern replacement for BungeeCord. It has its own plugin API, so BungeeCord plugins do not run on it directly.

Strengths:

• Designed for performance. On Linux x86_64 and aarch64, Velocity replaces zlib with libdeflate, which its docs describe as "twice as fast as zlib while delivering a similar compression ratio" (Why Velocity)
• Modern player info forwarding for Minecraft 1.13 and newer, secured with a secret key shared by the proxy and the backends
• Forge support for 1.7 to 1.12.2 and for 1.20.2 and newer, per the same page
• The proxy PaperMC recommends: when they ended Waterfall, they told users to move to Velocity (Waterfall end of life announcement)

Weaknesses:

• Smaller plugin ecosystem than BungeeCord
• Some BungeeCord plugins have no Velocity equivalent yet
• Velocity "does not attempt to maintain a stable internal API between minor and major releases", so plugins that reach into internals can break on updates

Security: Why Forwarding Matters

Behind a proxy, the backend server only sees the proxy's connection, so the proxy forwards each player's real IP address and UUID. With BungeeCord's legacy forwarding, the backend has no way to check that this information really comes from your proxy. Velocity's docs call legacy forwarding "fundamentally insecure" (player information forwarding). The usual protection is a firewall that only lets the proxy reach the backends.

Velocity's modern forwarding signs the forwarded data with a secret that only the proxy and your backends know, so a backend can reject anything that did not come from your proxy.

Performance: How to Judge It for Your Network

A proxy mostly moves packets, compresses them and handles logins, so it needs far less CPU and RAM than the game servers behind it. To compare the two for your network, watch your own proxy under real load:

• Install spark on the proxy; it runs on both Velocity and BungeeCord.
• At peak time, run /sparkv health on Velocity or /sparkb health on BungeeCord to see CPU and memory use.
• Note the player count next to the reading, so you can compare it later.

For sizing, Velocity's tuning page gives a rule of thumb: "512MB per 500 players, plus some extra to allow for some room for error (typically 1GB extra)" (Velocity tuning).

Which Should You Choose?

Choose Velocity if:

• You are starting a new network from scratch
• You run Paper backends (Paper supports Velocity's modern forwarding out of the box)
• You are comfortable with its API differences
• You want the proxy that PaperMC actively develops

Stay on BungeeCord if:

• You are running an existing network with BungeeCord-only plugins you cannot replace yet
• You need maximum compatibility with legacy setups

If you are still on Waterfall, plan a move. PaperMC has said Waterfall users should not count on updates for new Minecraft versions.

For most new networks in 2026, Velocity is the right choice.

Basic Velocity Setup

Start Velocity with the flags from its tuning page:

java -Xms1G -Xmx1G -XX:+UseG1GC -XX:G1HeapRegionSize=4M \
  -XX:+UnlockExperimentalVMOptions -XX:+ParallelRefProcEnabled \
  -XX:+AlwaysPreTouch -XX:MaxInlineLevel=15 \
  -jar velocity.jar

Then set up modern forwarding:

1. In velocity.toml, set player-info-forwarding-mode = "modern".
2. Velocity keeps the secret in the forwarding.secret file.
3. On every backend, set online-mode=false in server.properties, because the proxy now handles logins, and set settings.bungeecord: false in spigot.yml. That switch is for BungeeCord's legacy forwarding, and a backend you move over from BungeeCord will still have it on.
4. On every Paper backend, open config/paper-global.yml and under proxies.velocity set enabled: true, set secret to the value from forwarding.secret, and set online-mode to match online-mode in velocity.toml.
5. Restart the backends, then the proxy, and join through the proxy address.

Modern forwarding needs Minecraft 1.13 or newer on the backends.

Build your Minecraft network on Space-Node

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