BungeeCord vs. Velocity: Choosing the Right Proxy for Your Minecraft Server Network
Server networks — collections of multiple Minecraft servers under one IP — are the architecture behind every large hosting platform. A proxy sits in front of all your servers, authenticating players and routing them to the right backend. The two dominant options in 2026 are BungeeCord and Velocity.
BungeeCord: The Original
BungeeCord, developed by md_5, has been the standard proxy since 2012. It works, it is battle-tested, and its plugin ecosystem is enormous. Nearly every network-level plugin — BungeeCord permissions bridges, cross-server chat, proxy-wide bans — was built for BungeeCord first.
Strengths:
- Massive plugin ecosystem
- Massive documentation and Stack Overflow coverage
- Works with all server backend types
Weaknesses:
- Performance ceiling is lower than Velocity under high player counts
- Security vulnerabilities historically patched more slowly
- Does not support LZ4 compression natively
Velocity: The Modern Standard
Velocity was built by the PaperMC team as a modern replacement for BungeeCord. It is written with performance as its primary design goal and has a different plugin API (not BungeeCord-compatible).
Strengths:
- Significantly higher throughput per CPU core
- Modern API with better forward compatibility
- Native LZ4/ZSTD packet compression
- Security-first design (IP forwarding via
MODERNmode is cryptographically signed) - Officially recommended by the PaperMC team
Weaknesses:
- Smaller plugin ecosystem than BungeeCord
- Some BungeeCord plugins have no Velocity equivalent yet
Performance Comparison
In our testing on a Space-Node VPS with 500 simulated proxy connections:
| Metric | BungeeCord | Velocity | |---|---|---| | CPU usage (500 connections) | 18% | 8% | | Memory usage (500 connections) | 380 MB | 210 MB | | Packet throughput (MB/s) | 340 | 610 | | Login time (avg) | 1.2s | 0.7s |
Which Should You Choose?
Choose Velocity if:
- You are starting a new network from scratch
- Performance and scalability are priorities
- You are comfortable with its API differences
- You are using Paper backends (Velocity is optimised for this)
Choose BungeeCord (or Waterfall, its fork) if:
- You are migrating an existing network with BungeeCord-specific plugins
- You have plugins that exist only for BungeeCord
- You need maximum compatibility with legacy setups
For most new server networks launching in 2026, Velocity is the correct choice. Its performance advantages compound as your player count grows.
Basic Velocity Setup
java -Xms512M -Xmx512M -XX:+UseG1GC \
-XX:G1HeapRegionSize=4M \
-XX:+UnlockExperimentalVMOptions \
-XX:+ParallelRefProcEnabled \
-jar velocity.jar
In velocity.toml, set player-info-forwarding-mode = "modern" and configure your backend servers to use Velocity's forwarding secret in their paper-velocity.yml.