BungeeCord vs. Velocity: Choosing the Right Proxy for Your Minecraft Server Network

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 MODERN mode 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:

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.

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