Earlier this year, I needed to add an AI assistant to a Spring Boot application I maintain. Nothing exotic -- just a chat interface that could answer questions about the system's documentation. I had two obvious choices: Spring AI or LangChain4j.
I assumed it would be a quick decision. Both frameworks are mature. Both support the major LLM providers. Both have Spring Boot integrations. How different could they be?
Six weeks and two prototypes later, I learned that the differences matter a lot more than the feature matrix suggests.
I am a Senior Software Engineer from Dhaka, Bangladesh. I work with Spring Boot every day. I also run Hermes Agent as my personal AI infrastructure. So I have a foot in both the enterprise Java world and the AI agent world. Here is what I found comparing these two frameworks head to head.
The Two Contenders
