Pumpkin
A free program that lets you run your own Minecraft server, rebuilt from scratch to be faster and lighter on your computer's resources than the official server software.
🔗 Visit Pumpkin
Description
Running a Minecraft server for friends or a community usually means using the official Java server software, which can be heavy on memory and CPU, especially with many players connected. Pumpkin rebuilds the server entirely in Rust, a programming language known for speed and efficiency, aiming to let the same server handle more players with less hardware.
Pumpkin is a free, open-source (GPL-3.0, ~9,400 GitHub stars) Minecraft server implementation written entirely in Rust, supporting both Java Edition and Bedrock Edition clients. It offers a multi-threaded architecture for performance, full world management and chunk generation, player mechanics and combat systems, entity and mob support, RCON remote administration, a plugin architecture for extending functionality, and proxy support for Bungeecord and Velocity setups. The project is under active development toward a 1.0.0 release.
💬 Our review
The short version: if you're hosting a Minecraft server yourself and want it to run smoothly on modest hardware, Pumpkin's from-scratch Rust rewrite is specifically built to be lighter and faster than the official server software.
The project's real value is technical: Rust's performance characteristics genuinely can mean more players per dollar of server hardware compared to the Java-based vanilla server, and cross-compatibility with both Java and Bedrock clients in one server is a real convenience for mixed communities. The catch is that it's still pre-1.0 and under active development — plugin compatibility with the existing Java/Bukkit ecosystem (thousands of existing plugins) is the biggest practical question for anyone considering switching, since a from-scratch implementation won't automatically support plugins built for the official server. For a technically-inclined server admin willing to accept some rough edges for better performance, it's worth trying; for a community relying on specific existing plugins, wait for broader ecosystem compatibility.
💰 Pricing
📊 Global score
🤖 AI-enriched data
Entièrement gratuit et open source (licence GPL-3.0).
Pros
Gratuit, open source, réécriture complète en Rust pour la performance
Compatible avec les clients Java ET Bedrock sur le même serveur
Architecture multi-threadée pensée pour la charge
Support proxy (Bungeecord, Velocity) pour les réseaux de serveurs
Cons
Encore pré-1.0, en développement actif — instabilités possibles
Écosystème de plugins bien plus restreint que Paper/Spigot (des milliers de plugins existants non compatibles)
Nécessite des compétences techniques pour l'administration
Moins de documentation et de communauté que les solutions Java établies