82% of companies are fed up with Oracle pricing
Java turns 30 years old in 2025. What better time to release the 2025 State of Java Survey and Report? Our second annual survey serves as a guide to understanding Java adoption and trends, and confirms Java’s impact on application performance, developer productivity, and AI development. More than ever before, Java continues to lead in innovation, adaptability, and performance.
Welcome to Azul’s 2025 State of Java Survey & Report, a study of more than 2,000 Java professionals worldwide. The report uncovers how enterprises are tackling Oracle Java pricing and licensing challenges, strategies for addressing cloud costs, factors impacting DevOps productivity, and the role of Java in AI development.
Let’s look at some of the important results and trends from the 2025 State of Java Survey & Report.
Java’s continuing influence in the enterprise
Java remains a cornerstone for enterprise application development. Only 1% of those contacted to participate in the survey were disqualified because they don’t use Java. In addition, nearly 70% of respondents say that more than half of their applications are built with Java or run on a JVM.
19% of participants use Java 6 or 7, two of the oldest versions still in production (remember Java 6 was originally released in 2006!), and 49% use Java 17 or 21, the two newest Long-Term Support (LTS) versions. The results underscore Java’s role for both maintaining legacy applications and systems and for running modern, scalable applications and architectures.
More than just a programming language and a force for technical stability, Java is a critical enabler of enterprise innovation in areas such as artificial intelligence (more on that later).
The Great Oracle Java Migration gains momentum
Two years after Oracle introduced its employee-based pricing for Oracle Java SE in January 2023, organizations continue to grapple with Oracle’s employee-based pricing model. 82% of Oracle Java users express concern over its cost structure — a figure unchanged since Azul’s 2023 survey. Oracle Java users are turning their displeasure into action and joining The Great Oracle Java Migration. 88% of Oracle Java users are considering a switch to another Java provider. Nearly half of these companies plan to migrate to an OpenJDK distribution with paid support, preferring a cost-effective yet reliable solution.
As organizations recognize the value of paid support, they are considering switching Java providers for two main reasons – cost and experience.
Overall, 79% of Oracle Java users who are considering migrating to another distribution cited Oracle as a reason. In fact, seven of the top eight responses were about Oracle, and four of them were about Oracle’s behavior and the experience of being a customer (including sales tactics, pricing uncertainty, and audits). These responses underscore that organizations increasingly seek cost-effective, flexible, and transparent alternatives to Oracle Java to mitigate financial and operational risks.
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7 of the top 8 reasons for migrating from Oracle Java to an OpenJDK distribution were about Oracle pricing or support, or the experience of being an Oracle Java customer.
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Azul Platform Core customers typically pay 70% less than Oracle for licensing fees and support. They also have commercial support available for Java 6 and 7, which they can’t get from any other distribution, and Azul is the only Java provider besides Oracle that delivers stabilized security builds. Azul also delivers full updates every quarter that combine bug fixes, new features, and security patches.
Organizations tackle cloud costs, but overages are still high
As organizations increase their public cloud footprint, they are dedicating more than half of their cloud capacity to Java workloads. In a clear sign of inefficient resource allocation, most participants in this survey have more than 20% of their cloud compute capacity sitting idle. Overprovisioning not only inflates operating costs but also diverts funds that they could invest in innovation or growth initiatives.
Optimizing Java in the cloud presents a substantial opportunity to reduce costs without compromising performance. Organizations are taking steps to better align their cloud investments with actual usage. They are making behavioral changes like implementing internal rules and establishing DevOps functions. They are also using more efficient processors and autoscaling their workloads. In addition, a quarter of participants are using a high-performance Java runtime to improve application performance, optimize cloud compute costs, and improve customer experiences.
Azul Platform Prime is an enhanced build of OpenJDK, with additional features for faster and more consistent steady-state performance, faster startup and warmup, and more efficient use of resources. Azul Prime customers enjoy better performance and lower cloud and infrastructure costs.
Code management and security impact DevOps productivity
The survey reveals significant challenges to application development productivity. Organizations must remove efficiency barriers to development if they are to bring new features to their customers faster. Dead or unused code is a major challenge, and 62% of survey participants report that it affects their DevOps teams’ effectiveness.
A third of participants say their DevOps teams waste more than half their time addressing false positives from Java-related security vulnerabilities. 41% report that they encounter critical production security issues within their Java ecosystem on a weekly or daily basis. The high frequency of false positives can become overwhelming, leading to alert fatigue and reducing employees’ attentiveness to genuine security threats.
When DevOps can’t separate the real vulnerabilities from the plethora of alerts, notifications, and sometimes even spam, they have to siphon resources away from development and other priorities. But they must remain vigilant. Half of companies still report finding vulnerable versions of the Log4j library in production, more than two years after a patch was made available.
Azul Intelligence Cloud has two unique capabilities to help with DevOps productivity. Azul Code Inventory catalogs what code runs in production across an enterprise’s Java workloads. It slashes the time and burden of identifying dead and unused code, allowing developers to focus on the code that actually matters (and over time prune the code that doesn’t). Azul Vulnerability Detection detects vulnerable code that is actually run in production (versus simply present in the jar or container), eliminating false positives to enable rapid and efficient vulnerability triage.
Java powers enterprise AI development
Typically, when the topic of developing AI or ML functionality arises, people think of Python. Perhaps surprisingly, the survey found that Java was used more often than either Python or other languages. In fact, 50% of organizations use Java to code AI functionality.
AI impacts the way organizations strategize, build code, and maintain applications and infrastructure. As you might expect, this AI adoption comes with infrastructure implications, and 72% of survey participants say their compute capacity will have to grow for them to support Java applications with AI functionality.
State of Java Survey & Report is available now
This report shows organizations are actively seeking ways to optimize their Java deployments to drive operational efficiency and cost predictability. As Java continues to be the backbone for business-critical applications in the enterprise, we’re seeing important trends — from the growing interest in Oracle Java alternatives to cloud optimization strategies, improvements in DevOps productivity, and innovation with AI. Read Azul’s full 2025 State of Java Survey & Report today.
