Why is Spring Boot still used in large-scale systems despite newer backend frameworks?

Node.js is from 2009. Go lang from 2007. Spring Boot from 2014. Which one is newer?

Also, Go is a language, Node is a runtime, and Spring Boot is a framework (built on Java). OP is comparing apples, oranges, and lemons.

Most companies will start using a framework, and never see a use in migrating their code. For many companies, migrating a framework is far too expensive, and doesn't give enough of a benefit to the end users. Besides that, here are my answers to your question:

1. According to a JetBrains survey's results, Java is the most popular language with 7,109,000 developers claiming Java is their primary coding language. This can provide an advantage, as for enterprises, it's easier to find Java developers.

2. There are a couple of scenarios. One is if you need high scalability, and it's also multi-threaded, making it faster than single threaded web frameworks (such as Express). Another reason is for security, as Spring Boot has extensive, built-in security.

3. A couple of features that make Spring Boot scalable for large-scale applications are because of the support for microservices, opinionated defaults and auto-configuration eliminating boilerplate code, and a large community.

Before you even get to the frameworks, you're comparing three quite different languages, and that shapes everything downstream.

The Language Layer (Java vs Node.js (JavaScript) vs Go)

Java, Go, and JavaScript (via Node.js) each take a distinct philosophy to backend development.

Java is a statically typed, object-oriented language that's been battle-hardened over 30 years. It is verbose by design, but that verbosity buys you compiler safety, rich tooling, and a massive ecosystem that enterprise teams rely on.

Go was built by Google as a reaction to that complexity: statically typed and compiled like Java, but deliberately minimal, with a fast startup, a tiny memory footprint, and concurrency baked into the language itself via goroutines.

JavaScript through Node.js takes a different bet entirely: a dynamically typed, single-threaded language that escaped the browser and became a backend runtime, winning on ecosystem size (npm) and the appeal of sharing code between frontend and backend, but trading away the type safety and raw CPU performance of the other two.

Really large companies don't rely on a single stack; Google, Netflix, Paypal and Uber - just off the top of my head, use them all. Generally the core business layer will be Java, Go will be used on high-throughput infrastructure, proxies, and performance-critical microservices; and Node.js will be used for real-time features and APIs where developer speed and JavaScript unification matter.

Then you can debate the framework of choice. But language comes first.

If you look at projects aimed for massive scale, you'll notice that a lot of them are Java based; Apache Kafka, Hadoop, Spark, Cassandra...

So, answering your question, Spring Boot is a very solid choice to start learning. Don't limit yourself. Maybe you'd rather be doing more UI, then you'll probably will lean towards Next.js or something similar. But Spring Boot is a very solid and modern choice used by a significant number of the largest companies in the world.

Spring Boot is still a great choice for building backend applications, especially in large or enterprise systems. One of its biggest strengths is the ecosystem it has tons of libraries, built in features, and strong community support, which makes building, testing, and maintaining complex applications easier. Features like dependency injection and modular design help you keep your code organized and testable, while auto-configuration and starter templates let you get a project up and running quickly. It’s also production-ready, with built-in monitoring, security caching and cloud integration, which is why banks, insurance companies, and other large organizations often rely on it. While newer technologies like Node.js or Go can be faster for simple or event driven services, spring Boot is better when you need reliability, maintainable architecture, and scalability basically, when your app needs to survive and grow in a real-world, high-stakes environment.

When an organization already has some apps that it supports that were written using Java and Spring Boot it would require extra developers or extra learning of the existing developers to support also applications in a different framework.

When you support two or more frameworks/languages at the same time, you loose the benefit of reusing components that you already developed for one app in another. Also context-switch for the developers is harder (when the same developers switch from one framework to another and then back again and so on), since you probably want to support applications for a longer time.

Simply re-developing the already existing apps in another framework/language is also probably complete overkill, at least if you maintain the existing apps regularly.

Java and Spring Framework have been around for a really long time now (in developers time scales..), Spring Boot also has long history: Java exists for 30 years now, Spring for over 20 years and even Spring Boot for over 10 years - so experienced developers are relatively easy to find. But actually Spring Boot is the youngest of the three technologies you mentioned as examples ;-)

While GO and node.js also are actually older than 10 years, and JavaScript has about the same age as Java, those technologies were not used that long and not that widely in enterprise environments which makes it hard to find developers with the same experience as in Java (and therefore probably more expensive).

Do you understand the differences between the jvm and the other backends? That's part of the equation.