java - Differences Amazon Corretto and OpenJDK - Stack Overflow
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Backed by Amazon
Corretto comes with no-cost, long-term support from Amazon, so you can upgrade versions only when you need to. Amazon is committed to Corretto, running it internally on thousands of production services.
Multiplatform support
Production ready
Videos
From Amazon's description:
"Patches and improvements in Corretto enable Amazon to address high-scale, real-world service concerns, meeting heavy performance and scalability demands. We’re making these available to customers with no-cost, long-term support, with quarterly updates including bug fixes and security patches. AWS will also provide urgent fixes to customers outside of the quarterly schedule"
So Corretto has tweaks that are specific to performance (e.g. for server or cloud applications), and also additional bug fixes that users can take advantage of that aren't necessarily in OpenJDK proper yet. Also with this Amazon is offering proper LTS support of their build, as other commercial companies are starting to do for the JDK (Oracle and Azul come to mind, as well as others).
Other than any performance benefits, an important reason to use Corretto is for its Long Term Support of its releases, including security vulnerabilities.
One of the important differences between OpenJDK and several other vendors (like Amazon Corretto) is their release and support cycle.
OpenJDK is on a 6-month release cycle and only support each release for this time. After the next release, the previous release will stop receiving patches. This means to stay up to-to-date, you must upgrade every 6 months.
Corretto on the other hand offers LTS (Long Term Support) of their JDK builds.
Amazon Corretto is a no-cost, multiplatform, production-ready distribution of the Open Java Development Kit (OpenJDK) that comes with long-term support (LTS). LTS includes Amazon’s commitment to provide performance enhancements and security updates at no cost until at least the specified date for the relevant release version (e.g. May 2026 for Corretto 8). Updates are planned to be released quarterly. Amazon also plans to apply urgent fixes (including security) outside of the regular quarterly cycle when they are available and ready to use.
To summarize, you have 3 options:
- Use OpenJDK for free, but upgrade every 6 months to get updates
- Use a paid JDK from Oracle or another vendor
- Use Corretto for free, and get free updates for several years
As you can see, Corretto is a great choice if you want to stay secure and up-to-date, don't want to pay money, and don't want to be constantly upgrading to a new version.
Here are the current end of life dates for Corretto:
- version 8 LTS June 2026
- version 11 LTS September 2027
- version 17 LTS October 2029
Non-LTS versions are available as well, but are supported for a shorter period of time.
The is a variety of JDK vendors out there, so there may be other alternatives for a free and updated JDK, but be sure to read the vendors website carefully to understand their support and patching policy. Personally I think Corretto is a great choice, and something you can be confident will be patched in a timely manner.