Jakarta Persistence (formerly JPA) is a cornerstone of enterprise Java development, offering a standardized approach to object relational mapping (ORM). But when it comes to selecting a persistence provider, the decision isn’t one-size-fits-all. Hibernate, EclipseLink and OpenJPA are three leading options, each with unique strengths. But how do you know which is right for your project?

In this blog, we’ll give you a short overview of the core features, advantages and ideal use cases of these Jakarta Persistence providers to help you make an informed decision.

The defacto way of accessing relational data in a Jakarta EE application is through the use of the Jakarta Persistence API. For NoSQL data access, one can now use the much newerJakarta NoSQL API. Jakarta Persistence especially has worked quite well and been serving its purpose with both its support for native queries, JPQL and Criteria queries. However, modern data access paradigms have meant having to pull in third party libraries to enjoy some more abstractions.