What's the difference between Spigot and CraftBukkit Minecraft servers?

I'm making a small server for me and my friends, on a Raspberry Pi. All the guides I have seen so far use Spigot, but there isn't that much documentation that I can find on what they did to make it more lightweight.

What features are lacking? Or did they just make it handle the RAM more efficient but still have 100% the same features? Can I still use the same Bukkit plugins for my server? Also, with the modifications, with a Minecraft update, do I have to wait for Minecraft → CraftBukkit → Spigot/Plugins to get all updated before I can update my server? (i.e., does Spigot lag behind CraftBukkit's update cycle?) If so, does it generally take a long time to do this?

Solution 1:

Spigot is a fork of CraftBukkit and implements the same Bukkit plugin API, and is designed to be a drop-in replacement for CraftBukkit.

The advantage of Spigot is extreme configurability. If you know what you're doing, you can see a 50% drop in RAM and CPU use. But that's a big if – since you're asking, you should probably assume that the extreme configurability of Spigot will cause you more trouble than it's worth right now. Spigot is kind of like the "Enterprise Server" version of CraftBukkit, intended for expertly-tuned dedicated servers.

Spigot does update slower too, since it depends on CraftBukkit development.

On the plus side, since they're compatible you can always start with CrafBukkit and then move to Spigot once you feel like you understand how to manage a Bukkit-based server. Believe me, there is plenty to learn just in setting up a "basic" CraftBukkit server.

Solution 2:

Spigot in my opinion is much better, recently after a DMCA take down spigot AND craftbukkit have become into the hands of the spigot crew to update. Spigot works the same as craftbukkit and has some more config options; however they are not hard to use. It will only take you 7min to go through the spigot config. Spigot and craftbukkit may take a little longer to be updated however this does not matter because they normally add support for versions of minecraft that have not come out yet in spigot. Spigot reduces the ram usage quite a bit making it so you can use more plugins on your server with less ram required than craftbukkit. For a long time after the DMCA take down spigot and craftbukkit were thought to be DEAD until spigot worked a way around it.

SUM UP: So in my opinion spigot is better. I have tested them both as I own a server for me and my friends that originally ran craftbukkit, but then I tested spigot and found it to be much better.