I did this research the last week and I ended up with the same 2 libraries. As I'm using Spring 3 (that adopts Jackson in its default Json view 'JacksonJsonView') it was more natural for me to do the same. The 2 lib are pretty much the same... at the end they simply map to a json file! :)

Anyway as you said Jackson has a + in performance and that's very important for me. The project is also quite active as you can see from their web page and that's a very good sign as well.


Jackson and Gson are the most complete Java JSON packages regarding actual data binding support; many other packages only provide primitive Map/List (or equivalent tree model) binding. Both have complete support for generic types, as well, as enough configurability for many common use cases.

Since I am more familiar with Jackson, here are some aspects where I think Jackson has more complete support than Gson (apologies if I miss a Gson feature):

  • Extensive annotation support; including full inheritance, and advanced "mix-in" annotations (associate annotations with a class for cases where you can not directly add them)
  • Streaming (incremental) reading, writing, for ultra-high performance (or memory-limited) use cases; can mix with data binding (bind sub-trees) -- EDIT: latest versions of Gson also include streaming reader
  • Tree model (DOM-like access); can convert between various models (tree <-> java object <-> stream)
  • Can use any constructors (or static factory methods), not just default constructor
  • Field and getter/setter access (earlier gson versions only used fields, this may have changed)
  • Out-of-box JAX-RS support
  • Interoperability: can also use JAXB annotations, has support/work-arounds for common packages (joda, ibatis, cglib), JVM languages (groovy, clojure, scala)
  • Ability to force static (declared) type handling for output
  • Support for deserializing polymorphic types (Jackson 1.5) -- can serialize AND deserialize things like List correctly (with additional type information)
  • Integrated support for binary content (base64 to/from JSON Strings)