Plugins vs mods for Minecraft: What's the difference?

One of the coolest features of Minecraft is the ability for community members to add new features, such as structures, mobs, biomes, and mechanics, quite easily. Creators can add content in many ways, ranging from texture and resource packs to mods and plugins. With so many options for ways to change the game, keeping them differentiated can be hard.

On a grander scale, Minecraft's best mods are large content packs, while plugins are minor adjustments and tweaks. But there's more to these differences than just that, as detailed below.

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What are plugins?

The Modrinth website even has an entire section dedicated to plugins (Image via Modrinth)

Plugins are a unique way to modify the base game due to not actually adding in any new code. They instead take existing code, reuse it, and recombine it to create new things. They're also restricted to dedicated servers, vanilla or modded, and will only interact with server clients.

While this considerably limits their scope, as anything not possible within the base game is also not possible with a plugin, it also means players don't need to download anything to see a plugin work correctly on one of Minecraft's best multiplayer servers. Plugins are also very light in terms of performance issues since they're not actually adding anything new to the game.

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What are Minecraft mods?

Mods tend to add huge chunks of new content to the game (Image via Mojang Studios)

On the other hand, Minecraft's best overhaul mods tend to add to and expand huge areas of the vanilla game. However, adding more biomes, mobs, and structures to the list of already existing ones needs new code to actually work. Creating completely new items, mobs, Minecraft structures, and biomes by just using remixed vanilla code is simply not possible.

In fact, to even use mods, players will need to create a separate instance of the game with a modloader installed on it. This process isn't hard, but it can be confusing for new players. Thankfully, programs like CurseForge and Modrinth act as alternatives for the vanilla launcher that can handle the installation of both vanilla instances, modloaders, and mods automatically.

Additionally, mods have a higher performance impact on players and servers due to requiring extra resources to load and keep up with extra content. They can also be used outside of multiplayer clients.

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Putting it all together

CurseForge is an amazing alternate launcher for automating the modding process (Image via CurseForge)

Plugins can be used without modloaders as nothing extra needs to load or be injected. This makes them perfect for players wanting to add some smaller tweaks to a private vanilla server.

Mods, in contrast, are larger and require separate instances of the game to be set up, either in the vanilla launcher or one of Minecraft's best alternative launchers. This essentially means that mods are more technically involved and are much harder to use via multiplayer. Setting up a server with a custom Minecraft modpack is possible, but it is much harder than using plugins.

Plugins and mods can also not be used in conjunction, so players will need to decide which they want before setting up a server.