Atomikos and Narayana are similar projects and provide similar solutions. Atomikos provides additional benefits compared to Narayana. See the table below for details as to how Atomikos compares to Narayana.

Why trust us?

We offer free trials to qualified users and we get a lot of feedback from them. Some of these users come from the JBoss platform. We also know and respect Mark Little (he is now the CTO of Red Hat but used to be the lead of Narayana project). He's so passionate about his project that he will correct any mistakes we might put on this page - guaranteed.

Comparison table

Feature	Benefit	Atomikos	JBoss (Narayana)
XA transactions	Standards-based reliability
Elastic scaling	One shared configuration that can scale up and down
Microservices support	Commit/rollback across several microservices
Built-in connection pools	No need to integrate with third-party pools
Embeddable in your application	Light-weight, easy to deploy, easy to test in IDE, fast turnaround times for development
Spring Boot 3 & 4 integration	Works in the most popular Java stack, incl. the latest versions
Tomcat integration	Works in the most popular web container
Cloud-native recovery	Recovery survives elastic/replaced nodes via a shared-database log, with no per-node identity setup
Commercial support available	Fast solutions for problems, directly from the transaction-manager vendor
Easy to configure	Works standalone out-of-the-box, outside any vendor stack

What people say

Narayana is technically sound, but its main focus is integration in the JBoss stack. That makes it harder to configure outside, and a less obvious choice if you want to use your own platform like Spring, Tomcat or Spring Boot. Narayana does perform automatic, periodic recovery; but in elastic or Kubernetes deployments that recovery needs careful setup - a unique node identifier per instance and each node's transaction logs kept reachable - or in-doubt transactions can end up needing manual attention. Atomikos ExtremeTransactions keeps the recovery log in a shared database (LogCloud Documentation), so recovery survives replaced or rescaled nodes without that per-node plumbing.

Our take

If you're in the JBoss ecosystem, consider using Narayana. It's not a bad product and integrates well within the JBoss stack. In all other cases, consider Atomikos because our product was designed for independent use - outside of any vendor stack. This is especially true for modern Spring Boot 3 and 4 applications and cloud/Kubernetes deployments, where Atomikos ships dedicated starters and shared-database recovery out of the box, and where commercial support and indemnification come directly from us rather than bundled inside a separate platform subscription.

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