Spring MVC is a complete HTTP oriented MVC framework managed by the Spring Framework and based in Servlets. It would be equivalent to JSF in the JavaEE stack. The most popular elements in it are classes annotated with @Controller , where you implement methods you can access using different HTTP requests. It has an equivalent @RestController to implement REST based APIs. Spring boot is a utility for setting up applications quickly, offering an out of the box configuration in order to build Spring powered applications. As you may know, Spring integrates a wide range of different modules in its umbrella , as spring-core , spring-data , spring-web (which includes Spring MVC, by the way) and so on. With this tool you can tell Spring how many of them to use and you'll get a fast setup for them (you are allowed to change it by yourself later on). spring boot tutorial spring mvc