10 Best Spring Boot Courses in 2026 (Checked for Spring Boot 4)

Last updated: October 2026. Written by Josh Hutcheson. See our review methodology.

Spring Boot is the framework behind most Java back ends in production, which makes it one of the most directly employable skills a Java developer can add. It also changes: Spring Boot 4 arrived in November 2025 with Spring Framework 7, version 4.1 followed in June 2026, and the current release is 4.1.1. Spring Boot 3.5’s free support ended on 30 June 2026. So the first thing to check in any Spring course is which version it teaches. We opened every course below on 17 October 2026 and recorded its rating, size, last update and version, and we read what Java developers recommend on r/SpringBoot and r/learnjava before ranking them.

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Best Spring Boot courses at a glance

Figures as shown on each course page on 17 October 2026. Udemy listed its courses at $14.99 for new learners that day; Udemy prices change constantly, so avoid paying its list price. “Spring Boot version” is the version named in the course title or description.

1. Spring Boot 4, Spring 7 and Hibernate for Beginners (Udemy): best overall

Chad Darby’s course has been the default Spring recommendation for years because he rebuilds it for each major release. The current version is updated for Spring Boot 4 and Spring Framework 7 (July 2026) and has 4.6 stars from 95,594 ratings and 467,388 students, with 35.5 hours across 419 lectures. It covers Spring core, annotations and Java configuration, Spring REST and MVC, AOP, Hibernate and JPA, Spring Data JPA and Data REST, Spring Boot Security, OpenAPI and Swagger, and Thymeleaf, using IntelliJ’s free edition and Maven. You type every line with him, and he answers questions in the Q&A, which Reddit reviewers mention often.

Prerequisite: core Java (classes, collections, exceptions). This is a framework course, not a Java course. If you need Java first, see our best Java courses.

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2. Master Microservices with Spring Boot and Spring Cloud (Udemy): the microservices standard

in28Minutes’ microservices course (4.5 stars from 60,711 ratings, 306,778 students, 22.5 hours, updated May 2026) has been the answer to “best course for Spring Boot and microservices” for years. It builds REST services first (validation, exception handling, HATEOAS, versioning, OpenAPI documentation, Actuator), then composes them with Spring Cloud: Eureka naming server, an API gateway, client-side load balancing, centralized configuration with Spring Cloud Config, Feign clients, Resilience4j fault tolerance and Zipkin tracing, then Docker and Kubernetes. That vocabulary maps directly onto senior Java interview questions.

Sequence note: take it after Darby’s course or equivalent experience; microservices land badly while you are still learning dependency injection. Its title still names Spring Boot 3, so expect some setup differences on Spring Boot 4. Our best microservices courses guide covers the topic beyond Spring.

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3. Learn Spring Boot 3 in 100 Steps (Udemy): the step-driven alternative

Same team, opposite approach to Darby: Spring Boot in 100 Steps (4.7 stars from 19,350 ratings, 117,867 students, 18 hours, updated May 2026) breaks the framework into 100 short hands-on steps: auto-configuration and starter projects, a web application and REST API, JPA and Hibernate, unit and integration tests with Spring Boot Starter Test, Actuator, profiles and embedded servers. Its tighter scope makes it the faster route to a first working REST API.

The honest caveat: it still teaches Spring Boot 3, and Spring Boot 3.5’s free support ended on 30 June 2026. The concepts carry over to version 4; the version-specific setup does not always. Pick it if you learn by typing and want momentum; pick Darby’s if you want the current version.

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4. Master Spring Boot 3 and Spring Framework 6 with Java (Udemy): best for Spring core in depth

in28Minutes’ longer Master Spring Boot 3 and Spring Framework 6 (4.5 stars from 12,182 ratings, 75,521 students, 41.5 hours across 462 lectures, updated August 2026) starts from Spring Framework fundamentals with no previous experience assumed, then covers Spring Boot, Spring Data JPA, a web application and a full-stack project with React and Spring Boot, with JUnit and Mockito. It suits learners who want to understand the Spring container properly before relying on Boot’s defaults.

5. Spring Boot 4, Spring Framework 7: Beginner to Guru (Udemy): best for breadth

John Thompson’s Beginner to Guru course (4.4 stars from 3,126 ratings, 29,371 students, 48 hours across 574 lectures, updated August 2026) is built on Spring Boot 4, Spring Framework 7 and Java 25, and covers far more ground than the others: Spring MVC and WebFlux, Spring Data JPA, Mongo and R2DBC, Spring Security with OAuth 2.0 and the Spring Authorization Server, RestClient and WebClient, event-driven microservices with Kafka, MockMvc and JUnit testing, Flyway, Docker, Docker Compose and Kubernetes, and Spring AI. Reddit readers have recommended Thompson’s courses as an alternative to Darby. Its rating sample is smaller, so treat it as the second course rather than the first.

See Beginner to Guru on Udemy →

6. Spring Security Zero to Master (Udemy): best for security

Spring Security is where many Spring developers get stuck, and Eazy Bytes’ Spring Security Zero to Master is the focused fix: 4.7 stars from 11,223 ratings, 73,474 students, 24.5 hours, updated October 2026. It explains how Spring Security works, then CSRF, CORS, JWT and OAuth2, role- and authority-based authorization, and method-level security. Courses that still configure security with WebSecurityConfigurerAdapter teach a removed API; this one does not.

7. Testing Spring Boot: Beginner to Guru (Udemy): best for testing

Testing is the skill most Spring tutorials skip and most interviewers ask about. John Thompson’s Testing Spring Boot (4.3 stars from 3,500 ratings, 29,118 students, 20.5 hours, updated August 2026) covers JUnit, Mockito, MockMvc and testing a Spring Boot application layer by layer. Take it once you have built one Spring Boot project.

8. Spring Academy: the official source (free)

Spring Academy is the official training site from the Spring team (now part of Broadcom), with free courses written by people who work on the framework. Building a REST API with Spring Boot is a beginner course of 20 lessons (about 5 hours) with interactive labs, from Spring Initializr to Spring Security. The Spring Boot course runs 45 lessons (about 11.5 hours); Spring Framework Essentials is 48 lessons; and a Spring AI introduction (26 lessons) covers chat, retrieval-augmented generation, tool calling and MCP. A paid Pro course walks through upgrading from Spring Boot 3.5 to 4.1. The site also hosts the free Spring Certified Professional learning path (4 courses) that prepares you for the official exam.

Its style is closer to reference material than a Udemy course, and Reddit learners often use it after a structured course to go deeper on security or testing. We earn nothing from this recommendation.

9. Marco Behler: best deep, opinionated explanations

Marco Behler writes some of the clearest guides on how Spring and Spring Boot actually work, including what autoconfiguration does under the hood, and sells in-depth paid courses on his site. A highly upvoted r/learnjava answer recommends starting with his free YouTube videos and guides and moving to the paid course if you want the premium version. We are not an affiliate.

10. Building Enterprise Applications with Spring Boot (Educative): best text-based course

If you read faster than you watch, Educative’s Building Enterprise Applications with Spring Boot (by Arpan Paliwal, 37 lessons across 8 modules with 9 quizzes, updated August 2026) teaches auto-configuration, database integration and web services by building one application in the browser, with no local setup.

Also worth knowing

Coursera (Google Cloud): Building Scalable Java Microservices with Spring Boot and Spring Cloud is a short, one-module course (Coursera estimates about an hour) on running Spring Boot microservices with Google Cloud services such as Pub/Sub, Cloud SQL, Spanner and Cloud Trace. It has 4.3 stars from 1,364 reviews. It is useful if your employer runs Java on Google Cloud, and too narrow as a first course; see our Google Cloud courses guide for that path.

Udacity: if you want one structured program with human-reviewed projects instead of separate video courses, Udacity’s Java web developer program runs from Spring core through persistence, REST, security and production deployment. It lists Spring Boot as a prerequisite, so take a beginner course above first. See our Udacity Java Web Developer Nanodegree review.

What a current Spring Boot course must cover

Use this as a currency filter before buying any Spring course, including ones not on this list:

The quick test: search a course’s curriculum for “Spring Boot 4” or “jakarta.” If neither appears, it predates the current platform and you will spend time reconciling its code with reality.

Spring Boot versions in 2026: what to learn

Dates from endoflife.date and spring.io, read 17 October 2026. Spring Boot 4.1.1 requires Java 17 or later and supports up to Java 26 (system requirements).

Learn Spring Boot 4. Courses on Spring Boot 3 still teach the right concepts, because the Jakarta move, the security configuration style and the starter model all carried over, but new projects and most job postings now expect 4.

Spring vs Spring Boot: what is the difference?

Spring Framework is the underlying toolkit: dependency injection, the application context, Spring MVC, data access and transactions. Spring Boot sits on top and makes decisions for you: it auto-configures beans based on what is on the classpath, ships starter dependencies such as spring-boot-starter-web, embeds a server (Tomcat by default, or Jetty), and adds production features through Actuator. In practice, almost every new Spring application is a Spring Boot application, which is why courses now teach Boot first and explain the Spring core underneath as it comes up.

Three projects that show employers you know Spring Boot

A secured REST API. A CRUD API with Spring Data JPA, validation, error handling, JWT authentication with Spring Security, OpenAPI documentation and tests. This single project covers most junior interview questions.

A full-stack application. The same API with a React or Angular front end, deployed in Docker with a managed database. in28Minutes’ Master Spring Boot 3 course builds one with React if you want a guided version.

Two services that talk to each other. Split one feature into a second service, connect them with a REST client or Kafka, and add Actuator health checks and tracing. This is the bridge into microservices interviews.

Preparing for Spring Boot interviews

Interview questions cluster around a few topics: how auto-configuration and starters work, bean scopes and the application context, transactions and lazy loading in JPA, how a request moves through Spring Security, and, for senior roles, service discovery, resilience and distributed tracing. Darby’s course and the in28Minutes microservices course map onto these well, and explaining your own project’s design choices out loud is the best practice there is.

Free Spring Boot resources that hold up

Beyond Spring Academy, the official spring.io guides are short, current, task-focused walkthroughs maintained alongside the framework, and Baeldung is the de facto encyclopedia of Spring how-tos that most developers land on from search anyway. On YouTube, Java Brains, Dan Vega and Laurentiu Spilca are the names Reddit recommends most for Spring. The pattern we keep seeing: free resources answer questions well but do not sequence a curriculum, which is what you are buying for the price of a Udemy course.

Is there a real Spring Boot certification?

There is no exam called “Spring Boot certification.” What exists is the Spring Certified Professional, the official credential from the Spring team, described by Spring Academy as the credential for Java developers who want to master the major features of Spring and Spring Boot. Spring Academy’s free learning path prepares you for it; check the current exam details there before booking. Honest value assessment: in Java enterprise consulting and some large employers it is a real differentiator; at product companies, interviewers weigh a deployed project more. A Udemy certificate of completion is not a certification. For Spring Framework courses beyond Spring Boot, see our best Spring Framework courses.

The learning path that gets you hired

For a Java developer adding Spring Boot: Darby’s course (a few weeks at evening pace), then one project of your own that is not a tutorial clone (a REST API with authentication, persistence and tests), then Spring Security properly, then the microservices course when you target senior or distributed-systems roles. For interview prep, microservices vocabulary plus one real design trade-off you can talk through beats a stack of certificates. If core Java is not solid yet, fix that first; every Spring course assumes it, and our coding bootcamps guide covers the from-zero paths. Total cost on Udemy sales for the core path: well under $50.

Frequently asked questions

What is the best Spring Boot course in 2026?

Chad Darby’s Spring Boot 4, Spring 7 and Hibernate for Beginners on Udemy: 4.6 stars from 95,594 ratings, 467,388 students and 35.5 hours, updated July 2026 for Spring Boot 4. For microservices, in28Minutes’ Master Microservices with Spring Boot and Spring Cloud is the standard follow-up. The best free option is Spring Academy, the official training site.

Is there any certification for Spring Boot?

There is no exam called a Spring Boot certification. The official credential is the Spring Certified Professional, and Spring Academy runs a free Spring Certified Professional learning path (4 courses) that prepares you for the exam. Udemy and Coursera certificates of completion are not certifications in the credential sense.

Can I learn Spring Boot for free?

Yes. Spring Academy’s courses are free, including Building a REST API with Spring Boot (20 lessons, about 5 hours) and the Spring Boot course (45 lessons, about 11.5 hours). The official spring.io guides, Baeldung’s tutorials and YouTube channels such as Java Brains, Dan Vega and Marco Behler’s are also free.

Should I learn Spring before Spring Boot?

No. Modern courses teach Spring Boot first and introduce core Spring ideas (dependency injection, the application context, configuration) as they come up, which is how the framework is used at work. You do need core Java first: classes, collections, exceptions, and ideally lambdas and streams.

Is Spring Boot hard to learn?

Spring Boot itself makes Spring easier by configuring most things for you, but the ecosystem is large. Beginners usually find dependency injection, JPA relationships and Spring Security the hardest parts. A structured course plus one project of your own gets most Java developers productive in three to six weeks.

Which Spring Boot version should I learn?

Spring Boot 4. Version 4.0 came out in November 2025, 4.1 followed in June 2026, and the current release is 4.1.1. Spring Boot 3.5’s free open-source support ended on 30 June 2026. Most of what a Spring Boot 3 course teaches still applies, but choose a course updated for Spring Boot 4 when you can.

What Java version do I need for Spring Boot 4?

Spring Boot 4.1.1 requires at least Java 17 and supports versions up to Java 26. Installing the newest long-term-support JDK, Java 25, works with every current course.

How long does it take to learn Spring Boot?

A Java developer can build working Spring Boot REST services after three to six weeks of evening study. Microservices with Spring Cloud add another one to two months. Without solid Java, plan on roughly double.

Is Spring Boot free?

Yes. Spring Boot is open source under the Apache 2.0 license, and there is no license cost to use it in commercial software. Broadcom sells paid enterprise support, including longer support for older versions, but you do not need it to learn or use Spring Boot.

Spring Boot vs Node.js or Django: which back end should I learn?

Follow your job market. Spring Boot dominates enterprise back ends in banking, insurance, logistics and large SaaS companies; Node.js leans toward startups and JavaScript shops; Django follows Python-heavy teams. If you already know Java, Spring Boot is the obvious choice.

Related: Spring assumes solid core Java. If you need to build that first, our guide to the best Java courses compares Tim Buchalka’s Java Masterclass, the free University of Helsinki MOOC and Duke on Coursera, checked in October 2026.

Related: Building event-driven Spring Boot services? Our guide to the best Apache Kafka courses ranks the Kafka courses for Spring developers, including Sergey Kargopolov’s Event-Driven Spring Boot Microservices, alongside Maarek’s series.

Related guides

Best Google Cloud Courses • Best Coding Bootcamps • Best Online Courses in 2026, by Subject • Best Docker Courses

Start with Darby’s course →

Related: Best Spring Framework Courses.