Minecraft Realms or your own server: when do you outgrow Realms?

You're about to start a permanent Minecraft world with your friends, and then comes the big question: do you press the Realms button in the game, or do you rent a server of your own? Both give you a world that's online 24/7, even when your PC is switched off. Underneath, though, they differ a lot, and which one fits depends mostly on what kind of group you are. In this article we put them side by side honestly: what Realms costs, where its limits are, what your own server adds, and how to take your Realms world with you if you switch.

What Minecraft Realms is and what it costs

Realms is Mojang's official subscription service: with a few clicks from inside the game you rent a private world that's always on. No installation, no maintenance, and players can only get in if you invite them. There are two flavours, though, and they differ more than you'd think:

• Java Realms costs € 7,99 per month and is only available for Minecraft: Java Edition. You plus up to ten friends can play at the same time.
• Bedrock Realms comes in two variants: Realms at € 3,99 per month (you plus two friends at a time) and Realms Plus at € 7,99 per month (you plus ten friends, plus a catalogue of Marketplace content). Bedrock players join cross-platform from console, phone and Windows.

Important to know: a Java Realm and a Bedrock Realm are strictly separate. Java players can't join a Bedrock Realm and vice versa. That stays exactly the same on your own server, by the way, because the two editions each use their own server software and world format.

When Realms is perfectly fine

Let's be fair: for part of the player base, Realms is exactly right. If you recognise yourself in this, there's little reason to go to any more trouble:

• You play pure vanilla with a small, fixed group and you want to keep it that way.
• You have zero interest in tech and never want to see a setting, file or console.
• As a parent, you're looking for a safe, walled-off world for your kids, where only invited players can get in.

For those situations Realms does what it promises: set up in two minutes, and after that you never have to look at it again. That convenience is genuinely worth something.

Where you outgrow Realms

Still, many groups that seriously build together run into the same walls within a few months:

• A maximum of ten concurrent players. You can invite more people, but no more than ten can ever be online alongside you at the same time. For a growing community that's an instant showstopper.
• No plugins or mods; on Bedrock, add-ons at most. Java Realms runs vanilla only: no plugins for protecting builds or running an economy, no Forge or Fabric mods, no modpacks. Bedrock Realms is a different story: there you can activate add-ons (behaviour and resource packs) and Marketplace content, usually by uploading a local world that already has those packs to your Realm. Server plugins don't exist there either, and on neither edition do you reach the server files themselves. So a lot of what you see on big servers and YouTube channels still isn't possible on a Realm.
• Barely any configuration. You can adjust the difficulty and a handful of basic options, but that's it. No access to server.properties, no setting the view distance, no custom world generation options.
• Limited backup control. Realms keeps automatic backups and you can download your world; that part is handled nicely. But setting up your own backup schedule isn't possible, and you never get near the server files themselves.
• Inconsistent performance. Your Realm runs on Mojang's shared infrastructure and you have zero influence over the hardware. With big farms, lots of redstone or a well-filled world you'll notice it: lag you can't do anything about.

What your own server can do

A rented Minecraft server keeps the biggest advantage of Realms (it runs 24/7 in a data centre, not on your PC) and removes almost all of the restrictions. Side by side:

And then the price difference, because it's far smaller than you'd think. At MC-Node you rent a Java server from as little as € 0,50 per month and pay roughly € 1,10 per GB of RAM; a Bedrock server starts at € 2,50 per month. So for the amount you're spending on Realms right now, you rent a server with several GB of RAM, plugins, your own backups and full control. Everything runs on our own hardware with NVMe storage in the Previder data centre in Hengelo, DDoS protection is included and everything can be cancelled monthly. Have a look at the plans in the MC-Node Minecraft store or, if you play Bedrock, the Bedrock store.

In all honesty: your own server does ask slightly more of you than Realms. You pick your own server software, you install your own plugins, and if something goes wrong, restoring a backup is on you. Through the control panel that's all point-and-click work, but it's not quite the zero-effort deal of Realms. If you think that's a fair trade for all those extra possibilities, you're ready for a server of your own.

Moving your Realms world to your own server

The good news: you don't have to give up your progress. Downloading and moving your world is perfectly possible, and preferably you do it before cancelling your Realms subscription.

Java Edition

1. Open the Realms menu in Minecraft and go to your Realm's settings.
2. Choose to download the latest version of your world. The world then shows up as a regular singleplayer save in your saves folder.
3. Upload that world folder to your server via the control panel or SFTP: replace the world folder, or set level-name in server.properties to the name of your folder.
4. Start the server and walk around for a bit to check that everything is there.

Bedrock Edition

1. Open your Realm's settings and download the world to your local worlds. This is easiest on Windows.
2. Then export the world from your world list as a .mcworld file.
3. A .mcworld file is essentially a zip: extract it into the worlds folder of your Bedrock server and point the server configuration at that world.

One final pitfall: keep Java with Java and Bedrock with Bedrock. You can't just drop a Bedrock world onto a Java server or the other way around; the formats differ and a conversion rarely goes smoothly.

So: Realms or your own server?

Small vanilla group, no technical ambitions and ten players is plenty? Then happily stay on Realms; it does exactly what you need. But if you want plugins or mods, more than ten players, a grip on your backups or simply a world that doesn't stutter the moment the farms kick in, you've outgrown Realms. The price difference certainly won't hold you back, and your world simply moves with you.

Further reading

• How do I make a Minecraft server?
• The best Minecraft hosting in the Netherlands (honest comparison)
• Minecraft server at home vs renting: the honest trade-off
• Moving your Minecraft server to a new host, step by step