The evolving nature of web application development often necessitates evaluating and adopting novel paradigms to enhance efficiency and scalability. This research paper presents a comprehensive comparison between traditional Spring Boot applications and reactive ones, particularly focusing on the reactive WebFlux framework. We discuss the fundamental architectural differences, coding practices, and performance under varying load conditions. The tests reveal that reactive applications can exhibit significantly improved performance under high load conditions, offering up to ten times the speed of traditional Spring Boot applications while maintaining consistent responsiveness. However, the challenges associated with the reactive paradigm, including a steeper learning curve, complexity in handling nested entities, and difficulties in debugging, are noteworthy. The community support for traditional Spring Boot is also currently more extensive. Our findings suggest that the choice between the two paradigms should be carefully determined based on the specific needs of the application and the anticipated load. While the reactive approach can be powerful under high concurrency, the traditional Spring Boot approach remains a robust and straightforward solution for many applications.