Azul Zulu

Azul Zulu is a build of OpenJDK from Azul, offered as Azul Core for Java 8, 11, 17, 21 and 25 across Linux, Windows and macOS, alongside Azul Prime as a high-performance runtime and Azul Payara Micro for cloud-native microservices.

Positioning Azul Core explicitly as a drop-in Oracle Java replacement is the whole commercial pitch and it names the market accurately. Oracle's move to employee-based Java licensing produced bills that surprised a great many organisations, and the resulting migration to alternative builds is what Azul sells into rather than a technical shortcoming in Oracle's runtime.

Azul Prime is the genuinely differentiated product rather than the drop-in build, since it addresses garbage collection pause times that matter to latency-sensitive workloads such as trading systems and advertising exchanges, and that is a real engineering difference rather than a repackaging.

Framing the licence saving as funding AI initiatives is marketing rather than substance, but the underlying arithmetic is real for a large Java estate: Oracle prices Java per employee rather than per installation, so a company with ten thousand staff and forty Java applications pays on headcount regardless of how little Java it runs. Support is what Azul actually charges for, with the builds themselves downloadable, and it also sells migration assistance for moving an existing estate across. Rates are not published on the Azul pricing page.