CurseForge vs Modrinth: Where to Get Minecraft Mods

Both CurseForge and Modrinth are the right places to get Minecraft mods, and honestly they're the only two worth using — everything else, the 9minecraft-style pages and the mediafire mirrors sitting behind an adfly link, is where the actual malware lives. Both host the same things: mods, modpacks, resource packs, shaders, and data packs, all for the Java loaders you'd expect. The short version of my answer: start on Modrinth for a cleaner, faster site, and fall back to CurseForge when a mod or a legacy pack only lives there.

They carry the same content, and both are safe

The two sites overlap almost completely on what they host. Mods, modpacks, resource packs, shaders, data packs — you'll find all of it on either one, built for every loader that matters: Fabric, Forge, Quilt, and NeoForge (the 2023 Forge fork that a lot of newer packs now target first). CurseForge also carries Bukkit plugins and pre-made worlds; Modrinth also lists server plugins. But for someone installing mods, they're interchangeable in scope.

One thing that trips people up: all of this is Java Edition only. A mod .jar from either site will not run on Bedrock, full stop — Bedrock uses add-ons (behavior and resource packs), not Java loaders. If you're on the 26.x Java client, a .jar built for your exact version (26.3, 26.2 or 26.1) is what you're after; if you're on Bedrock, neither site is for you. There's more on that line in the mods-versus-plugins breakdown if the distinction is fuzzy.

On safety: use these two directly and skip the reuploads. Both platforms are first-party and legitimate, and neither is trying to sneak a link gate or a fake download button past you. They aren't magically immune, either — in mid-2023 the "Fractureiser" supply-chain malware slipped into a handful of files on CurseForge and Bukkit before it was caught and cleaned out. So keep your antivirus on. But that was the rare exception; the reupload sites are the everyday risk, and the fix there is just not going to them.

CurseForge: the big, old catalog

CurseForge is the largest and oldest of the two by a wide margin. It started as part of Curse, was bought by Twitch in 2016, then by Overwolf in 2020, which runs it today. It's multi-game — it also hosts addons for World of Warcraft, The Sims 4, and others — and its Minecraft section has years of back-catalog behind it. If a pack or mod has been around since the older versions, odds are it's here.

That depth is the real reason to come here. The long-running packs — All the Mods, RLCraft, SkyFactory, the FTB-era stuff — live on CurseForge, often with builds going back many Minecraft versions. If you want a specific legacy pack, this is usually the only place it still exists.

CurseForge has its own desktop app for browsing, one-click installs, and managing modpack instances, and it's genuinely handy for packs. There's no official Linux build, though — Windows and macOS only. The website itself is busier and heavier than Modrinth's, and you'll feel the difference the moment you switch between them.

Modrinth: newer, open, and quick

Modrinth is the younger platform — public beta around 2021 — and it's Minecraft-only. The whole thing is open source, developed in the open on GitHub, backend and frontend both. The site itself is the standout: faster, lighter, with faceted search that actually lets you filter by loader and version before you commit to a download.

Its signature is openness. Modrinth runs a documented, free REST API at api.modrinth.com/v2 that needs no key for reads and downloads, so third-party tools can pull from it without friction. Every file is freely downloadable through that API — there's no author opt-out that hides a file from other launchers. That matters more than it sounds, and I'll come back to it.

The Modrinth App is the first-party launcher, built on Tauri (Rust), open source, and — unlike CurseForge's app — cross-platform across Windows, macOS, and Linux. If you're on Linux and want a first-class official launcher, Modrinth is the one that covers you. The catalog is smaller than CurseForge's, but it's growing quickly, and a lot of newer, Fabric-forward mods land here first.

At a glance

	CurseForge	Modrinth
Catalog	Largest, oldest, multi-game	Smaller but growing fast, Minecraft-only
First-party app	CurseForge App (Windows, macOS)	Modrinth App (Windows, macOS, Linux)
Site experience	Busier and heavier	Cleaner and faster, strong filtering
API / openness	api.curseforge.com, needs a key; authors can opt out	api.modrinth.com/v2, open and free, no opt-out
Best for	Widest selection, legacy packs	A clean modern setup, Fabric/NeoForge, Linux

How they tie into launchers

Neither site's app is required to run mods. The official Minecraft launcher won't install mods on its own — you install a loader (Fabric, Forge, NeoForge, or Quilt) first, which adds its own profile, and then you drop .jar files into the mods folder yourself. On Windows that folder is %appdata%\.minecraft\mods; more generally it's mods inside .minecraft, or the per-instance mods folder if you're using a launcher that keeps instances separate.

Beyond the two first-party apps, the open-source Prism Launcher and ATLauncher can both browse and import content from CurseForge and Modrinth. So you've got real options: the official launcher plus a loader and manual .jar drops, or an instance manager that pulls from either site for you.

Here's where Modrinth's openness turns practical. CurseForge lets project authors opt out of third-party API distribution. When an author does that, Prism or ATLauncher can't auto-download that file — the site legitimately won't hand it over — and you have to grab it manually from the CurseForge website and drop it in yourself. It looks like a launcher bug the first time you hit it, but it isn't one. Modrinth has no equivalent gate, so its files always pull cleanly through the API.

Modpacks travel a little differently too. Modrinth uses the open .mrpack format; a CurseForge pack is a zip with a manifest.json inside that points at project and file IDs. Both first-party apps, plus Prism and ATLauncher, can import a pack from either source, so the format rarely gets in your way. If packs are new to you, the modpack-server explainer covers how the pieces line up.

The one rule that decides whether a mod loads

Match the loader and the exact Minecraft version. That's the rule, and almost every "why won't this work" comes back to breaking it. A Forge mod in a Fabric instance won't load and often crashes on startup — they're separate loaders that don't read each other's mods, which the Forge vs Fabric comparison gets into. A 26.1 build dropped into a 26.2 client fails the same way. On the mod's page — either site — set the filters to your loader and your exact version before you download, so you grab a 26.2 Fabric build for a 26.2 Fabric instance and not something close-but-wrong.

The order that works:

1. Install your loader first (Fabric, Forge, NeoForge, or Quilt). Running its installer adds a new profile — the vanilla launcher won't load mods without it.
2. On the mod page, filter to your exact Minecraft version and loader, then download that .jar plus any required dependencies.
3. For most Fabric mods, one of those dependencies is Fabric API — install it too, or the mod quietly fails to load.
4. Drop the .jar(s) into the mods folder — .minecraft/mods for the default launcher, or the instance's own folder in Prism, ATLauncher, or either first-party app.
5. Launch the loader profile and check the in-game mod list or the log. If the mod isn't there or the game crashed on load, the loader or version doesn't match — that's the answer nine times out of ten.

Two traps to watch for. Don't try to "fix" a mismatch by renaming the file or editing its version metadata to fake compatibility — that doesn't make the code compatible, it just moves the crash somewhere less obvious. And Fabric and Quilt aren't fully interchangeable: Quilt Loader runs most Fabric mods, but plain Fabric can't run a Quilt-only mod, so don't assume a Quilt-exclusive will work on Fabric. If you're setting Fabric up from scratch, the step-by-step Fabric install walks the whole thing, and if mods come up missing when you join a server, the missing-mods fix is the one to read.

One nice thing to lean on: where a .jar came from doesn't affect compatibility at all. You can freely mix mods pulled from CurseForge and Modrinth in the same instance — only the loader and Minecraft version have to line up.

Where I land

Modrinth for most people, most of the time. The site is faster and cleaner, the app runs on Linux as well as Windows and macOS, the open API means launchers never hit a locked file, and modern Fabric and NeoForge setups tend to be well covered there. Go to CurseForge when you need the widest possible selection or a specific legacy pack — All the Mods, RLCraft, an old FTB build — that only lives on it. In practice a lot of people end up using both, because availability follows the author, not the catalog: some mods are CurseForge-exclusive, some newer ones are Modrinth-first, and plenty are cross-posted to both. Whichever you land on, the loader-and-version rule is identical, and so is the advice to stay off the reupload sites.

FAQ

I picked the right loader and version and the game still won't launch. Now what?

Nine times out of ten it's a missing dependency or a conflict, not the version. Open the latest log — the launcher points you at it — and read the first error, which usually names the mod at fault outright; a lot of Fabric mods need Fabric API sitting next to them or they crash on load. If two mods are fighting, pull them out one at a time until the game boots, then add back the ones that survive. A mod that needs a newer build of another mod will say exactly that in the same log.

Do I need an account to download from either site?

Not to download. Both websites hand you the file with no login, no email, nothing, and if you only want the raw .jar files you can stay signed out the whole time. The apps are where a login shows up: the Modrinth App is a full Minecraft launcher, so to actually start the game it asks for your normal Microsoft sign-in — the same one vanilla uses — while browsing and downloading inside either app don't need an account.

A modpack I imported is broken. How do I tell which site it came from?

Look at the pack file itself. A .mrpack is a Modrinth pack; a plain .zip with a manifest.json inside is a CurseForge one, and that tells you which site's page to open for a fixed build or the comments where others report the same crash. If the import fails outright, it's usually the loader or Minecraft version the pack targets not matching what your launcher set up — the pack page lists both. Reinstalling the pack fresh, rather than patching a half-broken instance, clears most of these.

Do these sites work for shaders and resource packs too, or just mods?

Both, on both sites. Shaders go in the shaderpacks folder and resource packs in resourcepacks, inside your game directory — the sites just distribute them. Shaders need a shader loader to actually render (Iris on Fabric, or OptiFine), so the download itself is the easy part. Resource packs are lighter still and need no loader at all; the vanilla game reads them directly.