@Component vs @Bean

 

@Component is suitable for component scanning and automatic wiring.

Sometime an automatic configuration is not an option. When?

Let’s imagine that you want to wire components from 3^rd party libraries (you don’t have source code so you can’t annotate its classes with @Component), so automatic configuration is not possible.

The @Bean annotation returns an object that spring should register as bean in application context. The body of the method bears the logic responsible for creating the instance.