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Asked: 2026-05-10T20:39:27+00:00

I’m looking for a good Java obfuscator. I’ve done initial research into the following

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I’m looking for a good Java obfuscator.

I’ve done initial research into the following Java obfuscators: proguard, yguard, retroguard, dasho, allatori, jshrink, smokescreen, jobfuscate, marvin, jbco, jode, javaguard, jarg, joga, cafebabe, donquixote, mwobfu, bbmug, zelix klassmaster, sandmark, jcloak, thicket, blufuscator, and java code protector.

I tried proguard and it has a really nice GUI, seems really stable, and seems to be the most popular, but it seemed to not like some enumeration on a referenced jar file (not within the code I was trying to obfuscate) which was weird. Yguard seems to require some interaction with ant, which I didn’t know too much about.

What is a good java obfuscator? It doesn’t need to be free, it just needs to work well and be easy to use.

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  1. I use ProGuard heavily for all my release builds and I have found it is excellent. I can’t recommend it enough!

    I have encountered obscure bugs caused by it’s optimizations on several occasions and I now disable optimizations across the board – haven’t had a problem caused by ProGuard since. Though, to be fair, these were all quite some versions ago – YMMV.

    I used to use the GUI only to get a config started, and then I resort to editing the text config myself, which is really very simple to do. These days I do the config by hand.

    I have quite complex projects all of which involve dynamic loading and reflection. I also heavily use reflection for a callback implementation. ProGuard has coped with these very well.

    EDIT: We also use DashO Pro for one of our products – I looked into it for packaging the products I am responsible for and concluded that it’s configuration was too convoluted and complex; also integrating it into the build script seemed like a bit of a pain. But again, to be fair, this was circa 2001… so it might be better in current versions.

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