HATEOAS means Hypermedia As The Engine Of Application State ResourceSupport - support class for building DTOs with links ControllerLinkBuilder - allows to create links by pointing to controller classes (Spring MVC controllers or JAX-RS resource classes) With ControllerLinkBuilder you depend on controller classes in order to create links. @EnableEntityLinks - inspects Spring MVC controllers and JAX-RS resource for @ExposesResourceFor(model class) and allows injecting of EntityLinks With EnableEntityLinks you depend on model/business classes in order to create links; I think it's better instead of ControllerLinkBuilder.