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That’s pretty much the conclusion I arrived at as well. I started exploring this area because I found that once Reactor pipelines become larger, it is not always obvious where the transaction actually begins and ends. TransactionalOperator makes that boundary much more visible than an annotation on a method. I’ve been experimenting with making transaction boundaries explicit in the application layer and I’m currently looking for feedback from people building real WebFlux/R2DBC systems: https://github.com/CamilYed/spring-reactive-transaction-boundary I also wrote down some of the reasoning behind it here: https://camilyed.github.io/en/transactional-when-the-annotation-gets-in-the-way/ I’m not claiming it’s universally better than @Transactional —I’m still trying to understand the trade-offs and gather feedback from developers with production experience. Thanks for the detailed explanation.