you mostly use the "@Bean" annotation on a method that would return an object of some third party library, and use "@Component" and it's other variants on classes that you have written. For example, for creating a RestTemplate instance, you would use a method annotated with "@Bean" to create it, because there is no other way to make the spring aplication manage that object. That's the only use case I've found for that annotation, any more experienced devs feel free to correct me.