This thesis presents comparison of the JDBC API, which is standard API for communication between Java application and database, and Hibernate which is best-known ORM framework. ORM frameworks differ from JDBC API mainly because they provide automatic mapping between Java objects and tables from database. This is also the main advantage of Hibernate over JDBC API. The thesis is devided into two parts. The first part shows theoretical description of JDBC API and Hibernate, their development, architecture and their components, so that the second part of the thesis, where their comparison is presented, would be more understandable. During the comparison, examples were used which are made by the author of this thesis. The comparison was made in order to see the differences in JDBC API and Hibernate configuration, way of connecting to the database, implementation of entities, implementation of relathionships beteween entities, exception handling and way of performing basic CRUD operations. At the end, there is comparison of their performance and description of caching mechanism which is used by Hibernate to improve performance.