• Custom tags and beans accomplish the same goals -- encapsulating complex behavior into simple and accessible forms. 
  • There are several differences:
    • Custom tags can manipulate JSP content; beans cannot. 
    • Complex operations can be reduced to a significantly simpler form with custom tags than with beans. 
    • Custom tags require quite a bit more work to set up than do beans. 
    • Custom tags usually define relatively self-contained behavior, whereas beans are often defined in one servlet and used in a different servlet or JSP page. 
    • Custom tags are available only in JSP 1.1 and later, but beans can be used in all JSP 1.x versions.