What's the advantage of a Java enum versus a class with public static final fields?

Question

1. Type safety and value safety.
2. Guaranteed singleton.
3. Ability to define and override methods.
4. Ability to use values in switch statement case statements without qualification.
5. Built-in sequentialization of values via ordinal().
6. Serialization by name not by value, which offers a degree of future-proofing.
7. EnumSet and EnumMap classes.

Technically one could indeed view enums as a class with a bunch of typed constants, and this is in fact how enum constants are implemented internally. Using an enum however gives you useful methods (Enum javadoc) that you would otherwise have to implement yourself, such as Enum.valueOf.

Nobody mentioned the ability to use them in switch statements; I'll throw that in as well.

This allows arbitrarily complex enums to be used in a clean way without using instanceof, potentially confusing if sequences, or non-string/int switching values. The canonical example is a state machine.

The primary advantage is type safety. With a set of constants, any value of the same intrinsic type could be used, introducing errors. With an enum only the applicable values can be used.

For example

public static final int SIZE_SMALL  = 1;
public static final int SIZE_MEDIUM = 2;
public static final int SIZE_LARGE  = 3;

public void setSize(int newSize) { ... }

obj.setSize(15); // Compiles but likely to fail later

vs

public enum Size { SMALL, MEDIUM, LARGE };

public void setSize(Size s) { ... }

obj.setSize( ? ); // Can't even express the above example with an enum

There is less confusion. Take Font for instance. It has a constructor that takes the name of the Font you want, its size and its style (new Font(String, int, int)). To this day I cannot remember if style or size goes first. If Font had used an enum for all of its different styles (PLAIN, BOLD, ITALIC, BOLD_ITALIC), its constructor would look like Font(String, Style, int), preventing any confusion. Unfortunately, enums weren't around when the Font class was created, and since Java has to maintain reverse compatibility, we will always be plagued by this ambiguity.

Of course, this is just an argument for using an enum instead of public static final constants. Enums are also perfect for singletons and implementing default behavior while allowing for later customization (I.E. the strategy pattern). An example of the latter is java.nio.file's OpenOption and StandardOpenOption: if a developer wanted to create his own non-standard OpenOption, he could.