Difference between String, StringBuffer and StringBuilder?

String is immutable and final in java, so whenever we do String manipulation, it creates a new String. String manipulations are resource consuming, so java provides two utility classes for String manipulations – StringBuffer and StringBuilder.
StringBuffer and StringBuilder are mutable classes. StringBuffer operations are thread-safe and synchronized where StringBuilder operations are not thread-safe. So when multiple threads are working on same String, we should use StringBuffer but in single threaded environment we should use StringBuilder.
StringBuilder performance is fast than StringBuffer because of no overhead of synchronization.

Check this post for extensive details about String vs StringBuffer vs StringBuilder.
Read this post for benchmarking of StringBuffer vs StringBuilder.