@MappedSupperclass is different than the @Inheritance annotation.

@MappedSuperclass tells the JPA provider to include the base class persistent properties as if they were declared by the child class extending the superclass annotated with @MappedSuperclass.

However, the inheritance is only visible in the OOP world, since, from a database perspective, there’s no indication of the base class. Only the child class entity will have an associated mapped table.

The @Inheritance annotation is meant to materialize the OOP inheritance model in the database table structure. More, you can query a base class annotated with @Inheritance but you can’t do that for a base class annotated with @MappedSuperclass.

Now, the reason why you’d want to use the @Inheritance JPA annotation is to implement behavior-driven patterns like the Strategy Pattern.

On the other hand, @MappedSuperclass is just a way to reuse both basic properties, associations, and even the entity @Id using a common base class. Nevertheless, you can achieve almost the same goal using an @Embeddable type. The only major difference is that you can’t reuse an @Id definition with @Embeddable, but you can do it with @MappedSuperclass.