They're essentially the same, if your program is run from an interactive prompt and you haven't redirected stdin or stdout:
public class ConsoleTest {
public static void main(String[] args) {
System.out.println("Console is: " + System.console());
}
}
results in:
$ java ConsoleTest
Console is: java.io.Console@2747ee05
$ java ConsoleTest </dev/null
Console is: null
$ java ConsoleTest | cat
Console is: null
The reason Console exists is to provide features that are useful in the specific case that you're being run from an interactive command line:
Console will queue them up nicely, whereas if you used System.in/out then all of the prompts would appear simultaneously).Notice above that redirecting even one of the streams results in System.console() returning null; another irritation is that there's often no Console object available when spawned from another program such as Eclipse or Maven.