Answer by Gayan Weerakutti for When to use LinkedList over ArrayList in Java?

You can use one over the other based on the time complexities of the operations that you'd perform on that particular List.

|---------------------|---------------------|--------------------|------------||      Operation      |     ArrayList       |     LinkedList     |   Winner   ||---------------------|---------------------|--------------------|------------||     get(index)      |       O(1)          |         O(n)       | ArrayList  ||                     |                     |  n/4 steps in avg  |            ||---------------------|---------------------|--------------------|------------||      add(E)         |       O(1)          |         O(1)       | LinkedList ||                     |---------------------|--------------------|            ||                     | O(n) in worst case  |                    |            ||---------------------|---------------------|--------------------|------------||    add(index, E)    |       O(n)          |         O(n)       | LinkedList ||                     |     n/2 steps       |      n/4 steps     |            ||                     |---------------------|--------------------|            ||                     |                     |  O(1) if index = 0 |            ||---------------------|---------------------|--------------------|------------||  remove(index, E)   |       O(n)          |         O(n)       | LinkedList ||                     |---------------------|--------------------|            ||                     |     n/2 steps       |      n/4 steps     |            ||---------------------|---------------------|--------------------|------------||  Iterator.remove()  |       O(n)          |         O(1)       | LinkedList ||  ListIterator.add() |                     |                    |            ||---------------------|---------------------|--------------------|------------||--------------------------------------|-----------------------------------||              ArrayList               |            LinkedList             ||--------------------------------------|-----------------------------------||     Allows fast read access          |   Retrieving element takes O(n)   ||--------------------------------------|-----------------------------------||   Adding an element require shifting | o(1) [but traversing takes time]  ||       all the later elements         |                                   ||--------------------------------------|-----------------------------------||   To add more elements than capacity ||    new array need to be allocated    ||--------------------------------------|