JTA and JDBC

In order for a difference to exist, there should be something in common, and apart from being database-related (although JTA is not only that), they have nothing more in common:

    JPA is a standard for Java object-relational mapping - it specifies a set of annotations and an interface -EntityManager to perform persistence operations with the mapped objects. Hibernate implements the JPA standard

    plain JDBC is a technology for accessing databases. It it what hibernate actually uses to perform the database operations, "under the hood". It uses JDBC to send queries to the database.

    JTA is a transaction API, and it is optional in Hibernate. It handles (logically) the transaction behaviour.  Hibernate implemented the JTA.