We are really excited to bring you data from our latest Node.js User Survey. This is our third annual user survey (2017 data and 2016 data). More than 1,600 people spanning more than 100+ countries and speaking at least 60 different languages participated in the survey, which was distributed in English and Chinese. Analysis of survey results conducted by third party consultant, Research Collaborative.

Image from Pixabay.

The survey’s primary objective is to profile Node.js user patterns and trends as well as identify potential areas of improvement and growth.

For this survey, we really wanted to make it as interactive as possible, so you could dig down to the data that is most interesting to you. Below are a few interesting pieces of data that we found with the survey, but please check out the website to get the data that interests you most.

Node.js Usage Patterns:

Nearly three in four users plan to increase their use of Node.js in the next 12 months with growth likely coming from outside the United States, particularly in Latin America or EMEA.

AWS Lambda has the advantage with 20 % of Node.js developers leveraging this serverless framework, while 9 % use Google Cloud Functions and 4 % use Azure Functions.

GraphQL, which is a good fit for new API-driven models such as serverless, is growing with 21 % of Node.js developers using the technology.

There’s a broad range of additional technologies and tools used with Node.js. The most common technologies used alongside Node.js include: databases (96 %), frontend frameworks/libraries (87 %), and Node.js frameworks (82 %), with use of of Angular 2 and Vue also increasing.

Node.js Business Benefits:

Survey respondents spend on average 60 % of their development time in Node.js, and consider themselves full-stack developers.

As with last year’s survey, many users say that Node.js has had a positive impact on their business — chiefly through increased developer productivity and satisfaction.

Three out of 10 survey respondents using Node.js for more than two years said the runtime helps attract new talent.

Deployment of Node.js Varies per Region:

Developers primarily deploy to AWS, while use of AWS in development is also growing. On-Premise infrastructure is also widely used, but has dropped for use in production since 2016 from 39 % to 33 %.

EMEA respondents are less likely than others to use AWS, preferring on-premise infrastructure; while US/CA respondents are also likely to be deploying via on-premise infrastructure.

Heroku is growing in both APAC and Latin America, and is one of the top choices for deployment for development in Latin America.

Living in a Polyglot World:

Node.js developers are using a range of other languages alongside Node.js — more than three on average, including primarily JavaScript, Python, Java and PHP.

In the past 12 months, Node.js was most commonly used with the following languages:

JavaScript — 93 %

Python — 37 %

Java — 35 %

PHP -31 %

However, PHP, Ruby, .Net and Java are among the many languages that Node.js developers say they will use less of in the next year, with use of Rust, JavaScript, Go and Swift on the rise.

Learning to Node(.js):

The primary way respondents are gaining informal coding education is via online courses without an instructor — particularly outside US/CA.

9 % of respondents learned Node.js through NodeSchool

While not widely used, tutoring is more popular in APAC than in other regions.

Recent improvements around education have registered with users as evidenced by improved scores for ease of learning Node.js, and for the availability and quality of resources.

The survey revealed more could be done, particularly in meeting the needs of some segments (APAC, EMEA and new users) and in some topic areas (Managing Node.js in Production and Node.js and Security).

New to Node.js? We recently asked folks what videos helped them learn Node.js, here’s how they responded.

These are just a few of the many data points that the Node.js Foundation team found interesting, please check out our website to discover additional insight and if you would like to see a summary of the data in deck form, we have a PDF for you too.

A special thank you to the Node.js Project website working group for helping us put the website together.

Article updated on 5.31.18 at 5:00pm ET: We originally stated incorrectly that Heroku jumped to 25 % from about 10 %; Digital Ocean jumped to 21 % up from less than 10 %; and Google Cloud Platform jumped to 16 % up from less than 10 % compared to last year’s survey. These numbers were comparing primary of last year vs net use of this year and are an incorrect comparison. Heroku stayed relatively the same compared to last year and Google Cloud Platform jumped from 12% to 16%. Digital Ocean was not pre-listed last year, but 11% of respondents filled out that they used this platform.