🏆 The Top 50 Developer Tools of 2018

It's the moment you've been waiting for! Well, it's the one we've been waiting for, anyway. It's the 4th annual StackShare Awards! 🎉

This is your one-stop resource for developer tools, with a wrap up of what was hot in 2017 and what to be on the lookout for in 2018. We've analyzed thousands of data points to bring you these rankings. More on methodology at the end of the post. But first! The awards.

Here are the categories:

This is our biggest undertaking of every year, combing through our enormous piles of data to find the killer insights we know you want. This year we aggregated usage from 40K+ tech stacks, over 3 million unique visits, and thousands of developer comments, reviews, and votes across all of 2017 (more on methodology below). Let’s do this!

New Tool of the Year

#1: Lottie Our top new tool of the year is brought to us by the minds at Airbnb. Lottie is an open source mobile library for iOS, Android, and React Native that renders Adobe After Effects animations in real time, allowing apps to use animations as easily as they use static images. “Our goal is to support as many After Effects features as we possibly can, to allow for a lot more than simple icon animations,” says Lottie engineer Salih Abdul-Karim.





» Follow Lottie | » Tell developers why you chose Lottie

#3: LocalStack LocalStack is a fully functional local AWS cloud stack by none other than the good folks over at Atlassian. Features include continuous integration, cost-effective testing, and speed and ease of use. One comment on Hacker News reads, “One of the biggest 'drawbacks' of using AWS as a production platform is that making your development environment look like production is hard. Having to deploy to test is cumbersome and having a cost associated with each test can definitely introduce some sort of 'stress' and encourage people to not test incrementally. I wonder if this changes that. Having services like S3, Lambda and SQS available locally sounds super interesting.”





» Follow LocalStack | » Tell developers why you chose LocalStack

#6: Standup Standup integrates with all the tools you already use for source control and project management, including Jira, Trello, and GitHub, to deliver daily engineering progress reports, freeing up your engineers to do their work, rather than report on it. “We were doing some contract work for a customer that had stringent reporting requirements,” founder Kevin Coleman told us. “Compiling their reports was a manual, time-consuming process, but they were super high value for the customer. We decided to build a tool that would automate this report building process.





» Follow Standup | » Tell developers why you chose Standup

#7: Autotrack Google Analytics naturally appears in our list of top 10 Utility Tools this year, and it’s bringing along its new(ish) buddy Autotrack. Built by Google, Autotrack is a nifty little tool that automates some of the most common interactions most of us care about on our web pages. “Since most website owners care about a lot of the same types of user interactions, web developers end up writing the same code over and over again for every new site they build,” reads Autotrack’s README.





» Follow Autotrack | » Tell developers why you chose Autotrack

The Verdict:

There are always new tools, but not all of them battle their way out of obscurity to find widespread usage. These newcomers are still gaining traction but we’ve seen former top new tools find their ways into mainstream usage the following year, so may the odds be ever in their favor. This year’s top new tools are a mix of fresh startups and tools backed by established companies including Google, Atlassian, and two by Airbnb. And 8 of our 10 Top New Tools are open source this year; open source continues to offer opportunities for developers across the world to collaborate, build skills, and share knowledge.

New Tool of the Year (Runner-Up)

You can never have enough new tools. Okay, maybe you can (#stackbloat). But it doesn't hurt to do some window shopping. Below are the next 25 most popular new tools that were released in 2019. In 2019 we added over 1500 new tools (5X the number we added in 2018) to the StackShare database both open source and hosted software as a Service (SaaS). Same as last year, we're willing to bet the house on the fact that you can't get through this list without finding at least one tool you want to try out immediately 😏

#11: React Navigation React has made a strong showing this year in our top tools, and here’s one more React tool on the list. A flexible navigation library for React Native and web, React Navigation debuted on Hacker News last January to comments like “Awesome! A better navigator is the #2 feature request for React Native - this solves a huge pain point” and “Definitely going to try this out. Having a consistent navigation library seems to be the last missing puzzle when building cross platform apps.” Hackernoon said in November that “the React-Native community is finally settling for React-Navigation as the default navigation solution.”





» Follow React Navigation | » Tell developers why you chose React Navigation

#14: Castor Castor is a simple, live data dashboard tool. It allows you to present your data on any screen, from an iPad to a TV, formatted with their simple drag-and-drop widget interface; keep data updated in real time with webhooks. A commenter on ProductHunt had this to say: “Woah - just tried it out and I was definitely surprised about how great of an experience I had. The user interface, controls, and design is beautifully done - the graph is excellent.”





» Follow Castor | » Tell developers why you chose Castor

#15: Prepack Prepack is a tool by the team at Facebook that simplifies your JavaScript code to make it run faster. It rewrites a JavaScript bundle to produce new code that executes more efficiently. It’s similar to Closure Compiler, but not the same: Closure Compiler optimizes for file size, while Prepack optimizes for performance and minimizing computations.





» Follow Prepack | » Tell developers why you chose Prepack

#17: NanoNets NanoNets is a machine learning API that uses less data. Founded in December 2016, NanoNets made its way to #17 in our list by the end of 2017 due to its easy setup and ease of use; it allows developers to train a model with no machine learning experience.





» Follow NanoNets | » Tell developers why you chose NanoNets

Application & Data Tool of the Year

#2: JavaScript React may have rocketed to the top of the list, but it’s riding on the back of JavaScript all the way up. For the second year in a row JavaScript is our top language, further proven by the high proportion of JavaScript tools, libraries, and frameworks in the top 10.





» Follow JavaScript | » See recent tech decisions about JavaScript

The Verdict:

2017 continued to be dominated by front-end technologies, with 6 of our top 10 Application & Data tools falling under that umbrella. Of those, 4 were JavaScript tools. Data is on the rise, with Redis earning the title of our first database to crack the top 10. And just beyond the top 10 sit MySQL, PostgreSQL, and MongoDB—#13, #14, and #16, respectively. Maybe they’ll move up the list in 2018?

Utility Tool of the Year

#6: At number 6, email service SendGrid has built a loyal base of developer and marketer customers who love it for its easy setup, affordability, and reliability. Easy integrations with Heroku and Azure also get high marks. SendGrid went public in November with a hugely successful IPO, shares surging nearly 13% on the first day

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The Verdict:

Last year we saw Postman take the #2 spot, and this year it’s overtaken Google Analytics at the top of the heap. Mailgun and Mandrill didn’t make the list at all this year, and SendGrid dropped from #4 to #6, so email is still hot, but Postman is moving ahead of the pack. Replacing some of the transactional email tools we saw last year are search solutions Algolia (on the list for the first time) and Elasticsearch (moving from #3 last year to #2 this year). And in the payment-processing world, Stripe has knocked PayPal off the list, securing its spot as the developer-favorite payment service.

DevOps Tool of the Year

#10: Kubernetes The container movement continued to gain steam throughout 2017, Docker hanging onto its spot at the top but making room for Kubernetes to make its own mark. In November Amazon AWS announced long-awaited support for Kubernetes on top of ECS in the form of EKS, and even Docker found a way to play nicely together, announcing native Kubernetes support in October (“Kubernetes and Swarm, side by side”). In December Kubernetes announced Kubeflow, an open source project to make machine learning stacks easier to use on the Kubernetes platform.





» Follow Kubernetes | » See recent tech decisions about Kubernetes

The Verdict:

DevOps this year is still a Git game with GitHub, BitBucket, and GitLab all making the list once more, and the rise of containerization we predicted last year has come to pass with Docker and Kubernetes staying strong. Atom wiped out Sublime to take the only text editor spot, and conspicuously absent are both Gulp and Grunt; both were dethroned in the JS task runners space by Webpack.

Business Tool of the Year

#1: Slack No surprise here. Slack has steadily overtaken the workplace chat industry, and it’s not difficult to understand why. The huge number of integrations, mobile-friendliness, and clean UI make it a joy to use. In January 2017 Slack unveiled its Enterprise Grid product, bringing the platform squarely into the enterprise space for once and for all. In October Slack rolled out an update to its screen-sharing feature that allows participants to interact with the shared screen.





» Follow Slack | » See recent tech decisions about Slack

#4: Jira Atlassian’s flagship product remains enormously popular among agile development teams who call it flexible, powerful, and customizable. Fans also cite its REST API, easy separation of projects, and the fact that it runs in the cloud as benefits. In May they released JIRA Cloud for iPad, and November saw Atlassian make this exciting announcement: “After 13+ years and over 2,500 votes, we’re closing the #1 customer voted feature request in our public issue tracker: Global Admins can now add priority schemes to the configuration options in Jira Software.”





» Follow Jira | » See recent tech decisions about Jira

#5: InVision Jumping up 3 spots from #8 last year, InVision continues to set the bar high for prototyping software. Gone are the days designers and developers wasted hours building something nobody wanted; now InVision allows teams to quickly create interactive, clickable prototypes that can be iterated and refined before anybody builds anything. InVision teased an upcoming release (codename: V7) at the end of 2017, so expect to see some exciting things out of Invision in 2018.





» Follow InVision | » See recent tech decisions about InVision

The Verdict:

Communication and task management are still top priorities here, with Slack and Trello holding the top spots a second year in a row, joined by Asana, JIRA, and Intercom. Gone from the top 10 are old favorites like MailChimp, Skype, and Confluence, replaced by newcomers: Passbolt was a top new tool last year and has held onto its momentum, rising to the top above its more established competition this year. React Sketchapp is the rare tool that’s both new this year and in the top 10 for its category, indicating a real interest in bridging the gap between engineering and design (also represented by InVision).

Top Stack Stories

Gather 'round the campfire folks, it's story time! 2017 was packed full of some awesome scaling tales. While the list is dominated by insights into how consumer and enterprise companies are scaling to billions of things- it's no surprise that the top spot went to this year's #1 Application & Data tool: React. Pete Hunt, one of the original creators of React.js, sat down with us to explain how React came about and how the Facebook/Instagram teams set the library up for success. If you missed any of these stories, now is the time to double back and see what you missed.

Top Developers

Without you, there is no us. Developers power everything you see here on StackShare (literally). This year, we wanted to take a moment to thank the top contributors on StackShare- the folks that left witty one-liners, got others to agree (vote), left reviews, added stacks, and left comments. Thanks for helping steer your fellow developers towards the right tools!

Newsletters You Should Be Reading

Everybody loves a good newsletter, the kind packed with useful and actionable information you can use in your work and life. These aren’t ranked in any particular order, just a list of our favorites. And while we’re on the subject, check out our newsletter if you haven't

Discover dev This daily digest is curated “by AI and a network of globally distributed nerds” and covers a wide assortment of software-related topics, all tagged by category for easy navigation. Show me the good stuff

Software Lead Weekly Software Lead Weekly is unique because it goes beyond code to curate the best content on leadership, entrepreneurship, people, and culture in the software industry. Lead By Example

DailyNow DailyNow is a browser extension (for Chrome and Firefox) that replaces your “new tab” screen with up-to-date developer news. “We help devs focus on code instead of searching for news.” DailyNow Read All About It

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Methodology:

For tool rankings, scores are calculated using a combination of # of stacks a tool was added to, votes, favorites, and pageviews for the year. Beyond that, New Tool rankings were chosen from tools that were created added to StackShare in 2017 with favorites weighing more than other metrics since new tools don’t just enter stacks overnight.

Once again, we removed Git from the #2 spot (behind GitHub) in the DevOps rankings since the placement didn't make sense. Many developers mention GitHub in their stack, but leave out Git.

If you have any questions about the rankings, drop us a line at team@stackshare.io!