Overview

This is the third annual Node.js User Survey conducted by the Node.js Foundation. The survey was fielded in English and Chinese from October 2017 through January 2018, yielding 1,626 respondents. The primary objective of the research is to profile Node.js users, understand how they use Node and gauge satisfaction with and anticipated future use of Node and other related technologies. To ensure data integrity and unbiased interpretation, data analysis and reporting was conducted by Research Collaborative, an independent market research firm.

Node.js is continuing to have a positive impact on users particularly around developer productivity and satisfaction; when asked to describe Node.js, respondents use mostly positive terms like – “fast”, “easy”, “awesome”, “powerful”, “flexible” and even “fun”.

The largest percentage of users deploy on Amazon Web Services followed by on-premise infrastructure. Though a significant number of users deploy to Heroku, DigitalOcean, Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure.

Web Apps remain the most popular use case for Node, with 85% of respondents indicating they use Node for this work. 43% of respondents indicate they use Node for enterprise applications.

Integration with databases, front-end frameworks and load balancing are at the forefront of the range of technologies integrated with Node.js.

Most users expect to increase their use of Node.js, particularly in Latin America and EMEA.

Babel is the leading transpiler, but back-end, full stack and ‘other’ developers are increasing their use of Typescript. Among Module Bundlers, Webpack seems to be consolidating its lead across most regions and development areas.

is becoming increasingly important to users to manage different packages for multiple environments. npm is by far the most widely used package manager, but Yarn is gaining in popularity in many segments.

Node.js continues to see it’s popularity grow on every continent and in a very broad set of use cases due to its flexibility and utility for a wide variety of use cases.