Top Developer Tools

It’s that time of the year again! The 5th Annual StackShare Awards have arrived! 🎉

This is your one-stop resource for developer tools, with a wrap up of what was hot in 2018 and what to be on the lookout for in 2019. We've analyzed over one million data points to bring you these rankings 😱

Shameless plug: if you haven't heard of Stack Decisions, do yourself a favor and check it out!

Here are the categories:

• New Tool of the Year
• Application & Data Tool of the Year
• Utility Tool of the Year
• DevOps Tool of the Year
• Business Tool of the Year
• Top Stack Stories of the Year
• Top Community Members of the Year
• Developer Podcasts You Should Be Listening To [NEW]
• Developer Newsletters You Should Be Reading

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 100K+ tech stacks , over 700K follows and favorites , and hundreds of thousands of developer comments, reviews, and votes across all of 2018 (more on methodology below) . Let’s do this!

New Tool of the Year

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The Verdict:

Two competing static site generators, machine learning in the browser, Docker, serverless... besides all the buzzwords being covered, this year has some pretty great new tools you should probably check out. Congrats to the team behind Docusaurus for their deserved win.

New Tool of the Year (Runner-Up)

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Application & Data Tool of the Year

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The Verdict:

Bootstrap, AngularJS, Redis, and Vue.js were sadley shown the door. They were replaced by Python, Node.js, MySQL, and jQuery (yes, we ran the numbers more than once). JavaScript, HTML5, and Java rose while React, PHP, and nginx fell. JavaScript continues to dominate the stack with 4 tools in the top 10 all built using JS.

Utility Tool of the Year

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The Verdict:

This year Algolia, SendGrid, SendBird, and Stripe where knocked out by Stack Overflow, Google Maps, Dropbox, & GitHub Pages. Google had 3 utilities make it this year, 1 more than last year (Maps). Postman and Google Analytics secured their positions while CloudFlare and Elastic search dropped 5 and 4 spots (respectively). Cheers to all the extra functionality we all added to our apps.

DevOps Tool of the Year

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The Verdict:

New Relic, and Atom were eliminated this year. What’s interesting is what replaces them: Visual Studio Code and Sublime Text. 2 text editors go figure. GitHub and Docker remained #1 and #2. BitBuket and npm moved up while Jenkins, GitLab, and webpack moved down.

Business Tool of the Year

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The Verdict:

Slack and Trello remained untouched. Unfortunately, Passbolt, Intercom, and React Sketch.app did not make the cut this year. They were replaced by Confluence, Skype, and Mailchimp. JIRA, WordPress, and G Suite moved up the list while InVision and Asana moved down. Worth noting that Atlassian managed to dominate the biz rankings with a total of 3 tools in the top 10.

Top Stack Stories

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It's story time again! Scaling tales from the depths of the Internets. This year's top spot went to none other than Stream. While companies like Facebook (Instagram), Twitter, and LinkedIn build their newsfeeds in-house, startups wouldn't dare do that these days (that's so 2016). Here at StackShare, we even use Stream to power our Feed- the good folks over at Product Hunt do as well, along with a bunch of others. And if you missed the Nick, the CTO of The New York Times, break down the newspaper's stack, you've got some reading (and listening) to do!

Top Community Members

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With the release of Stack Decisions we saw new community members step up, while OGs like gdi2290 continued to hold their top spots. There's far more than 10 developers that made 2018 a special year- so to everyone that took the time to write a one-liner, upvote, and give some guidance to someone else- thank you for helping hundreds of thousands of developers decide on the right tools!

Podcasts You Should Be Listening To

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And now for a brand new section of our annual roundup: Podcasts! To be honest, this section is long overdue, but better late than never. Given that our Podcast had a whopping one episode throughout the whole year 😒 (those things take time!) we thought we'd feed the developer streets with some heat from a handful of our favorites. These aren’t ranked in any particular order, just a list of our favorites. Listen up:

Newsletters You Should Be Reading

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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 either. And while we’re on the subject, check out our newsletter if you haven't. Check out last year's top newsletters here.

Methodology:

For tool rankings, scores are calculated using a combination of # of stacks a tool was added to, number of votes, favorites, follows (a new feature this year), and pageviews for the year. Beyond that, New Tool rankings were chosen from tools that were created and added to StackShare in 2018 with follows 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!