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Now that 2015 has officially come to an end, we’re proud to present our 2nd Annual year end roundup! 2015 was an amazing year for us as more people got wind of StackShare and shared the tools and services they use. Some quick stats for the year:

  • 20,301 stacks added
  • 1,848 tools and services submitted by the community (487 approved)
  • 120,012 votes for tools and services (via one-liners)
  • 3,921 one-liners and comments
  • 15,313 favorites for stacks and tools

This is all thanks to the amazing people who contribute to StackShare regularly and take the time to share not only the tools they use but why and how they use them. So first up, we’d like to recognize the awesome community members who made the most contributions (one-liners, votes, reviews, stacks, and comments) and community members who made the largest impact (most viewed stacks and posts):

Top 10 Developers (by number of contributions)


Top 5 Posts & Their Authors (by number of favorites and views)

Top 10 Stacks (by number of favorites and views)


Top 10 New Stacks (by number of favorites and views)

Out of the over 20K stacks added this year, here are the Top 10 most popular. We were particularly surprised at this list since we assumed the biggest companies would have the most popular stack profiles, but that didn't turn out to be true for the majority of the top 10:





Top 50 Developer Tools & Services of 2015

Methodology: tool/service rankings are based on a score that is a combination of the following weighted values: number of one-liners, number of votes for those one-liners, number of reviews, number of verified stacks a tool/service is included in (highest weight), and number of favorites. The top groups and categories are based on the aggregated sum of the score of the tools and services in each group or category.

This year we decided to also create separate lists for hosted and open source software (OSS) in order to make it easier to see what's been most popular. For open source tools that are offered as hosted services (e.g. Sentry), we've classified them as hosted services.





Bootstrap dethroned GitHub as the top overall tool/service, nginx made it into the top 10, and Rails was knocked out of the top 10 by more ubiquitous tools like Git and JavaScript. Check out the category breakdowns below the Top 50 list to see specific rankings for the most popular groups of tools and services.


Top 50 Developer Tools & Services of 2015


Top 50 New Developer Tools & Services of 2015

We also decided to break out top new tools and services into a separate ranking to make a distinction between tools and services that already existed vs ones that were released/added this year. Open source tools dominated the new list, with very few new hosted services ranking amongst the most popular. React, Docker, and open source Slack alternatives all had multiple tools in the top 50 pointing to the growing popularity of all of these tools and their respective ecosystems- we suspect this will continue in 2016.



Top 20 Groups and The #1 Tools
  1. Languages


  2. Frameworks (Full Stack)


  3. Databases


  4. Code Collaboration & Version Control


  5. Javascript UI Libraries


  6. Front-End Frameworks


  7. Web Servers


  8. Text Editor


  9. General Analytics


  10. Javascript MVC Frameworks


  11. Group Chat & Notifications


  12. Continuous Integration


  13. Version Control System


  14. Cloud Hosting


  15. Integrated Development Environment


  16. Front End Package Manager


  17. Project Management


  18. CSS Pre-processors / Extensions


  19. Platform as a Service


  20. JS Build Tools / JS Task Runners

Top 5 Categories of Tools/Services
Top Stack Layer


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