🏆 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:

• 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 Developers of the Year
• 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 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

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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)

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Application & Data Tool of the Year

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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, just a list of our favorites. And while we’re on the subject, check out our newsletter if you haven't

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!