Top Developer Tools


Itโ€™s that time of the year again! The 5th Annual StackShare Awards have arrived! ๐ŸŽ‰

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 ๐Ÿ˜ฑ

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

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 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) . Letโ€™s do this!

New Tool of the Year


#1: Docusaurus

The coveted top spot for New Tool of the year goes to Docusaurus, a project from Facebook for easily building, deploying, and maintaining open source project documentation websites. Given how much of a developer's daily life is spent inside of documentation, it's not surprising that this was the year's most popular tool. Its key features are Markdown support, search, easy translation functionality using Crowdin & quick headache-free setup. You can support the maintainers on their Open Collective page.

ยป Follow Docusaurus | ยป Learn more about Docusaurus

#2: Haiku

Haiku allows you to create dynamic, cross-platform UIs using design tools, code, or both. In other words, “Haiku speaks both design and code — providing the bridge that connects your digital product workflow”. It integrates with Sketch, React, Vue, Lottie (last year's new tool of the year) & more.


ยป Follow Haiku | ยป Tell developers why you chose Haiku

#3: Prisma

Prisma is a powerful database tool used for data access, migrations and visual data management. It replaces traditional ORMs and removes friction from complicated database workflows.

๐Ÿ‘‰ See how two developers used Prisma in their Stack.

ยป Follow Prisma | ยป See recent tech decisions about Prisma

#4: TensorFlow.js

TensorFlow.js an open-source library you can use to define, train, and run machine learning models entirely in the browser, using Javascript. Since its launch last March, the community has been busy creating awesome things like new ways to play Mortal Kombat.


ยป Follow TensorFlow.js | ยป Tell developers why you chose TensorFlow.js

#5: VuePress

VuePress a minimalistic static site generator that was created to support the documentation needs of Vue's own subprojects. Forestry.io claims “VuePress Brings Your Documentation to Life”. Key features include built-in markdown support, custom theming system, automatic service worker generation, search, and more. Please note, Vue is not funded by a large corporation. It is paid for by the community. Consider donating to Vue.js if you would like to support an independent team of open source developers.

ยป Follow VuePress | ยป Tell developers why you chose VuePress

#6: Architect

Architect is a serverless framework currently exclusive to AWS. They say it’s “the simplest, most powerful way to build serverless applications”. It has out of the box support for popular services such as Lambda, Route53, S3, CloudFront, and more.

ยป Follow Architect | ยป Tell developers why you chose Architect

#7: Bootstrap.build

Bootstrap.build is an open source web app that creates custom Bootstrap themes. Its key features are SASS support, “Sketch-like” color picker, Google Fonts integration, and more.

ยป Follow Bootstrap.build | ยป Tell developers why you chose Bootstrap.build

#8: Ring UI

Ring UI is a collection of React-based UI components for web-based products. The creator, JetBrains, is dogfooding it for their web-based products like YouTrack, Hub, TeamCity, and Upsource.

ยป Follow Ring UI | ยป Tell developers why you chose Ring UI

#9: RIBs

RIBs is a cross-platform architecture framework behind many mobile apps at Uber. The name RIBs is short for Router, Interactor and Builder, which are core components of this architecture. This framework is designed for mobile apps with a large number of engineers and nested states.

๐Ÿ‘‰ Learn how Uber developed RIBs and went from Objective-C to Swift

ยป Follow RIBs | ยป Tell developers why you chose RIBs

#10: Dimer

Dimer makes it easy to publish your documentation, with distraction-free writing experience and beautiful, handcrafted themes. The two-man team is trying to simplify your documentation writing experience. Its key features are Extended Markdown Syntax, and live preview.

ยป Follow Dimer | ยป Tell developers why you chose Dimer

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)


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 ๐Ÿ˜

#11: Gitkube

Gitkube is a tool for building and deploying Docker images on Kubernetes using `git push`. Hasura wrote a great detailed comparison of similar tools.

ยป Follow Gitkube | ยป Tell developers why you chose Gitkube

#12: PrimeReact

PrimeReact is a collection of open source UI components for React. The idea is to allocate your valuable time on business logic rather than dealing with the complex user interface requirements.', score:

ยป Follow PrimeReact | ยป Tell developers why you chose PrimeReact

#13: Apache OpenWhisk

Apache OpenWhisk (incubating) is a serverless, open source cloud platform that executes functions in response to events at any scale. It supports popular container frameworks such as Kubernetes, Mesos, OpenShift and Compose.

ยป Follow Apache OpenWhisk | ยป Tell developers why you chose Apache OpenWhisk

#14: Stimulus

Stimulus is an open source JavaScript framework by the team at Basecamp. It claims to have modest ambitions by not taking over your entire front-end.

ยป Follow Stimulus | ยป Tell developers why you chose Stimulus

#15: ML Kit

ML Kit allows developers to seamlessly build machine learning into their mobile Android and iOS apps. Its key features are OCR, face detection, smart reply, and more. One remarkable feature is image labeling which allows you to identify objects, locations, activities, animal species, products, etc.

ยป Follow ML Kit | ยป Tell developers why you chose ML Kit

#16: Rekit

Rekit is an open source toolkit for building scalable web applications with React, Redux, and React-router. It's an all-in-one solution for creating modern React apps. One cool feature is the command line tools to manage actions, reducers, components, and pages.

ยป Follow Rekit | ยป Tell developers why you chose Rekit

#17: Vue Storefront

Vue Storefront is a standalone open source PWA storefront for popular ecommerce platforms like Magento, Pimcore, Prestashop, and Shopware[e]. The team focuses heavily on web performance which makes sense since page load time can affect conversion rates.

ยป Follow Vue Storefront | ยป Tell developers why you chose Vue Storefront

#18: Skaffold

Skaffold is an open source command line tool by Google that facilitates continuous development for Kubernetes applications. It is a lot like Gitkube, mentioned above. From the same blog post they say you will find similarities but Skaffold is more flexible, as it can manage different build-push-deploy pipelines.

ยป Follow Skaffold | ยป Tell developers why you chose Skaffold

#19: OneGraph

OneGraph is a service allowing you to build API integrations with GraphQL. You can connect Stripe, Salesforce, Zendesk, GitHub
ยป Follow OneGraph | ยป Tell developers why you chose OneGraph

#20: Muze

Muze is an open source data visualization library which uses a layered Grammar of Graphics (GoG) to create composable and interactive data visualization for web. In layman's terms, it’s trying to redefine how you create visualizations for the web.

ยป Follow Muze | ยป Tell developers why you chose Muze

#21: Mason

Mason is a service that allows you to build, design, and deploy fully functional front-end solutions without any coding requirements. It’s perfect for creating fully-functional prototypes and some.

ยป Follow Mason | ยป Tell developers why you chose Mason

#22: HeySpace

HeySpace is breaking away from the unix philosophy norms by combing features from Trello and Slack into one tool. Basically, it is a free task manager that tracks the progress and discuss all the assignments without jumping between two or more tools.

ยป Follow HeySpace | ยป Tell developers why you chose HeySpace

#23: ReLaXed

ReLaXed is an open source tool which creates PDF documents interactively using HTML or Pug. It allows complex layouts to be defined with CSS and JavaScript while writing the content in a friendly, minimal syntax close to Markdown or LaTeX.

ยป Follow ReLaXed | ยป Tell developers why you chose ReLaXed

#24: Sublime Merge

Sublime Merge is a pretty new Git Client, from the makers of Sublime Text. Hate merge conflicts? The Integrated Merge Tool allows you to resolve any merge conflicts rather than having to open up your editor. That is just one of many tools to breeze through code reviews.

ยป Follow Sublime Merge | ยป Tell developers why you chose Sublime Merge

#25: Gridsome

Gridsome is an open source Vue.js-powered, modern site generator focusing on web performance. It integrates with WordPress, Drupal, Contentful, and many other data sources.

ยป Follow Gridsome | ยป Tell developers why you chose Gridsome

#26: Proton Native

Proton Native is an open source project that creates native cross-platform desktop applications through a React syntax. Works with existing React libraries such as Redux and yes, it’s compatible with Node.js packages.

ยป Follow Proton Native | ยป Tell developers why you chose Proton Native

#27: Jenkins X

Jenkins X is a CI/CD solution for modern cloud applications on Kubernetes.

ยป Follow Jenkins X | ยป Tell developers why you chose Jenkins X

#29: NestJS

Nest is an open source framework for building efficient, scalable Node.js server-side applications. Nest makes use of Express, but also, provides compatibility with a wide range of other libraries. You can support them on Open Collective.

ยป Follow NestJS | ยป See recent tech decisions about NestJS

Application & Data Tool of the Year


#1: JavaScript

JavaScript is back on top.  Last year it lost its throne to React but before React could get comfortable it was stolen right back. Besides that, JavaScript had a big year: according to the 2018 GitHub State of the Octoverse report, JavaScript still has the most contributors in public and private repositories, organizations of all sizes, and every region of the world. Also, the JS Foundation & NodeJS Foundation announced the intent to create a joint organization to support the broad Node.js and JavaScript communities. Last but not least, TC39, the Technical Committee for ECMAScript (JavaScript) finished 8 proposals. Welcome back JS.

ยป Follow JavaScript | ยป See recent tech decisions about JavaScript

#2: Python

Ladies and gentlemen, please put your hands together and welcome Python to the stage. Python had an interesting year in 2018. In July, Guido van Rossum, founder and BDFL (Benevolent Dictator For Life) of 29 years announced he was stepping down. In happier news, they held their 16th annual PyCon in Cleveland, Oh. By the way, Python 2.7 end-of-life will be on January 1st, 2020 so might want to convert those scripts asap. ;)

ยป Follow Python | ยป See recent tech decisions about Python

#3: Node.js

Node.js was absent from this list in 2017 but has made a comeback in 2018. Node had 65 releases including version 11. The Node.js runtime can be found on Lambda and App Engine. The founder of Node.js, Ryan Dahl gave a talk titled ”10 Things I Regret About Node.js”.

ยป Follow Node.js | ยป See recent tech decisions about Node.js

#4: HTML5

HTML5 is up 6 spots from last year. The innovation built on top of HTML5 continues to amaze all. In February of last year, a developer managed to evoke nostalgia to all who grew up in the 90s with Webamp, reimplementation of winamp 2.9 in HTML5 and JavaScript. Welcome to the top 5, HTML.

ยป Follow HTML5 | ยป See recent tech decisions about HTML5

#5: React

The React team has been exercising its jedi-level adoption strategies by announcing Hooks which is an upcoming feature that lets you use state and other React features without writing a class. Another feature they released in React 16.5 added support for a new DevTools profiler plugin to help identify performance issues. Netlify wrote a great tutorial on how to use it.

» Watch Dan Abramov Making Sense of React Hooks

ยป Follow React | ยป See recent tech decisions about React

#6: Java

Java 11 was released which came packed with a lot of new features. Microsoft open sourced some of Minecraft's code libraries which are little parts of the Java game engine.

ยป Follow Java | ยป See recent tech decisions about Java

#7: MySQL

MySQL is one of those technologies that some developers love to dismiss yet major companies such as Facebook, GitHub, Uber, and many others rely on it heavily. Welcome to the list MySQL, you were just beyond the top 10, now just shy of the top 5.

ยป Follow MySQL | ยป See recent tech decisions about MySQL

#8: PHP

The third feature update to the PHP 7 series was released with numerous improvements like Windows File Deletion and new features such as LDAP Controls Support. Facebook’s HHVM dropping support but it will continue to work with Hack.

ยป Follow PHP | ยป See recent tech decisions about PHP

#9: jQuery

jQuery is new to the list this year. By the way, who said jQuery is dead? I guess it’s who you ask. If you ask GitHub, it’s dead to them. If you ask the jQuery team, they will refute that with 1 feature release followed by 1 quick fix release.

ยป Follow jQuery | ยป See recent tech decisions about jQuery

#10: NGINX

Nginx was #3 last year but it’s still hanging on to the top 10. The LEMP stack is not dying, in fact, Nginx is closing in on Apache httpd. Two new big features they released in 2018 were HTTP/2 server push and gRPC support.

๐Ÿ‘‰ Learn how Kong uses the Lua Nginx Module in their stack.

ยป Follow NGINX | ยป See recent tech decisions about NGINX

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


#1: Postman

For the 2nd year in a row, Postman is the #1 Utility Tool. For those who don’t know, they provide developers with API development environments. A lot of new features were released in 2018. The key features where Workspaces, Postman Enterprise, Newman v4.0, Find and replace, and OpenAPI 3.0 support.

๐Ÿ‘‰ See why Segment uses Postman

ยป Follow Postman | ยป See recent tech decisions about Postman

#2: Google Drive

Back in 2006, Google’s internal Gdrive client, named “Platypus" was leaked. Fast forward 12 years and now Google Drive has 1 billion users storing over 2 trillion files. For consumers, Google introduced One which gives you more storage across Drive, Gmail, and Photos. Drive will also start intelligently organizing the “Shared with Me” section by listing names and the files that people have shared with you, so you can track down files faster.

ยป Follow Google Drive | ยป See recent tech decisions about Google Drive

#3: Stack Overflow

Stack Overflow is a developers best friend. No matter what your skill level is, eventually you end up on Stack Overflow for a solution you can’t find anywhere else. In 2018 they acknowledged that their service wasn’t very welcoming, especially to newcomers. They also updated their Salary Calculator. Last but not least, they launched their Teams product.

ยป Follow Stack Overflow | ยป See recent tech decisions about Stack Overflow

#4: Google Analytics

In January 2018 Google launched a Salesforce integration for Google Analytics 360. They also unleashed more powerful ways to manage users. For the big data nerds, they enabled BigQuery to quickly query all of your Google Analytics data.

๐Ÿ‘‰ How we use Google Analytics

ยป Follow Google Analytics | ยป See recent tech decisions about Google Analytics

#5: Google Maps

Google Maps became a teenager in 2018.  It is yet another Google service that has over 1 billion monthly active users. To help businesses integrate seamlessly with iOS, Android, and desktop applications, Google Cloud launched the Google Maps Platform. Make sure to take a trip back to 1998 to see inside Google’s original garage.

ยป Follow Google Maps | ยป See recent tech decisions about Google Maps

#6: Elasticsearch

Elasticsearch has made the list again this year. In 2018 they had a big release. Key features included support for SQL, Java 10, rollups, and 2 security fixes. They also created some GDPR pseudonymization examples. Last but not least they announced that they made their source code available for their X-Pack features using the Elastic license which is not OSI approved.

๐Ÿ‘‰ See what you can do with Amazon S3 + Elasticsearch 

ยป Follow Elasticsearch | ยป See recent tech decisions about Elasticsearch

#7: Dropbox

2018 was Dropbox’s year. It was the first YC company to go public. They also landed an impressive partnership with Google by adding a native G Suite integration. Oh yeah, remember when they started to move off of AWS? Well, they that saved them about $75mm over a 2 year period. The year’s official mic-drop award goes to them.

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#8: GitHub Pages

This just goes to show you, Google isn’t the only utility maker that can make the same list more than once. GitHub Pages is perfect for those who use static site generators like Jekyll. The best feature in 2018 was hands down, SSL support for custom domains. This was thanks to Let’s Encrypt which GitHub is a sponsor.

๐Ÿ‘‰ Learn how Uploadcare uses GitHub Pages

ยป Follow GitHub Pages | ยป See recent tech decisions about GitHub Pages

#9: CloudFlare

In 2018, CloudFlare made it rain. They launched their first consumer smartphone app called 1.1.1.1., multiple data centers, Onion service, IPFS Gateway, JavaScript & WebAssembly for Workers (serverless), and if you weren’t already feeling overwhelmed, don’t forget their birthday updates. Message to all CloudFlare competitors: pray.

ยป Follow CloudFlare | ยป See recent tech decisions about CloudFlare

#10: Amazon CloudFront

What’s funny about Amazon CloudFront being in this position, is that its sister service Route 53, was #10 last year. What’s even crazier is that they didn’t release any new features in 2018.

ยป Follow Amazon CloudFront | ยป See recent tech decisions about Amazon CloudFront

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


#1: GitHub

GitHub has been the #1 DevOps tool for three years in a row. They had a blockbuster year, to say the least. On June 4th, 2018 Microsoft acquired the open source powerhouse for $7.5b in stock. With that, GitHub got a new CEO, Nat Friedman and his team has been going full throttle on pushing out new releases. They also launched a new product called Actions (beta) which can automate your workflow “from idea to production”. Listen why GitHub Actions is the next big thing. ๐Ÿ‘‰ » Learn how SendGrid uses bots to interact with GitHub

ยป Follow GitHub | ยป See recent tech decisions about GitHub

#2: Docker

Docker has also kept its place this year. Docker had a few big announcements in 2018. In March, Solomon Hykes, co-founder of Docker announced he was leaving the company. Docker Enterprise Edition 2.0 was released. In December, Microsoft and Docker teamed up to make packaging and running cloud-native applications easier. Last but not least they open sourced Compose on Kubernetes

ยป Follow Docker | ยป See recent tech decisions about Docker

#3: npm

According to their 2018 review, npm has over 10 million users who download over 30 billion packages every month. In 2018, npm committed to focusing on security. In April they acquired the company behind “Node Security Platform” and have integrated it directly into npm which automatically notifies users if they are installing insecure modules. In non-product news, Isaac Schlueter, has stepped down as CEO and moved into the Chief Product Officer role. Listen to Issac describe the process of hiring a new CEO.

๐Ÿ‘‰ Read why Compass Inc are big proponents of using npm


ยป Follow npm | ยป See recent tech decisions about npm

#4: Visual Studio Code

We want to give a warm ‘welcome to the list’ to Visual Studio Code (VSC). In addition to being the number one text editor on StackShare for 2018, Stack Overflow also found in a recent survey, that VSC is the #1 most popular development environment. There must be something in the water over at Microsoft because they are doing some amazing things in the open source community.

ยป Follow Visual Studio Code | ยป See recent tech decisions about Visual Studio Code

#5: Jenkins

While some developers have moved on to Travis CI or CircleCI, Jenkins still has a home in many enterprises and in developer’s lives. It has continued releasing updates to Blue Ocean, an open source project that “puts Continuous Delivery in reach of any team without sacrificing the power and sophistication of Jenkins. We hope to see them on this list again next year.

ยป Follow Jenkins | ยป See recent tech decisions about Jenkins

#6: Webpack

In February, the highly popular bundler webpack released 4.0. It was a big release that required migration from v3. The big features included WebAssembly module support, as well as better optimization, performance, syntaxing, and stats.

ยป Follow Webpack | ยป See recent tech decisions about Webpack

#7: GitLab

GitLab had a great year as well. They recently joined the unicorn club after raising $100mm. On the product side of things, they launched a Web IDE, GitLab Serverless, and much more. If that wasn’t enough, they welcomed the Gnome project who was looking for a way to make it easier for newcomers to contribute.

ยป Follow GitLab | ยป See recent tech decisions about GitLab

#8: Bitbucket

Bitbucket made it again this year. Maybe it was the 10 reasons why teams are switching from GitHub after the Microsoft acquisition? But that can’t be the only factor. In April they launched a Slack chatbot and then ended the year strong with updates in their 5.13 release, particularly for Git protocol version 2 support.

ยป Follow Bitbucket | ยป See recent tech decisions about Bitbucket

#9: Sublime Text

Last year Sublime Text was wiped out by Atom and now the tides have turned. We suspect it might have something to do with their 3.1 release which improved text rendering, color schemes, syntax definitions (Git, Markdown, JavaScript), and most importantly, performance optimizations which significantly improved memory usage.

ยป Follow Sublime Text | ยป See recent tech decisions about Sublime Text

#10: Kubernetes

Kubernetes made the list again, the same position as last year but they’ll take it. One big feature that came out in 2018 was the Containerd integration. Did you know DigitalOcean recently announced they are offering a managed Kubernetes service? Well, now you do.

ยป Follow Kubernetes | ยป See recent tech decisions about Kubernetes

The Verdict:

New Relic, and Atom were eliminated this year. Whatโ€™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


#1: Slack

At #1 again this year, S.L.A.C.K. (Searchable Log of All Conversation and Knowledge ๐Ÿคฏ) has changed the way a lot of us work. It is the conduit between each team member regardless of their location. 2018 was a monumental year for Slack. They partnered with Atlassian by acquiring HipChat (and shutting it down), launching Actions, announcing their first developer conference: Spec, and according to who you ask, prepping for an IPO this year.

ยป Follow Slack | ยป See recent tech decisions about Slack

#2: Trello

Trello can be considered kanban board royalty. It came out of Joel Spolsky’s Fog Creek Software, spun off in 2014 and the acquired 3 years later by Atlassian. In 2018 they acquired Butler, a popular plugin a.k.a Power-Up that automats processes on Trello boards.

๐Ÿ‘‰ » See how we use Trello here at StackShare

ยป Follow Trello | ยป See recent tech decisions about Trello

#3: Jira

It’s hard to believe that JIRA is almost 18 years old. While we are on the topic of name origins, did you know its name is a truncation of Gojira, the Japanese word for Godzilla? Anyway, 2018 was a great year for the JIRA product. It now integrates with GitHub and added some new features to their Cloud version like timeline view, configuration flow, and more APIs.

ยป Follow Jira | ยป See recent tech decisions about Jira

#4: WordPress

Love or hate it, in 2018 WordPress powered 29.2% of all websites on the web (up from 27.3% in 2017). In December WordPress 5.0 “Bebo” was released which made some big upgrades to the editor. For those who want to keep it old school, support for the classic editor plugin will remain in WordPress through 2021.

ยป Follow WordPress | ยป See recent tech decisions about WordPress

#5: G Suite

Have you ever been working in a spreadsheet in G Suite and thought how amazing that it runs solely in a modern browser? G Suite is more than just spreadsheets, it is a full-featured web based business productivity suite that goes head to head with Office 365. In March, Airbus moved 130,000 employees from Office to G Suite.

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#6: Confluence

Confluence is a powerful wiki that goes hand in hand with #3 (JIRA). This is Atlassian’s 4th mention in this list alone. They should get an award just for that. 2018 was a good year for Confluence users. New features included a new redesign, improved @mentions, and email threading i.e. it groups email notifications as one conversation.

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#7: Skype

It has been reported that Microsoft has turned consumers against Skype. While that might be the case, Skype was still the #1 video chat service on StackShare implying that developers and businesses are still using Skype as an invaluable tool for corporate communication.', score: 11

ยป Follow Skype | ยป See recent tech decisions about Skype

#8: Mailchimp

Mailchimp was absent from the 2017 list but is back now. In 2018 they launched lots of new features like GDPR tools, custom landing page URLs, Google remarketing ad support, and more. They also have a new brand identity and design system.

ยป Follow Mailchimp | ยป See recent tech decisions about Mailchimp

#9: InVision

Don’t count InVision out. They were #5 last year but they have made the list 3 years running, which a lot of other tools can’t claim. For those who don’t know, InVision is a digital product design platform. It allows designers to create rich interactive prototypes for developers to code. It’s overwhelming how many new features they pump out each month, so be our guest and check for yourself. Oh yeah, they also achieved unicorn status.

ยป Follow InVision | ยป See recent tech decisions about InVision

#10: Asana

Asana has been on a roll. They recently raised $50mm to focus on international growth. As far as new features go, in 2018 they released a new Asana for Slack integration, as well as improvements to their machine learning, predictions and other AI features.

ยป Follow Asana | ยป See recent tech decisions about Asana

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


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


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


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 ๐Ÿ˜’ (those things take time!) we thought we'd feed the developer streets with some heat from a handful of our favorites. These arenโ€™t ranked in any particular order, just a list of our favorites. Listen up:

Syntax

Full Stack Developers Wes Bos and Scott Tolinski dive deep into web development topics, explaining how they work and talking about their own experiences.
Take a listen

CodeNewbie

Stories from people on their coding journey.
Take a listen

Talk Python to Me

The show covers a wide array of Python topics as well as many related topics (e.g. MongoDB, AngularJS, DevOps).
Take a listen

Views on Vue

Vues on Vues on Vues (on Vue.js)
Take a listen

Software Engineering Daily

Technical interviews about software topics.
Take a listen

Full Stack Radio

A podcast for developers interested in building great software products
Take a listen

JAMstack Radio

A show all about the JAMstack, a new way to build fast & secure apps or websites.
Take a listen

To Be Continuous

A show all about continuous delivery and software development.
Take a listen

Developer Tea

A podcast for developers designed to fit inside your tea break
Take a listen

The Changelog (Master)

Conversations with the hackers, leaders, and innovators of software development.
Take a listen

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 arenโ€™t ranked in any particular order either. And while weโ€™re on the subject, check out our newsletter if you haven't. Check out last year's top newsletters here.

Changelog Weekly

An editorialized take on this week in open source and software development Show me the good stuff

nixCraft Weekly

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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 donโ€™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 ๐Ÿ™„

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