Top 5 Technologies Top Tech Startups Are Using in 2020
I haven’t programmed in several years. My primary goal in the last several years has been to run the company I built — and to manage its operations including sales, finance, channels and what not.
So when we decided to upgrade our platform in 2018, I had little idea what to build it on. Our previous platform was built on Java and a whole lot of promises — and took 8 years to deliver. We started out at a time when Java was fairly new and both RoR and Php were the rage.
(Aside, I have no idea what happened to Ruby on Rails but honestly it was clearly slow and very hard to scale)
Our website was built on Wordpress — a pretty standard CMS back in 2008. So I did what anyone in my situation would do — ask around.
I started with wappalyzer to see what other startups were building their front ends around. Of Course the fact that wappalyzer picks it up — does not mean that the website indeed uses that technology — nevertheless its a good vector to start from.
The websites I did research on were:
- notion.so — a hot startup straight out of valley
- dropbox.com — we all know dropbox
- reddit.com — well, not a startup anymore but a runs a good social platform
- grab.com — ride sharing leader in SEA
- intercom.com — I like the design and structure of this startup
- paytm — top startup in India
- squarespace.com —builds websites
- medium.com — this very website
- salesforce.com — enterprise software behemoth with a startupy heart
- facebook.com — is facebook
(If you’d like me to include any other website, let me know.)
This is a list of startups from all parts of the world — and there’s no specific reason to choose one over the other. Here’s what I found
1. Notion.so uses React and vue.js both.
2. Dropbox.com uses React
3. Reddit uses a whole assortment of frameworks — including React, Bootstrap and vue.js
4. grab.com is back to old school with PHP & Wordpress.
5. Intercom uses React, Node.js And Contentful as CMS.
6. Paytm uses React & Node.js
7. Squarespace uses YUI and well..Squarespace. Interesting.
8. Medium lists React, Vue.js and Node.js
9. Salesforce is happy with jQuery and Bootstrap
10. And lastly, Facebook uses everything
After analyzing these and more sites, its abundantly clear React is the favorite of web developers worldwide. Infact, as per wappalyzer 25% of sites it indexed run on React.
So to summarize, here are the top 5 technologies/stacks (in no particular order) for 2020 that startups are using. Hopefully you will find this list useful for your next project or website.
- For JS library, React is #1, followed by vue.js. Angular is not used much on front end websites and its probably used for enterprise specific applications only.
- For UI, Bootstrap was followed by Material.io as the clear choice of layout and structure
- For CMS, wordpress is still #1 and the clear choice. There are some examples of headless CMS that I’ll discuss in the following posts. I also noticed Strapi.
- For Web Server, Nginx was the clear choice. I also ran into Gatsby for speed — I’ll comment more once we use it.
- For Marketing, Tracking and Analytics — GTM or Google Tag Manager was basically everywhere. There seems to be no other option.
For CMS, I ran into the following options
- Contentful: https://www.contentful.com/
- GetGrav: https://getgrav.org/
- and ofcourse Wordpress
Contentful seems to have some traction and we did see intercom using it. Obviously it's a paid platform so I’m not going to recommend it in this post.
GetGrav is a flat file CMS — and I highly recommend it over other options. Its git repo has 11k stars and some pretty decent activity https://github.com/getgrav/grav
Wordpress — surprisingly I had to dig in deep before I could find a good startupy website built on it. I’m sure you all know about wordpress — so thats that.
