List of Top Developer Software to Try in 2023

Introduction

With new developer tools emerging every day, it can be challenging to keep up with the latest and greatest software worth adopting. This post aims to highlight some of the most popular, innovative, and highly-rated developer software across a range of categories to help you boost productivity and efficiency in 2023.

We'll be covering both free open source options as well as paid tools and services for code editing, programming languages, web frameworks, testing, deployment, databases, and more. The goal is to showcase new developer software you may not have discovered yet while also discussing established choices that remain competitive.

The software listed was selected based on criteria like usage popularity, community ratings, critical reception, and unique capabilities. There's something here for all major coding languages and project needs, whether you're an indie dev, startup engineer, or enterprise team. While no list can cover every tool, these should provide a solid overview of developer software to evaluate further in 2023. DevHunt is a great resource for discovering and comparing the latest developer tools in one place.

Code Editors

For coding JavaScript, Python, and beyond, a good code editor is essential. Here are some top options to consider based on features, customizability, and community support:

VS Code

Microsoft's free VS Code has quickly become many developers' editor of choice thanks to its excellent extensions, built-in Git support, and debugging capabilities. While fast and customizable, some may find it resource intensive for lightweight editing needs.

Atom

Atom is an open source editor maintained by GitHub with strong cross-platform support. The vibrant community has built thousands of plugins and themes while performance enhancements continue improving.

Sublime Text

Boasting lightning fast performance and sophisticated code intelligence, Sublime Text delivers a lightweight yet powerful editor. The proprietary software is free to try with full access purchasable.

Vim

The ubiquitous Vim needs little introduction. Available on every platform, its keyboard-driven editing philosophy has cultivated an avid following of users seeking speed and efficiency.

Emacs

Like Vim, Emacs provides a highly keyboard-driven workflow with extensive customizability through Lisp extensions. The open source editor has been around for decades and remains popular.

Visual Studio

Microsoft's flagship IDE provides an incredibly robust editor optimized for .NET. Enterprise developers will appreciate the deep code intelligence, profiling tools, and integration with the MS stack.

WebStorm

JetBrain's WebStorm delivers excellent intelligent code completion tailored specifically for JavaScript and web development. Integrated debugging helps build rich frontend applications efficiently.

Codepen

Codepen's online editor allows live previews of frontend code like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. The social community helps developers build, prototype, and showcase their UI creations.

There are certainly tradeoffs between proprietary and open source tools, as well as lightweight versus full-featured IDEs. But having options for different languages, environments, and complexity needs is a boon for developers. DevHunt provides useful comparisons between top code editors.

Programming Languages

While personal preference plays a role, some languages are better suited for certain projects. When considering learning or adopting a new language, keep these options in mind:

Python

Python's elegant syntax, readable code, and huge ecosystem of libraries make it a top choice for general purpose programming, web backends, data science, and machine learning.

JavaScript

JavaScript's ubiquity across web, mobile, and backend development has cultivated an unparalleled community and abundance of frameworks. It provides beginner-friendly development with room to grow.

Java

Java's verbosity provides discipline while the JVM platform and enterprise tools offer stable large-scale development. But this can make Java more challenging for newer programmers.

C#

Microsoft's C# provides rapid object-oriented programming with the .NET ecosystem. Strong tooling makes it easier to build and manage complex applications.

PHP

PHP remains a viable server-side scripting language powering millions of websites. Recent versions add more modern language features and frameworks like Laravel improve development.

Ruby

Ruby's elegance and developer happiness focus makes it excellent for prototyping and MVPs. The Rails framework enables fast, productive web development out of the box.

Go

Compiled and statically typed, Google's Go provides built-in concurrency and efficient performance. It shines for distributed and networked systems programming.

Rust

Rust's modern systems language focuses on speed, memory-safety, and parallelism. It promises C++ performance without the headaches but requires adapting to its ownership system.

Choosing a language involves assessing your current skills, project goals, and community support. But expanding your programming language repertoire opens more career and coding opportunities. DevHunt highlights innovative new programming languages and compilers worth evaluating.

Web Frameworks

For building modern web applications, these frontend and backend frameworks represent popular choices:

React

Facebook's React pioneered the component-based approach to UI development that's inspired many JavaScript frameworks. The community provides an endless array of open source components.

Vue.js

Vue combines an approachable API and excellent documentation with great performance and small footprint. The incremental adoption model makes adding it to existing projects easy.

Angular

Maintained by Google, Angular provides an opinionated MVC framework enforcing best practices for complex applications. Broad adoption makes finding Angular developers manageable.

Express

The minimalist Express framework powers Node.js server applications. It offers a thin layer on top of Node.js itself allowing flexible REST API and backend development.

Django

Python's Django framework enables clean, pragmatic web development. The batteries-included philosophy provides everything needed to build web apps quickly with less code.

Ruby on Rails

Beloved for dramatic productivity gains, Rails pioneered conventions over configuration. An ecosystem of gems and host providers make launching new projects easy.

Laravel

Considered the Django or Rails of PHP, Laravel brings modern web development sensibilities. The inversion of control container and expressive syntax reduce boilerplate code.

Spring

Java's Spring framework promotes dependency injection and rapid development. Modules like Spring Boot simplify building enterprise Java applications with opinionated defaults.

The rise of component-based JavaScript frameworks doesn't diminish the viability of server-side and monolithic options. There are still merits to different approaches depending on team skills, project scope, and complexity. DevHunt is a great resource for discovering and evaluating JavaScript frameworks.

Testing Frameworks

Testing remains crucial for reducing bugs and maintaining quality code at scale. Consider these popular frameworks:

Jest

Jest's developer-friendly testing framework requires zero configuration to start JavaScript testing. Snapshot testing and mocks make unit testing React applications simple.

Mocha

Also for JavaScript, Mocha allows greater flexibility for test structure over Jest. Chai's assertion library combines nicely while still providing a minimalist testing interface.

PyTest

The Python world's most used testing framework, PyTest makes it easy to start testing with just a few functions. Fixtures and parametrized tests reduce boilerplate code.

unittest

Python's built-in unittest module provides a solid out of the box testing solution. It lacks some niceties of PyTest but benefits from being in the standard library.

JUnit

JUnit established the conventions for unit testing Java applications. Most Java IDEs and build tools integrate with it seamlessly.

Capybara

The Ruby ecosystem's Capybara framework makes testing web applications simple. Capybara simulates how users interact with UI for effective end-to-end testing.

Cypress

Like Capybara, Cypress also specializes in end-to-end web application testing. Cypress offers advanced capabilities like time traveling during test failures to replay interactions.

Selenium

Selenium automates testing web applications across different browsers and platforms. Integration with continuous integration pipelines helps scale browser testing.

Unit testing best practices remain essential even as end-to-end testing gains prominence. Both help create resilient applications users can trust. Check out DevHunt community ratings and reviews when evaluating testing tools.

Package Managers

Package managers solve the challenge of organizing shared code dependencies across projects. Popular options include:

npm

The default for JavaScript, npm hosts over 1.5 million open source packages. Simplicity helped adoption spread, though vulnerabilities and dependencies remain an issue.

Yarn

Aimed to address npm deficiencies, Facebook's Yarn provides speed and security optimizations like offline caching and deterministic dependency locking.

Composer

Composer dominates PHP package management with simple SemVer range declarations and powerful dependency resolution. It integrates tightly with PHP frameworks.

NuGet

NuGet serves as the package manager for Microsoft development platforms including .NET. It provides access to thousands of libraries as well as CLI tooling.

Maven

Maven brings its build automation capabilities to Java package management. It enforces project structure standards favored by enterprises.

pip/PyPI

Python's official PyPI package index works seamlessly with the pip installer. A massive array of scientific Python and machine learning libraries are available.

RubyGems

RubyGems provides a straightforward package manager built into Ruby. It helped drive Ruby on Rails adoption by simplifying gem installations.

Cargo

Rust's Cargo manages Rust crates while also compiling projects. Its conventions, versioning, and unified interface simplify Rust development.

Package managers boost productivity and enable building on the work of others. But beware outdated packages, licensing considerations, and excessive dependencies. DevHunt profiles clearly list supported languages for each package manager.

Deployment Tools

Shipping new features and updates safely, quickly, and reliably to users is table stakes for modern development. Consider these deployment options:

Docker

Docker's containerization platform allows packing applications into standardized units for running on any environment. Orchestrators like Kubernetes manage containers at scale.

AWS Elastic Beanstalk

EB simplifies AWS deployments using managed containers, load balancing, autoscaling, and application health monitoring. But options are prescriptive.

Heroku

Heroku's hosted platform-as-a-service allows deploying apps without managing servers. Add-ons provide data and service integrations. But vendor lock-in is possible.

Netlify

Netlify specializes in simplifying static site and Jamstack deployments with continuous deployment, previews, and backend serverless functions.

Azure Web Apps

Microsoft's Azure Web Apps provides managed Windows and Linux application hosting. Integration with other Azure services makes it ideal for .NET apps and enterprise scale.

Google App Engine

Google App Engine allows running applications on Google's infrastructure without managing servers. Services integrate tightly but flexibility is limited.

Ansible

Ansible provides simple IT automation and app deployment through playbooks. No agents or client software requirements make it lightweight.

Jenkins

The leading open source automation server, Jenkins provides continuous integration and delivery capabilities. Plugins allow custom deployments and integration with services.

Balancing convenience with control and scalability for your infrastructure needs determines the ideal deployment solutions. DevHunt highlights tools optimized for different deployment strategies.

Database Systems

Applications rely on database backends to persist and organize data. From traditional relational databases to more scalable NoSQL options, considerations include:

PostgreSQL

The open source PostgreSQL offers a full-featured SQL implementation with a reputation for reliability, correctness, and strong data integrity.

MySQL

Also open source, MySQL remains a popular choice for web and OLTP applications. Plugins extend functionality while widespread adoption simplifies hiring.

Microsoft SQL Server

Microsoft's flagship RDBMS integrates tightly with .NET stacks and delivers enterprise scale OLTP and OLAP performance.

MongoDB

The popular document database provides horizontal scale and flexible data models. Querying and indexing make working with unstructured data simple.

Cassandra

Originally created at Facebook, Cassandra offers massive scalability across nodes with tunable consistency. A query language provides SQL-like access.

DynamoDB

Amazon's DynamoDB provides managed NoSQL at any scale with single-digit millisecond latency. Integrations with other AWS services makes it highly adoptable.

Redis

Redis' in-memory key-value store makes it ideal for caching, queues, and streams. Lightning fast performance has made it the go-to for many architectures.

Neo4j

Optimized for graph data models, Neo4j allows representing highly connected data simply. Cypher queries traverse relationships with speed.

Choosing database technology requires balancing speed, scalability, consistency, and development flexibility - there is no one size fits all solution. Check out DevHunt for niche databases like GraphQL optimized offerings.

Monitoring Tools

Observability into application performance, health, and usage is critical as systems grow more complex. Monitoring options include:

Datadog

Datadog provides full-stack monitoring with hundreds of integrations, dashboards, alerts, distributed tracing, and ML-powered anomaly detection.

New Relic

Also full-stack, New Relic specializes in tracking and optimizing application performance with a focus on visualizing and analyzing traces.

Grafana

Most often used with Prometheus, Grafana's open source dashboards provide flexibility for visualizing monitoring data from multiple sources.

Kibana

Kibana lets users visualize and analyze log data aggregated in Elasticsearch. The combination enables powerful application and infrastructure monitoring.

CloudWatch

Amazon CloudWatch allows basic AWS resource monitoring and tracking distributed application logs. Great baseline observability for serverless.

AppDynamics

Targeting enterprises, AppDynamics probes inside applications to pinpoint performance bottlenecks correlated with business metrics.

Splunk

Splunk indexes and correlates massive amounts of log and event data. Sophisticated analytics enable monitoring and troubleshooting systems.

Sentry

Sentry provides open source and enterprise application monitoring focused on error tracking. Integration makes capturing errors and exceptions easy.

There is no shortage of capable monitoring solutions. Focus on addressing your organization's visibility gaps without creating overload. Discover less mainstream monitoring tools on DevHunt.

Other Essential Tools

Beyond the major categories discussed above, developer infrastructure relies on several other key technologies:

Nginx

The high performance open source Nginx web server excels at serving static content, reverse proxying, load balancing, API gateways, and more.

Apache Kafka

Kafka's distributed streaming platform allows building real-time data pipelines and streaming apps. Replayable messages enable reliable data delivery.

Elasticsearch

Elastic's open source Elasticsearch powers search and analytics. Integrations with Beats, Logstash and Kibana provide end-to-end data processing.

GitLab

GitLab provides a complete DevOps platform balancing CI/CD, issue tracking, Git repository management, and Kubernetes integration.

Cloudflare

Cloudflare's global network offers CDN, DNS, DDoS protection, and security for sites and internet-connected applications.

Terraform

HashiCorp's Terraform allows provisioning, changing, and versioning infrastructure as code. Support for services makes infrastructure manageable.

Postman

Postman's interactive API explorer simplifies testing, mocking, documenting, and publishing REST APIs. Team collaboration helps improve API quality.

Notion

Notion's flexible notes and knowledge base help teams collaborate and share information. Visual databases track projects and data.

Developers rely on an ever-widening array of services and infrastructure. When evaluating additional tools, consider integration, community, documentation, and sustainability. DevHunt provides a great launch platform for additional developer infrastructure tools.

Conclusion

This overview highlights developer software worth evaluating across a variety of categories relevant to most tech stacks. There are certainly even more choices worth considering, but the options presented represent proven solutions to research further as you look to build software more efficiently in 2023.

Keep criteria like community support, documentation quality, and productivity impact in mind as you assess options. Expand your toolkit with tools aligned to project needs and team skills to boost your development velocity. But also consider long-term sustainability when adopting new software.

The developer software landscape will only continue growing. Revisiting the latest emerging tools on DevHunt can reveal better ways of building applications. But don't underestimate the value of boring solutions that get the job done. As always, keeping an open mind to new technologies while critically evaluating their tradeoffs remains key.