Software is eating the world, and there are not enough developers to fulfil demand.
The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics projects that employment for software developers, which includes software engineers, will grow 22%, substantially faster than the 4% average for all careers.
As developers and IT professionals, this demand results in pressure. We are often given impossible deadlines, velocity goals and expected to deliver at breakneck speeds, with zero bugs. This is exactly why we need the support and acceleration of good development tools.
What makes for a good development tool?
Although the term "developer tool" is very general and can apply to a wide range of services, there are a few key features that your top developer tools should have.
- It saves you time
- Good documentation
- It integrates well with other tooling
- Good community
- Regular releases and updates
Top 10 open source development tools
Below we'll cover the top open-source development tools you should be using in 2021. Without these tools, the work we do, the deadlines we hit, the bugs we find and squash before release would be impossible.
VS Code
Visual Studio Code is a lightweight but powerful source code editor which runs on your desktop and is available for Windows, macOS, and Linux. It comes with built-in support for JavaScript, TypeScript, and Node.js and has a rich ecosystem of extensions for other languages (such as C++, C#, Java, Python, PHP, Go).
Why VS Code is in our top 10
Personally, it's been my go-to editor for over three years. I moved from Sublime to Atom to VS Code, and I'd never looked back. Feature-wise, UX-wise, and extensions-wise, it's the best. In addition, the team behind VS Code releases new features and functionality through monthly updates. It's been exciting to watch the editor grow from strength to strength, and I'd like to thank the team and community behind the product for their effort. These are the reasons why VS Code is the best editor and worth a try if you've never developed with it before.
Time-saving: 8/10
Documentation: 9/10
Integrations: 10/10
Community: 8/10
Release/Updates: 10/10
Budibase
Budibase is an open source low-code platform, bringing together everything required to build internal tools and custom business apps, such as; dashboards, admin panels, approval apps, customer portals, and everything in between. Within minutes, transform data and processes into powerful internal tools.
Why Budibase is in our top 10
Budibase is the leading open source low code platform. Low code platforms are trending at the moment and for sound reasoning. As previously mentioned, the demand for software development is proliferating, with no sign of stopping. Low code platforms, such as Budibase, allow IT professionals and developers to deliver internal tools and CRUD apps in a fraction of the time. They also remove a lot of the repetition and grunt work experienced when developing such tools, leading to a more satisfying dev process in some cases.
Budibase outshines its competition for several reasons:
- users can self-host their apps on their own infrastructure
- users can create internal and external tools
- Budibase has an automation layer, allowing users to automate tasks such as email notifications, triggering webhooks, sending a report
- Budibase exports real single-page applications providing end-users with a better, more performant experience.
If you've not tried Budibase, give it a try - it's simple to get started.
Time-saving: 10/10
Documentation: 6/10
Integrations: 8/10
Community: 7/10
Release/Updates: 10/10
Posthog
PostHog is a product analytics platform built for the enterprise, with the differentiators of being open source and having a broader view of the tools needed to make a product successful.
Why Posthog is in our top 10
PostHog can be deployed on your infrastructure and provides a large set of tools to help improve your product, such as session recording, heatmaps, and feature flags, that are unique to PostHog in the product analytics space. Posthog is a young product, like Budibase, but its community and team are responsive and helpful.
Time-saving: 6/10
Documentation: 7/10
Integrations: 6/10
Community: 8/10
Release/Updates: 7/10
Snyk
Snyk is a developer-first platform for building cloud-native applications securely. In addition, it helps and encourages developers to remediate open source vulnerabilities during the development process.
Why Snyk is in our top 10
Software composition analysis is a pain. Not many developers like doing it. Or at least, in my experience, I didn't like doing it until Snyk came along.
Snyk offers direct integration into your software development life cycle, supporting all the major IDEs, auto-remediation of security vulnerabilities, and visualization of dependencies. Snyk also provides custom patching.
Time-saving: 7/10
Documentation: 9/10
Integrations: 9/10
Community: 8/10
Release/Updates: 7/10
Prisma
Prisma is an open source next-generation ORM. It consists of the following parts:
- Prisma Client: Auto-generated and type-safe query builder for Node.js & TypeScript
- Prisma Migrate: Migration system
- Prisma Studio: GUI to view and edit data in your database
You can use the Prisma Client in any Node.js or TypeScript backend application.
In other words, it's an ORM that turns your database into a REST/GraphQL API, which is fantastic!
Why Prisma is in our top 10
I love how Prisma provides a type-safe API that users can use across the frontend and backend. It also takes an SDL-first approach which is easier to understand and great for building things quickly.
Time-saving: 6/10
Documentation: 8/10
Integrations: 8/10
Community: 9/10
Release/Updates: 8/10
Storybook
Storybook is a tool for UI development. It makes development faster and easier by isolating components, allowing developers to work on one component at a time. As a result, you can develop entire UIs without needing to start up a complex dev stack, force specific data into your database, or navigate around your application.
Why Storybook is in our top 10
Storybook integrates with all popular frontend frameworks, including React, Vue, and Svelte. It's also got a great library of add-ons, and the community is extensive and helpful. But, most importantly, the tool is excellent and allows me to present components in an isolated environment. With Storybook, I've found developers are also more aware of the components at their disposal, leading to less duplication and repetition.
Time-saving: 4/10
Documentation: 8/10
Integrations: 9/10
Community: 9/10
Release/Updates: 7/10
Vercel
Vercel is a deployment and collaboration platform for frontend developers. Vercel puts the frontend developer first, giving them comprehensive tools to build high-performance websites and applications.
Vercel enables developers to host websites and web services that deploy instantly and scale automatically – all without any configuration.
Why Vercel is in our top 10
Vercel is a joy to use. They truly accel at developer experience, performance, and UI design. Their community is one of the largest and fastest-growing on Github, and their forums are active and welcoming. They're also the creators of Next.js, which, in my opinion, is the second-best static site generator after Hugo.
Time-saving: 7/10
Documentation: 8/10
Integrations: 8/10
Community: 10/10
Release/Updates: 10/10
Oh My Zsh
Oh My Zsh is an open source, community-driven framework for managing your Zsh configuration. It's great if you use the command line often.
Why Oh My Zsh is in our top 10
It, in my opinion, makes the command line more exciting. It also comes bundled with over 275 plugins that's make your life as a software developer easier. It also comes with themes contributed by the community.
Time-saving: 1/10
Documentation: 6/10
Integrations: 10/10
Community: 10/10
Release/Updates: 9/10
Gitlab
GitLab is a single application that spans the entire software development lifecycle. If you're not using GitLab, your DevOps lifecycle is likely spread across any number of applications. These silos take overhead to integrate, manage, configure, and maintain, slowing down your team and your deployments. Moving to a single application will speed up your workflow and help you deliver better software faster.
Why Gitlab is in our top 10
I prefer Github for version control. But, as the post suggests, this list comprises of open source development tools only. Gitlab is a close second and one I have used for 5+ years. Gitlab has additional features that Github does not, including; Code analytics, Service Desk, Design Management, Secrets management, and time tracking. In addition, it focuses more on the entire DevOps lifecycle, which is helpful if you prefer to only interact with one platform for a vast number of functions.
Gitlab is particularly strong when it comes to package management. GitLab enables teams to package their dependencies, manage containers, and build artifacts with relative simplicity. The private, container, and package registry are built-in and preconfigured out-of-the-box to work seamlessly with GitLab source code management and CI/CD pipelines. Once again, Gitlab shines when you use all its tooling together - but this makes it hard to switch workflow due to lock-in. Gitlab is a behemoth in the open-source developer world, and if you have not tried it, I recommend you give it a go.
Time-saving: 9/10
Documentation: 10/10
Integrations: 9/10
Community: 9/10
Release/Updates: 8/10
Supabase
Supabase is an open source Firebase alternative. Rather than one platform, Supabase is a 'suite of open source tools, stitched together to build a seamless developer experience.'
Why Supabase is in our top 10
Supabase is packed full of features, including authentification, storage, and soon-to-be-released functions. Another reason I prefer Supabase is that its closed source competitor Firebase charges for API calls, leading to a few uneasy bills at the end of the month.
Time-saving: 5/10
Documentation: 6/10
Integrations: 6/10
Community: 10/10
Release/Updates: 9/10
Open source development tools come in many shapes and sizes, and it's often a complex process when selecting the right tool for a new project. I hope my list helps you on your development journey.
I would also like to share my thanks to the creators and communities of the platforms above. They all make the internet and the development process better - and that's truly wonderful, in my opinion.
Top comments (25)
Postgraphile instead of Prisma. Oh-my-zsh.... Uh, never understood why anybody would want to bloat the system when its really easy to config the thing yourself.
I use oh my zsh to save me hours configuring my terminal. It's got nice aliases for the tools I use and fair defaults I don't need to mess with.
Good tip on postgraphile, I'll check it out.
I obviously agree, oh my zsh has helped me a lot over the years.
Just curious, for both of you... Which OS you use?
I use all three major os's weekly
Linux, Mac, win and prefer them in that order.
Even on windows I have windows terminal launch oh my zsh to keep my environments consistent. Recently I did check out oh my psh after seeing Scott H use it. I was pleased, but less whelmed I had to troubleshoot more and don't know power shell nearly as well as the nix shells.
I asked because I kinda can understand Mac users use Oh-my-zsh. As it "just works" philosophy. But Linux user in my opinion is used to configs, man pages and heavy customization of the system. Or maybe I'm too old and finally Linux is really becoming desktoo for the masses. :)
I'm of the mindset that you just dump your dot files in a git repo and then you never have to configure them again. Just git clone once per new system ¯_(ツ)_/¯
Exactly. And in that scenario ohh-my-zsh is another level of abstraction, another dependency, and ads no value at all. Im quite sure that only people that never tried to configure zsh, think it's so complex. It really isn't. Only trouble configuring it, is filtering out 'oh-my-zsh' from google search results :) It simple dominates there and its hard to find much about config wothout it. Really frustrating.
Completely agree on oh-my-zsh. I think people use it because it is overhyped and people think configuring zsh is hard. Its complete opposite, oh-my-zsh adds unneeded complexity over zsh
Even bash works fine for me, and what sort of "config" are we talking about? I'm adding bash aliases on the fly as I need them.
If you'd like to try an online API development / testing platform - we're building Hoppscotch.io an open source Postman alternative in web. Would appreciate if you try it out and let us know your comment for improvements.
GitHub:
👽 Open source API development ecosystem https://hoppscotch.io
Also, check out Responsivize to develop responsive websites and CodeBox, which is a sandbox web dev environment like CodePen or JSFiddle but has the same editor features as in VSCode it's pretty awesome too!
Codebox looks very interesting indeed. Thanks for sharing.
Im glad you liked it. Also, a star to the repo would be amazing!
Thanks for sharing the list. As a developer, i use open source tools with not much thought, so it's nice to show some appreciation once and a while.
Share the love!
I'll be checking out budibase at some point soon. Never heard of it and not in love with no-code platforms I've seen, but willing to be amazed. We need less imperative tooling anyway.
Wonderful. Well, i hope we can change your perspective and give you hope when it comes to no/low code tools.
Using
oh-my-zshinstead of taking a few hours to fully configure your ownzshconfiguration (you can still useoh-my-zsh's plugins, you just have to adapt the code somewhat) is being penny wise pound stupid. Sure you save time at the onset of the configuration but you sacrifice a lot of control, are wholly accepting the at times questionable decisions ofoh-my-zshand the startup time ofoh-my-zshis absolutely awful if you are loading more than a few plugins. Plus who actually needs to keep all those theme files? If you have a decentXresourcesthat defines colors, you shouldn't even really need any of the basic themes and bringing in powerlevel10k on its own is easy enough.Sure
oh-my-zshis a great place to start, but once you understand how shell configurations generally work and how to search Github for other people's to use as examples, its not something anyone serious should be using long term unless they like waiting for their shell to load. Here's myzshconfiguration, just to give you an example (its not that great, I would look around for another to use as the basis but this gives you an idea) github.com/Thomashighbaugh/zshThanks for sharing the list. I know only a few of them and never heard of the others. I will definitely check them out and try because why not.
Cheers.
Nice Post. Definitely going to try buildbase.
Btw there is supabase's screenshot in place of vercel, you might wanna correct that.
Thank you! Edited.
I already using GITLAB for everything, like requirement, packaging, devs ops, and the one of the best feature is gitlab-runner,
Btw I like Prisma, but it's doesn't support mongodb yet
Prisma supports MongoDB in early access: prisma.io/docs/concepts/database-c....
You can expect MongoDB to improve significantly in the coming months.
Is Synk open-source ?