Top 20 Developer Tools 2017

This has been a big year for our company with GitKraken taking on the Git world full-force! We know we wouldn’t be where we are today without the support of the developer community. Thanks for not being afraid to tell us what you think, what you like, and what you don’t like. Our mission is to build world-class developer tools, and we need your feedback to do that.

We wanted to know what dev tools our community loves to use. In order to find out, we emailed our GitKraken newsletter subscribers and asked them to tweet their top 5 dev tools using #MustHaveDevTools. We were blown away with how many responses we got (over 550 as I write this, and they’re still coming)!

So, without further ado, here are the top 20 must have dev tools. These results are based on the 20 tools that received the highest number of votes (1 being the most and 20 being the least).

Top 20 Dev Tools

1. GitKraken (346 votes): The downright luxurious Git GUI client for Windows, Mac, and Linux.
2. Atom (125 votes): A hackable text editor for the 21st Century.
3. VS Code (104 votes): A free, lightweight tool for editing and debugging web apps.
4. Git (77 votes): A free and open source distributed version control system.
5. GitHub (75 votes): A web-based Git repository hosting service.
6. Visual Studio (67 votes): Developer tools and services for any platform with any language.
7. Sublime Text (66 votes): A sophisticated text editor for code, markup, and prose.
8. Chrome DevTools (50 votes): A set of web authoring and debugging tools built into Google Chrome.
9. Docker (50 votes): An open platform for developers and system administrators to build, ship, and run distributed applications.
10. GitLab (45 votes): Git repository management, code reviews, issue tracking, activity feeds, and wikis.
11. IntelliJ IDEA (44 votes): A Java IDE.
12. PhpStorm (39 votes): A commercial, cross-platform IDE for PHP.
13. Postman (34 votes): A powerful GUI platform to make your API development faster & easier.
14. ReSharper (33 votes): A Visual Studio extension for .NET developers.
15. Slack (31 votes): Real-time messaging, archiving, and search for modern teams.
16. PyCharm (29votes): An IDE used specifically for Python.
17. Android Studio (27 votes): The official IDE for Android platform development.
18. Notepad++ (25 votes): A free source code editor which supports several programming languages running under the MS Windows environment.
19. Xcode (25 votes): an IDE for macOS/and iOS development.
20. Stack Overflow (23 votes): The largest online community for programmers to learn, share their knowledge, and advance their careers.

Honorable Mentions

1. Coffee
2. Beer

If you know our company well, you might be wondering, “what about your Scrum project management software, Axosoft?!” Well, the community we polled is mostly software developers who are more focused on coding tools, but, just maybe, they haven’t seen Axosoft’s fresh new look!

While our developers have spent a lot of time working on GitKraken, they’ve also spent the better portion of this year working on Axosoft v17 Beta, which was just released, and contains significant UI and UX improvements. So who knows, maybe both our tools will make this list next year!