Your choice of tech stack is absolutely critical to your business.
The right choice will make your technology an asset that drives traffic to your website, optimizes conversions, allows you to innovate faster than the competition and attract the best talent.
By contrast, the wrong choice of tech stack is going to slow down customer acquisition, make innovation hard and cause your company to stagnate.
But, what is the correct tech stack for your business?
In this article we explain how to choose the best tech stack for your business. We cover:
What is a tech stack?
A tech stack is the combination of technologies that are used to build and run software applications.
At a high level, a users tech stack is typically divided into two main parts:
- Frontend (client side): This includes everything that the user of your software interacts with directly. Technologies in this layer could be HTML, CSS or JavaScript frameworks like React and Vue.js. Alternatively if you are building a mobile phone app, you might use Android or iOS SDKs which are the low level languages for the mobile app development or development toolkits like Flutter or React Native.
- Backend (server side): This manages data and business logic. It is generally built out of three components: server, database and application logic.
Pro Tip:
Development toolkits like React allow you to build one app that works across multiple platforms (iOS, Android, web) using a single codebase, making development faster and more convenient.
However, unlike toolkits like React, native SDKs like the iOS SDK offer complete control and access to advanced platform-specific features, toolkits may have performance trade-offs and limited support for the latest features. While native SDKs provide the highest level of customization, they require separate development for each platform, making maintenance more complex.
Bonus Content:
For a high level, intuitive view on how the backend works, watch the video below.
For the server, the technologies here could be Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform or Microsoft Azure. These solutions provide on demand infrastructure and other supporting services to host your software applications.
For the database, the technologies could be PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Cassandra or ClickHouse.
For your application, the technologies here could be Node.js, Python, Java or Google Go. In each case you can leverage third party libraries which are pre-coded blocks of code that you integrate into your tech stack to speed up your development.
Layers and components in your tech stack
The layers of your tech stack can be broken down into individual components. These are listed below.
| Component | Description & Examples |
|---|---|
| Server |
|
| Operating system |
|
| Server side programming |
|
| Backend frameworks and libraries |
|
| Web server |
|
| Database |
|
| Client side programming |
|
| Frontend frameworks and libraries |
|
| Deployment and infrastructure |
|
| Infrastructure as code |
|
Additional layers in your tech stack
When building your technology, you may also want to consider adding the following components to your tech stack.
| Component | Description & Examples |
|---|---|
| Third party APIs | Third-party APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) are like ready-made services or tools provided by other companies that your app can use to enhance its functionality. For instance, instead of building your own payment system, you could integrate a third-party payment API like Stripe or PayPal. These APIs help form part of your tech stack by allowing you to leverage existing technologies, saving time and resources. |
| CI/CD pipelines | CI/CD pipelines (Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment) are like an automated assembly line for software development. They streamline the process of integrating new features (code changes), running tests, and deploying applications to production.
When developers push new code, the CI/CD pipeline automatically builds the application, runs tests to ensure everything works, and then deploys the updated version. This helps teams release updates more frequently, reduce errors, and improve collaboration, ensuring that new features can be delivered to users quickly and reliably. |
| Version control | Version control is like a time machine for your code. It tracks every change made to the codebase, allowing developers to collaborate, revert to previous versions, and understand who made changes and why.
With version control systems like Git, multiple developers can work on the same project without overwriting each other’s work. This ensures that the development process is organized, mistakes can be easily fixed, and new features can be added safely and efficiently. |
| Monitoring & analytics | Monitoring and analytics tools like Datadog and CloudWatch, are like a security camera system for your application. They track how your app is performing, gather data on user behaviour, and alert you to any issues in real time. |
| MarTech Stack | Driving traffic to your platform, converting the traffic to sign ups and then activating your users is the only way to get users of your technology. To do this you need a Marketing Tech Stack or MarTech Stack. This will include tools like an SEO optimized website, Google Analytics, Ads and Tag manager and Hubspot CRM. |
How to choose your tech stack? (Things to consider)
To choose the best tech stack for your business, we recommend that you consider the following.
- Project requirements
- Team expertise
- Development speed and ease
- System performance
- Time to market
- Development costs
- Compliance
Please note, although you are not constrained to one tech stack, it’s often preferable to keep the number of technologies that you use to the minimum.
Project requirements
When choosing a tech stack you need to consider the project requirements. In software development there are two types of requirements:
- Functional requirements: these define what your software should do. It will include the features that your software will have such as sign up, login, password recovery and so on.
- Non-functional requirements: these define how the system should operate. For example, how many users should your app be designed to support, which devices will your tech run on e.g. mobile, web, tablet, what uptime guarantees will you offer your users, what are the security requirements and so on.
Both your functional and non-functional requirements will impact your choice of tech stack. For instance, let’s say you are building a big data, real-time analytics platform. In this case, you may consider using a columnar database like Clickhouse which is optimized for big data analytics. You may also want to use Python for your systems analytics since it comes with a large number of machine learning libraries.
By contrast if you are building a two-sided marketplace like Airbnb, you may want to use Google Go for your backend application and a relational database like PostgreSQL.
Pro Tip
Whilst it is very important to get the foundational tech stack correct, a famous saying amongst software engineers is that “premature optimization is the root of all evil”.
With this in mind, there is no point building your app to scale to millions of users on day 1 because unless you have an enormous marketing budget and get very very lucky, you will not need to scale immediately. Growth tends to be much more gradual. So when building new tech, it is best to start small and then incrementally improve the tech over time.
Another Pro Tip
Websites act as a major lead generator for all kinds of software. To do this, the websites must be readable by the major search engines. Certain tech stacks lend themselves better to search engine optimization than others, so it’s important to choose a tech stack for your website that can be well optimized for Google.
Even the most experienced engineers miss this requirement since it requires a detailed understanding not only of traditional tech, but also of technologies used in sales and marketing.
Team expertise
It can be a good idea to choose a tech stack that can match the skill set of your team. For example, if your team already knows how to use MongoDB, Node.js and React, it may be best to just stick with this for your tech stack. However, here you need to also consider if the tech stack that you choose will be easy or hard for new engineers to onboard onto and if there is a ready pool of talent that you can call upon as you expand your team.
If you have no developers on your team, it may be preferable to use a hybrid no-code platform like Dittofi that can enable you to build apps visually and then automatically generate the code for your system. Then as you expand your team, you can simply hire engineers to take over the code development.
Development speed and ease
Your choice of tech stack impacts the speed of your development due to several factors:
- Complexity of tools and languages: Different programming languages have varying levels of complexity. For example, languages like Python or JavaScript tend to be much easier to develop in compared to languages like C and C++. This is because Python and JavaScript are more high level and offer less control. Newer programming languages such as Google Go offer excellent trade off between complexity and control.
- Availability of libraries and frameworks: A tech stack with a large number of pre-built libraries and frameworks (like React for front-end or Django for back-end) can drastically reduce the amount of code you need to write. This is because they come with lots of reusable components that make it quicker and easier to implement new features and handle complex tasks like authentication, routing or building responsive apps.
- Community support: Popular programming languages and infrastructure setups all have large communities of users. This means more available tutorials, resources, third party integrations. If you encounter a problem, the likelihood of quickly finding a solution is much higher when there is strong community support. Each component of your tech stack will also offer paid for support options. For instance, enterprises that choose the open source operating system Linux, often choose the version Red Hat which offers enterprise support and SLAs (Service Level Agreements).
- Learning curve: The more complex a tech stack, the harder it becomes to onboard new developers onto your tech stack. This means that you may need to spend weeks, if not months onboarding a new team member before they can start contributing to your technology. Since developers are in such high demand, this can mean that by the time an engineer is getting productive, they may already be moving to a new company.
System performance
When choosing a tech stack, it is important to choose a tech stack that supports low-latency and high throughput.
Imagine a restaurant: low latency is like getting your food served promptly, while high throughput ensures you can serve many customers without slowing down. In tech terms, low latency means minimal delay in actions (like fetching a list of properties to display), & high throughput ensures many users can access your application simultaneously without causing bottlenecks or slowdowns.
Certain server-side programming languages enable high performance by handling multiple requests simultaneously and reducing processing delays. For example, languages like Node.js or Go are well-suited for building low-latency, high-throughput applications due to their efficient, non-blocking architectures. Just like a busy restaurant with an efficient kitchen and waitstaff can serve many customers quickly, these languages ensure that the backend of your app can handle many user requests at once, keeping things fast and smooth under heavy loads.
By contrast, languages like Python or Ruby, while known for their ease of use and rapid development, can be slower in handling large numbers of requests simultaneously. This is because they are not optimized for high concurrency or non-blocking operations like Node.js or Go. In a busy “restaurant” analogy, Python or Ruby would be like a slower kitchen: great for making complex dishes (features), but not as efficient when trying to serve a massive crowd quickly and without delay.
Time to market
When choosing your tech stack, it is important to make sure that your choice can accelerate your time to market without compromising on quality.
One good way to get to market faster is to look for open source solutions or template technology, that your developers can leverage. For instance, if you are building a two-sided marketplace, you can check out Dittofi’s two-sided marketplace templates. These are full stack, full feature marketplaces like Airbnb, Etsy or Fiver. You can take these and configure them for your specific app build using Dittofi’s visual development framework and then export and own the source code whenever you are ready.
Pro Tip
Dittofi has a full suite of template apps that you can check out in our templates marketplace including, CRMs, Learning Management Systems and Two-Sided Marketplaces.
Development cost
Another consideration when choosing your tech stack is the cost of development. There are two major costs in developing your app.
- Cost of software development. This refers to the expense of building the app, including developer salaries, design, testing, and feature implementation.
- Cost of infrastructure development. This is the expense of setting up and maintaining the necessary resources to run the app, such as servers, databases, cloud services, and ongoing maintenance to ensure smooth operation.
Whilst software development is notoriously expensive and time consuming, the cost of building and running your infrastructure is often overlooked and can in fact dwarf what is spent on the initial application.
Companies nowadays build their infrastructure with cloud service providers (e.g. Amazon, Google or Microsoft). These providers offer on demand services will form part of your tech stack, for example the database.
Using on demand services is significantly lower cost than building your own physical infrastructure, however the cost can still get very high. Ultimately the amount you pay will depend on what cloud services you choose for your project. For instance, do you need advanced database services, machine learning tools, or just basic hosting.
The more complex and resource-intensive your project, the more you’ll pay for the infrastructure that supports it. Choosing the right services ensures you only pay for what you actually need, optimizing both performance and cost.
For example, imagine you are building a platform like Netflix. In this case you are going to choose services that are optimized for content delivery at scale. This is because you will need to stream large volumes of video data to millions of users simultaneously, all whilst ensuring low latency and high quality playback. Compare this to a platform like ChatGPT. In this case, high quality video playback is not the priority. Instead, the backend must be optimized for high-performance computing and fast access to large language models. As such ChatGPT will need to utilize cloud services such as GPU clusters, auto-scaling compute power and low-latency API responses.
Pro Tip
To decide which services make most sense for your project, most engineers will work with an experienced software architect.
Compliance
Compliance does not just relate to data security, however, every component in your tech stack has compliance requirements from your user interface to your database.
User interface designs
Your user interface designs must be compliant with accessibility standards that ensure digital products are accessible to people with disabilities. Whilst the legislation varies by region, regulation tends to align with the Web Compliance Accessibility Guidelines or WCAG which is an internationally recognized set of recommendations for improving web accessibility.
Pro Tip
Dittofi offers WCAG compliant component libraries that you can use to build your app. Alternatively, Dittofi allows you to import your own WCAG compliant component libraries into Dittofi.
Backend, database and infrastructure
To ensure backend compliance, your system must integrate security principles across your entire development lifecycle and ensure that your architecture aligns with the relevant compliance frameworks such as GDPR, HIPAA or PCI-DSS.
This means that your initial setup needs to be end-to-end secure, and then that each new feature which is introduced to your platform retains the same high level of security. There are various technologies that you can integrate into your tech stack to ensure that both the initial setup and ongoing security requirements are met.
For example, let’s say you develop a new feature for your technology. Before you release this feature you need to be sure that you are not inadvertently introducing a security vulnerability to your system. To do this in an automated way, you can integrate with tools like SonarQube which will automatically run static code analysis to identify common security vulnerabilities such as a SQL injection, as well as allowing you to configure custom quality gates that new features must pass through before being merged into the main codebase.
Setting up all of this requires time and extensive architectural and development experience. To by-pass these challenges, you can use an all in one development tool like Dittofi which generates code that has these tools integrated by default.
Third party libraries
Tech companies that want to sell to SMEs and Enterprise must comply with their target customers’ data security requirements. This is because, in many cases the SME or Enterprise will have their own security requirements that they must satisfy in order to remain compliant. Each SME and Enterprise will have their own requirements. These requirements will depend on what product you are selling.
For example, at Dittofi we have dedicated solutions for enterprise tech teams to solve complex engineering challenges. There are always legal restrictions placed on the use of third party libraries used in the development process. New third party libraries must be submitted to the enterprises’ legal teams for review before the solution can be accepted.
The top 10 tech stacks used for software development 2024
Below are some examples of the most popular tech stacks in 2024. Notice that some of the older tech stacks became so popular that they earned an acronym in the developer communities.
React and Google Go Stack
- Our recommendation for a modern, high performing tech stack.
- React is a JavaScript framework developed by Facebook. It is performant, comes with huge community support. Google Go is a programming language designed by Google to handle large scale systems.
- The React and Google Go tech stack. is perfect for building high performance web apps. You can also convert React to mobile friendly code that will run on Android and iOS devices.
Serverless Stack
- Serverless architecture is one the best way to build a secure, robust and cost efficient infrastructure.
- Since the serverless architecture model is based on a Function as a Service (FaaS) model, you do not have to pay for unused server resources, which makes the stack highly cost effective.
- The serverless stack also makes it easy to scale up during peak times, since the cloud providers will automatically scale their resources to accomodate the surge in usage. To save on costs, the solution will then scale down when the usage drops back down.
LAMP Stack
- LAMP stands for Linux (Operating System), Apache (Web Server), MySQL (Database) and PHP (Backend Programming Language).
- The LAMP tech stack was one of the first open source tech stacks. Although the technology is old, it is still frequently used by developers today to build web applications.
- You can easily substitute out parts of this tech stack such as the Linux Operating System (OS) for a Windows OS to form a WAMP stack or macOS to build a MAMP stack.
MEAN Stack
- The MEAN stack is MongoDB (database), Express.js (backend framework), Angular (frontend framework) and Node.js (runtime environment).
- The MEAN tech stack uses the JavaScript programming language across the entire tech stack. This means that you can easily reuse different components of the tech stack across the entire application.
- The downside of this tech stack is that Angular is a dying framework and significantly more complex to work with compared to React.
- Moreover MongoDB is a noSQL DB and so is not appropriate for datasets that are closer to a relational structure.
- Lastly Node.js is increasingly unpopular compared to languages like Google Go.
MERN Stack
- When you replace Angular in the MEAN stack with React it becomes MERN.
- React is one of the fastest growing and most popular frameworks used for building high end software applications.
- One thing to beware of with React is that it does not work well with search engines out of the box. There are many solutions to this. One of the most common is to use Next.js in parallel with React.
Ruby on rails Stack
- Ruby on Rails (often just called “Rails”) is a server side web application framework written in Ruby under the MIT license.
- The technology is designed to make it easier to build dynamic websites.
- Rails follows the Model-View-Controller (MVC) pattern, which organizes your app into three parts:
- Model: Manages the data and the business logic (how the app should work with that data).
- View: Handles the user interface and presentation (what the user sees).
- Controller: Acts as the go-between for the model and the view, processing user input, interacting with the model, and updating the view.
- Rails is designed to take a lot of common decisions off your plate by following well-established conventions. This means you don’t need to spend time writing a lot of configuration files; Rails does that for you as long as you follow the naming rules and patterns it expects. This makes development faster and easier.
.Net Stack
- .NET is a software development framework created by Microsoft that provides tools, libraries, and runtime to build a wide range of applications, including web apps, desktop apps, mobile apps, games, and more.
- Initially, .NET was Windows-specific, but now with .NET Core (and the unified .NET 5+), you can build apps that run on Windows, Linux, macOS, and more. This makes it versatile for developers targeting multiple platforms.
.NET supports several programming languages, with the most common being:
- C# (most popular, often used for web, desktop, and mobile apps)
- VB.NET (historically used for Windows applications)
- F# (functional programming language)
- If you’re building web applications, ASP.NET (a part of .NET) is what you’d use. It works similarly to other web frameworks like Ruby on Rails or Django, offering tools to build the frontend and backend of web apps. It follows the MVC (Model-View-Controller) architecture.
Python-Django Stack
- The Python-Django tech stack is a high level Python web framework that encourages rapid web development.
- Python-Django known takes a “batteries-included” approach, meaning it comes with a lot of useful tools and features right out of the box. For instance, you get authentication, admin interface, form handling and so on.
- Using Django allows you to leverage modern technologies allows you to use modern technologies including: PyCharm, Python, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.
- Developers can integrate the stack with the Apache web server, MySQL, and the Django framework to handle server-side development.
Flutter Stack
- Flutter is an open-source UI toolkit developed by Google, used for building natively compiled applications for mobile, web, and desktop from a single codebase, primarily using the Dart programming language.
- Flutter is often used for developing cross-platform mobile apps, allowing developers to write code once and deploy it to both iOS and Android, as well as the web and desktop platforms.
- Developers can integrate the stack with Flutter, a UI toolkit, alongside a backend server and a database like Firebase or MySQL, for full-stack mobile and web app development.
- Since Flutter providers a single codebase for multiple platforms, this can saves time and effort when building apps for mobile and web. That being said, it is still maturing relative to other frameworks.
Java Enterprise Edition (EE) Stack
Java Enterprise Edition (Java EE) is a powerful tech stack designed for building large-scale, distributed, and scalable applications, particularly for businesses. It builds on top of core Java (Java SE) and adds many additional features and libraries that simplify the development of robust web applications, microservices, and enterprise-level systems.
Key components of the Java EE tech stack include:
- Servlets and JSP (JavaServer Pages): Used for handling HTTP requests and generating dynamic web content.
- EJB (Enterprise JavaBeans): Simplifies the development of business logic, like transactions and database operations.
- JPA (Java Persistence API): Used for database access and object-relational mapping (ORM), making it easier to interact with databases.
- JAX-RS and JAX-WS: Libraries for building RESTful and SOAP-based web services.
- CDI (Contexts and Dependency Injection): Manages object lifecycles and dependencies for cleaner, more modular code.
- JSF (JavaServer Faces): A framework for building component-based user interfaces for web applications.
Conclusion: How to choose your tech stack
In this article, we have seen that choosing the right tech stack depends on your business requirements, project scope and long term business objectives.
It’s important to lay a strong foundation and architect a modular system that allows you to easily substitute out parts of the system that you don’t need.
At Dittofi, we offer you an enterprise grade tech stack without the complexity of setting it up, managing and maintaining it yourself. We do this with the use of our hybrid no-code technology.
This platform allows you to quickly build and launch software applications without writing any code. Our visual designs then transform the visual designs into full stack React and Google Go all deployed onto a serverless tech stack, powered by AWS.
Try building an app today (for free) with Dittofi.