40+ Tools that we use to make web development easier

We get asked regularly what services we prefer to use for certain tasks or problems, so we’ve created this list of products that helps us at Exlabs deliver better products. You may notice that vast majority of those services is paid, although we can’t stress enough how much time and money they’ve saved us and our clients.

Hope you find this list useful!

Infrastructure & Engineering

Heroku – Heroku allows us to focus on building apps instead of infrastructure, so we don’t need to spend time on DevOps

AWS – we specifically use Amazon S3 for assets storage and backups, but occasionally we use Amazon EC2 cloud services as well

CloudFlare – helps us speed up sites delivery

DNSimple – how we streamline domain and SSL certificate management

CircleCI – it takes care of continuous integration and testing

NewRelic – makes keeping bull’s eye on performance of production applications easy

Logentries – we use it for applications log storage

DataDog – does pretty much the same as NewRelic, but for significantly lower price

HoneyBadger – monitors errors in our application

Github – all of our code and versioning is stored here

BrowserStack – our QA team use it to test front-end work across various browsers and devices

CodeClimate – it makes sure quality of our code is top-notch by automated code quality checks

Watchdocs – helps us keep our APIs documentation up to date

Sidekiq – takes care of background jobs

Pusher – helps us deliver real-time data to the browser

Sublime – this is where most of our developers

Atom – alternative choice for code editing

Debugmail – it moves all our test emails from development/staging into one place

Product Management & Design

JIRA – Our Scrum Masters’ kingdom. Although we are not fans of JIRA’s UX, it’s still by far the most comprehensive agile project management tool.

Craft – Craft helps our Product Owners to manage the Product Backlog and vision clearly

Trello – we use Trello a lot, but mostly for Information Management and checklists. Read more about how using checklists on trello helped improve our processes quality here.

Google Docs – we use Docs mostly in pair with Trello to document processes more thoroughly

UXPin – we use it for mocking the UI and presenting it to the clients

Sketch – this is what we use for web design,

Illustrator – and this for vector editing stuff

Communication

Slack – this is our company headquarters

Zoom – we use zoom for our weekly team updates

Toggl – helps our team be in control with the most precious asset – time. More about how Toggl helped us with estimates.

Features as a Service

Auth0 – saves us time on building identity management

Stripe – takes care of online payments management

Algolia – search engine as a service

MapBox – whenever we need a map feature in the app we use MapBox

Keen.io – ever tried to build custom reporting? Thanks to Keen.io it’s simpler than ever before

Gengo – we use it for translating websites and apps

Wistia – our choice for video hosting

Twilio – powerful platform that we use mostly for sms

Tokbox – great service that we use when we need to build video communication into our apps

Api.ai – helps us create smart conversational chatbots

Kloudless – it saves us time allowing integrate many file storage services at once

Backend As a Service

Backand – we use Backand when we need to speed up product development. It gives us out of the box backend ready for action. Here you can read more about that approach.

Syncano – does pretty much the same as Backand

Firebase – very powerful platform that can save a lot of backend work, we use it mostly for online chats

Email Marketing

Sendgrid – we use it for transactional emails delivery

Mailgun – occasionally we use Mailgun instead of Sendgrid

Mailchimp – it’s mostly used by marketing teams, but we often recommend it for campaign emailing

Customer Success

Intercom – fantastic tool for customer support

Drift – messaging tool, we use it mostly for marketing websites

Clearbit – provide a lot of person and company data that we use to enhance our products  

Analytics

Google Analytics – no introduction needed here

Heap – fantastic alternative to Google Analytics

Segment – it helps us merge users data streams from all sources

Mixpanel – great for tracking funnels and product usage

So this is our toolkit. Interested in our values & how we get things done? See the page about us. 

What about you? What other services are indispensable for your business?