How to Choose a Tech Stack for Your Project

Frontend: React, Vue, or Something Else?

React dominates the frontend landscape for good reasons: a massive ecosystem, excellent hiring pool, and battle-tested performance at scale. For most custom software projects, React (typically with Next.js) is the safe, strong choice.

Vue offers a gentler learning curve and excellent developer experience. It's a great choice for teams transitioning from jQuery or server-rendered apps, and has a particularly strong presence in the Laravel ecosystem.

Svelte and Astro are newer options worth considering for specific use cases. Svelte compiles away its framework overhead for exceptional runtime performance. Astro (what this site is built with) is ideal for content-heavy sites where you want minimal JavaScript shipped to the browser.

Backend: Node.js, Python, Go, or Rails?

Your backend choice should be driven by your team's existing expertise, your performance requirements, and the ecosystem of libraries you need.

Node.js with TypeScript is our default recommendation for most projects. Sharing TypeScript between frontend and backend reduces context switching, simplifies hiring, and enables code sharing. Express or Fastify handle most use cases well.

Python (Django or FastAPI) excels when your project has significant data processing, machine learning, or scientific computing requirements. The Python ecosystem for data and AI is unmatched.

Go is the right choice when you need exceptional performance, low memory usage, and high concurrency — think real-time systems, API gateways, and infrastructure tools. Ruby on Rails is still excellent for rapid prototyping and CRUD-heavy applications.

Database: SQL vs NoSQL

PostgreSQL should be your default choice for any new project unless you have a specific reason to choose something else. It handles relational data, JSON documents, full-text search, geospatial queries, and time-series data — often eliminating the need for specialized databases.

MongoDB makes sense when your data is genuinely document-oriented and schema flexibility is a requirement, not just a convenience. Be honest about whether you need flexible schemas or just don't want to think about your data model upfront — these are very different things.

Redis, Elasticsearch, and other specialized databases should be added when you have specific use cases that justify the operational complexity. Don't add them prematurely.

The Decision Framework

When we help clients choose a tech stack, we use these criteria in order of importance: (1) team expertise — the best stack is the one your team knows, (2) hiring pool — can you find and afford developers in this stack, (3) ecosystem maturity — are there libraries for what you need, (4) performance characteristics — does it meet your specific performance requirements.

Notice that "what's trendy" and "what has the most GitHub stars" aren't on the list. Technology decisions should be boring and practical. The exciting part should be the product you build, not the tools you build it with.

If you're starting from zero with no existing team preference, our default recommendation for most business applications is: React + Next.js frontend, Node.js + TypeScript backend, PostgreSQL database, deployed on AWS or GCP. This stack is battle-tested, well-documented, and has the largest hiring pool in the US.