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Hi – this is Gergely with the monthly, free issue of the Pragmatic Engineer Newsletter. In every issue, I cover challenges at Big Tech and startups through the lens of senior engineers and engineering leaders. If you’ve been forwarded this email, you can subscribe here.
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The Pragmatic Engineer 2025 Survey: What’s in your tech stack? Part 2
Tools software engineers use for project management, communication and collaboration, databases and backend infrastructure. Reader survey with analysis, based on 3,000+ responses
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During April and May, we asked readers of this newsletter about the tools in your tech stack and your opinions of them. We reported some results in Part 1 of this mini series, and today, we look into more metrics contained in the circa 3,000 responses. A big thanks to everyone who took the time to fill out the survey.
We cover:
Most-mentioned tools. JIRA, VS Code, and AWS lead the pack.
Project management. Linear is becoming a challenger to JIRA and is especially popular at smaller companies.
Communication and collaboration. Slack is the most frequently-used tool for chat, for video calling it’s MS Teams, Confluence for documents, Miro for whiteboarding, and Figma for design tasks.
Databases and data stores. PostgreSQL is the leading choice for databases, and there’s a very long tail of database solutions which professionals choose.
Backend infrastructure. Docker, Kubernetes, and Terraform are used everywhere, alongside many managed AWS services.
Forks of popular open-source projects. OpenSearch seems to be eating into Elasticsearch’s market share, while Valkey and OpenTofu seem not to have persuaded many developers to drop Redis and Terraform.
As a reminder, in the first of these articles on The Pragmatic Engineer 2025 survey, we covered:
Demographics
AI tools
Most used, most-loved programming languages
Most hated (and loved) tools
IDEs and terminals
Version control and CI/CD
Cloud providers, IaaS, and PaaS
The bottom of this article could be cut off in some email clients. Read the full article uninterrupted, online.
1. Most-mentioned tools
Below is a summary of the most-mentioned tools from around 3,000 survey respondents. Everyone mentioned several tools, and this chart lists those cited by at least 10% of respondents (300):
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The biggest surprises for me:
JIRA is the most used tool. More software engineers work with JIRA than with VS Code or AWS – which is a surprise! It’s known that JIRA is widely used across tech companies, and the survey replies reveal just how much.
Figma mentioned more than Kubernetes or Cursor. Figma is a tool designers use for creating user interfaces which are easy to share with developers for collaboration. Figma recently went public, valued at $34B at the time of publication. It’s one of the most-used tools by software engineers, and our survey suggests why the company is so valuable.
Other observations on the most-used tools:
Microsoft is dominant across the tooling which developers use. VS Code (IDE), GitHub (version control), GitHub Copilot (AI coding) and GitHub Actions (CI/CD) are some of the most-used tools. Of the 15 most common tools, 4 are owned and operated by Microsoft.
Grafana, Datadog, and Sentry are popular with developers. Grafana (visualizing observability data), Datadog (observability), and Sentry (monitoring and performance analysis), are used by 15-25% of respondents – more than the likes of Notion and Google Workspace. Datadog is publicly traded and valued at $44B, Grafana is private and was last valued at $6B, while Sentry is valued at $3B. Given Grafana and Sentry seem to be equally popular with developers, it’s worth asking if they are actually undervalued compared to Datadog, or whether Datadog simply monetizes its software better.
2. Project management
Part 1 of the survey results found that JIRA is the “most disliked tool” among developers, based on the number of negative mentions subtracted by the number of positive mentions. This suggests that many engineers using JIRA don’t want to use it but have no choice, which makes sense because it’s often engineering leaders, product folks, or the CEO who select project management software. Smaller competitor Linear is the 4th most-loved tool. Let’s look closer at which tools software engineers use for project management: