Awesome Developer-First

A curated list of awesome developer-first products.
I'm sure that you'd like unzip.dev (developer trends newsletter I created).
You can follow me on Twitter for more dev related content :)

The definition of developer-first for this repo is:

• Developers are the target audience.
• "Headless", "API-first", "SaaS" are frequently used keywords.
• Usually, this means that the front page has some code examples.
• Products - tools/services that people pay for.

+ 👀 Watch this repo to get notifications about new products we find

Contents

• Analytics
• Authentication & Identity
• CI/CD
• CMS (headless)
• Code Quality
• Computer Vision
• Databases & Spreadsheets
• Deployment Hosting
• Discussions
• Documentation
• Environment & Secret Management
• Feature Flags
• GEO
• IDE
• Infrastructure as Code
• Integrations
• Localization
• Mail
• Media
• Messaging
• Misc
• Monitoring
• Natural Language Processing
• Orchestration
• Payments
• Repo
• Reports Generation
• Scraping
• Search
• Shipping
• Testing

Analytics

Track web/app visitors.

• Mixpanel - Product analytics and dashboards.
• Baremetrics - Subscription analytics for Stripe.
• Segment - Collect user data and send it to your other tools.
• Heap - Product analytics API for web and mobile, captures all events.
• Pirsch - Privacy-friendly web analytics with a backend integration and API.

Authentication & Identity

Products that handle authentication and user identity for you.

• Auth0 - Authentication & authorization as a service.
• AWS cognito - AWS's authentication as a service.
• Okta - Embeddable authentication with SSO.
• LoginRadius - Managed user authentication service with SSO.
• Firebase Auth - Google Firebase's take on authentication.
• Magic.link - Passwordless (email-based) log in as a service.
• Oso - Authorization framework (RBAC).
• Hanko - Passwordless (WebAuthn API) PSD2, eIDAS, and GDPR compliant.
• SuperTokens - Opensource and hosted email & Oauth authentication with prebuilt UI.
• Permit.io - Permissions and access-control as a service.
• FusionAuth - Security-centric authentication as a Service, including self-hosting.
• userfront - Simplistic user authentication with pre-built back-office dashboard.

CI/CD

Continious Integration/Delivery.

• CircleCI - YML to configure your builds, parallel jobs, jobs marketplace.
• Gitlab - Open source CI and hosted solution with Github-like abilities.
• Gitpod - Automated cloud dev environments.

CMS (headless)

Backend only Content Management System, you decide on frontend and consume content via API.

• Contentful - CMS as an API.
• ElegantCMS - Headless CMS builder.
• Ghost - Blog platform, can be used as headless CMS (ex. with Hexo).
• Sanity - Headless CMS, treat content as data.

Code Quality

Check your code quality.

• sonarsource - Lint and code quality checks.
• Codacy - Automatic code quality checks.

Computer Vision

Manipulate and detect visual data.

• clarifai - Set of computer vision APIs.
• CloudSight - Digital media brand recognition.
• Google Vision AI - Google's AI vision APIs.
• roboflow - Simplified computer vision model creation for developers.
• Scanbot SDK - Structured data extraction from images for applications.

Databases & Spreadsheets

Storing data and processing it.

• Airtable - Database and spreadsheet hybrid with an API.
• Supabase - Hosted and open source managed postgres DB like firebase.
• PlanetScale - Hosted managed MySQL database, CI integration & auto scaling.

Debugging

Tools that help in tracking bugs.

• Google Cloud's operations suite - Set of debug primitives (capture, log injection, etc) for Google cloud.
• Lightrun - Debug production servers using a plugin in the IDE (on-prem or SaaS) that supports Java, Node.js, and Python.
• Rookout - Debug production servers via a cloud-based debugger. Supporting Java, .Net, Node.js, Python, and Ruby.

Deployment Hosting

Products that help you deploy your app/website.

• Render - Deploy from git to a CDN with SSL.
• Vercel - Deploy JAMStack (mainly Next.js) via CLI.
• Netlify - Deploy JAMStack (mainly Gatsby) via CLI.
• Heroku - Deploy via CLI to scalable servers.
• Digital Ocean App Platform - Deploy and don't care about infrastructure, works with all major frameworks.
• Platform.sh - Continuously deploy full-stack apps.
• Fly.io - Deploy dockerized full stack apps via a location-aware service (latency reduction).
• Railway - Out of the box git to deployment with auto scaling, DBs, secrets and rollbacks.

Discussions

Comments and forums.

• Commento - Privacy centric embeddable comment system.
• MuutIo - Tools to create a community-driven app.
• Bazaarvoice - Ratings, reviews as a service.
• Yotpo - Reviews ratings and Q&A as a service.

Documentation

Documentation solutions.

• readme - Personalized and dynamic developer docs.
• DeveloperHub - Collaborative developer documentation platform.
• swimm - Docs that are coupled with your code, auto-synced, works with your IDE.
• Mintlify - AI powered code documentation, IDE extension (open source).

Environment & Secret Management

Manage environment variables and secrets for multiple apps or projects.

• Vault - API driven secret key management.
• Doppler - Environment variable management across projects, in one place.
• 1Password Secrets Automation - Secrets management with integration to 1Password.
• Envkey - Environment management with syncing mechanism for all apps.
• Ubiq - Encryption APIs wiht secret management

Feature Flags

Control production features with conditional flags in your code.

• LaunchDarkly - Feature flags-as-a-service platform.
• split - Feature flags platform with data analytics.
• Flagsmith - Feature flags-as-a-service platform simplified.

GEO

Location services.

• Radar - Geofencing and geo APIs.
• mapbox - Maps and locations products for devs.
• SmartyStreets - US Reverse Geocoding and Address Verification APIs.

IDE

Products that extend your IDE and help development.

• Codota - AI code completions for your IDE.
  • TabNine - Deep learning completion (part of codota).
• Kite - AI assistant in your IDE (Python or JS).

Infrastructure as Code

Declare your infrastructure and reproducibly provision cloud infrastrucure from it.

• Terraform - DSL, open-source and free (paid solution adds team management, policy-as-code...).
• Pulumi - Developer-first IaC with Python, TypeScript, Go and more languages...

Integrations

Integration management systems or products that ease integration development

• Apideck - Integration marketplace builder, one-API with 3rd parties for quick development.

Localization

Translating your product (also denoted i18n).

• Localazy - App translation built for developers.
• Tolgee - Developer & translator friendly web-based localization platform.

Mail

Sending emails as a service.

• Mailgun - Send, track, and receive emails.
• Sendgrid - Email API.
• Lob - Email and address verification.
• FormSpree - Receive form submissions by email.
• Hunter.io - Email lead and validation APIs.
• Anymail finder - Verify and find email APIs.

Media

Media APIs (optimization, CDN).

• Cloudinary - Optimize, create, manage, and deliver images and videos.
• imgix - Transforms, optimizes, and cache images.
• ImageKit - Automate image optimization, transformation, and delivery.
• Mux - APIs to upload, manage, and stream video.
• Pintura - A fully configurable JavaScript image editor SDK.
• APITemplate.io - APIs to generate images and PDFs from reusable templates.

Messaging

Messaging APIs - SMS, notifications, chats, and VoIP.

• Twilio - SMS, push notifications, and VoIP APIs.
• Vonage - Video, SMS, chat, and voice APIs.
• stream - Feed and chat as a service.
• Applozic - Chat SDKs, real-time messaging.

Misc

Different products that probably don't have a category.

• Actyx - Developer-first factory building.
• ngrok - Generate public URLs for internal servers (behind NAT/firewall).
• zigi - Developer’s assistant for mundane non-coding tasks via Slack.
• Nylas - APIs for productivity workflows (email, calendar, contacts...) - like plaid for productivity.
• Interval - SDK to build internal tools and scripts for your product.

Monitoring

Monitoring your production application.

• Sentry - Application monitoring for bugs and performance.
• KeenIO - Event streaming platform.
• Rollbar - Reports errors in production.
• LogRocket - Replay bugs users had.
• Dashbird - Serverless realtime monitoring.
• Statuspal - Public/Private status pages for services with integrations.
• instatus - Minimalist Jamstack status page.

Natural Language Processing

Interactions with natural language.

• DialogFlow - Voice/text chatbot framework by Google.

Orchestration

Orchestration tools for (micro) services.

• Camunda- Platform - Workflow engine that delivers scalable, on-demand process automation.
• AWS Step Functions - visual workflow service to build distributed applications and automate processes

Payments

Handling payments, credit card processing, and invoices.

• Stripe Payments - Accept payments and move money globally with APIs.
• Braintree - Paypal's take on API-first payments.
• Plaid - Accept, send ACH (bank transfers) and get bank information.
• Paddle - Revenue delivery platform for SaaS with broad geographical support (unlike stripe at the moment).

Repo

Repository and artifacts management.

• Artifactory - Create your own package repository.
• cloudsmith - Cloud-native private package management.

Reports Generation

Generating reports, mainly PDFs

• PDFBlade - HTML to PDF API usage based pricing.
• Carbone - JSON into PDF, DOCX, XLSX, PPTX, ODS... API.
• Export SDK - PDF generator API with visual template editor.
• DocRaptor - HTML to PDF API built specifically for Paged Media using the Prince PDF library.

Scraping

Fetching data from websites not via an intended API.

• Apify - Turn websites to an API.
• proxycrawl - Scrape hard-to-scrape websites with proxies.
• ScrapingBee - Using headless browsers and proxies to scrape without being blocked.
• ScrapingANT - Scrape with headless chrome.
• SerpApi - Real-time search engine scraping API.

Search

Index and search your content as a service API.

• Algolia - Search as a service and full suite of search APIs.
• Swiftype - Search as a service (crawlers and React ready).
• Websolr - Open-source and hosted search with Solr.
• typesense cloud - Open-source and hosted search as a Service.

Shipping

Creating and handling the shipment of goods.

• easypost - Shipping APIs for e-commerce.

Testing

Testing tools.

• Testim - Frontend testing.
• Applitools - Automated visual testing.
• Percy - Continuous visual testing.
• Blackfire.io - Performance testing.
• Chromatic - Visual UI testing for storybook.
• Beeceptor - REST API mocking.
• Loadmill - Generate tests from user behavior.

Contributing

See here: CONTRIBUTING.md