Top 20 Backend Tools List

In a mechanical world, the terms back-end and front-end refer to the distinction between the data access layer (back-end) and the presentation layer (front-end) of a software.

This software details a client-server model. According to the thumb rule, the server-side of the model is any component that handles data storage and business logic, and the client-side is an abstraction that a user manipulates.

While the front-end is the visible portion of the iceberg, the back-end is the huge, invisible portion of the same iceberg. And in this context, you will learn about the invisible portion of the iceberg- the back-end.

The back-end is a mystery! Back-end development is a skill that makes the web mighty. Because of these skills, people can browse their favorite sites seamlessly without even realizing all the labor put in by the back-end developers.

So, to help break this mystery, you need to go through this context and learn about:

• What is backend development?
• What are the advantages of backend development?
• The best 20 tools for backend development.

Read on to know them.

What is back-end development?

Back-end development is that mystical and elusive portion of an application that remains unseen. Every significant yet complex application carries more non-user interface code than user-interface code.

The user-interface code defines the front-end development part of an application related to direct interaction with the user.

Non-user interface code has assorted logic that happens in the background, including storage and retrieval of data, business rules, and logic calculation. This entire thing happens behind the scenes, and a back-end developer makes all this happen.

A back-end developer will majorly concern himself with building a logic behind the application he is working on. Front-end developers are accountable for building the user interface, and back-end developers are to write the codes that make it all work.

Developers design the architecture of the system, solve problems, and implement algorithms. Simply put, back-end development involves writing code that is not seen directly.

What are the advantages of backend development?

Nowadays, companies deploy web applications and websites in a range of environments. This becomes convenient with the use of back-end development services. 

Back-end development plays a vital part in the software development process by allowing software to run in different environments.

Furthermore, the back-end development technology processes retrieve and transfer every detail submitted by the user in the repositories to the web interface for a better app view. Hence, the back-end serves as a website’s framework and enables sharing of knowledge swiftly.

The back-end of a website contains the logic of an application that performs the scheduled data processing required by each organization, besides conjugating an app’s infrastructure and domain components.

Last, back-end technology adds functionality to every front-end development. The website’s user interface and accessibility will completely depend on how successfully the back-end performs. Therefore, without proper back-end technology, no website will work effortlessly.

Top 20 Backend Tools List

Here are the best 20 backend tools.

Want to know more? Keep reading.

Back4App  

Back4App is a backend-as-a-service provider that effectively drives apps to perform. It is an impressive open-source solution that assists developers in constructing extensive and scalable mobile and web applications at a quick speed. You can use this solution to optimize and customize your apps seamlessly in a different manner.

Back4App is a solution that is fully managed. It features planning of component-based products that exist in the middle-tier of a server-centric framework and aids automatic scaling of applications. This distinct feature makes the solution one of the most prioritized choices among app developers. 

Some of the significant aspects of Back4App include GraphQL APIs, REST, scalable hosting, Email and push notifications, spreadsheet-like database, and live queries. And some of its core features include authentication, SQL and NoSQL databases, and storage.

Back4ap offers a free tier. However, shared hosting will cost you $5 per month, and dedicated hosting will be worth $250 per month.

Firebase

Firebase is an entire toolset for coding, improving, and scaling your app. In addition, this mobile platform lets developers use the toolset to cover a considerable portion of the app development process that they would otherwise have to create all by themselves. Thus, deploying the Firebase tool saves a substantial amount of time for the app developers.

Notably, developers get the opportunity to extend Firebase features by adding server-side codes and integrate them with the developed applications. These features include gaining access to an array of mobile-centric services that are fully managed. So, if you want to have your entire focus on the app experience, Firebase is for you.

The Firebase Cloud Function service covers authentication, configuration, push messaging, notifications, analytics, file storage, database, and more. These services are hosted in the cloud and scaled efficiently with a minor effort from the developer’s end.

The core features of this service include NoSQL databases, REST APIs, ML. Firebase offers a free tier but permits usage-based shared hosting.

Heroku

It is a cloud platform-based service supporting eight official programming languages, including Node.js, Java, Python, Scala, Ruby, PHP, Go, and Clojure.

In addition, Heroku provides a fully managed runtime environment allowing your apps to run inside smart containers, also known as dynos. Inside the dynos, the language and system stacks are continually checked, patched, and upgraded by the Heroku solution.

Heroku keeps you alarmed about what is going on with your application, thanks to response time, CPU load, built-in monitoring of throughput, memory, and errors. Also, Heroku deploys data clips that keep everybody in the network informed about information insights from your ongoing project by sharing results through a secure URL.

Developers can experiment fearlessly while building apps as Heroku’s build system lets them instantly roll back their database to any previous state. Heroku scales your applications in an instant, both horizontally and vertically. As a result, you can run your applications elegantly, from enterprise-grade projects to little hobby projects.

NGINX

Nginx is one of the fastest website servers available. It initially started as a web server structured for maximum stability.

Since its original release, NGINX has grown along with the websites that have efficiently broadened from uncomplicated HTML to complex, multifaceted content.

Now it supports all components, including Web Socket, HDS, HLS, RTMP, gRPC, and more. As a result, this excellent open-source software consistently beats web servers like Apache in standards measuring web server performance.

Although NGINX became well known as the fastest web server, it serves beyond web serving. Because NGINX can deal with large volumes of connections, it acts as a load balancer and reverses proxy to control incoming traffic and spread it across a slower upstream server. Also, NGINX serves as a web accelerator.

Developers of NGINX placed it between the second web server and clients, making it capable of serving as an intermediary, such as compressing content or negotiating SSL/TLS, and efficiently dealing with any work that might decelerate the webserver.

Dynamic sites often deploy NGINX as a content cache and reverse proxy to balance the load on application servers to leverage the underlying hardware completely.

Docker

Docker carries with it the crucial word agility. Developers who want the features and updates of their applications to reach out to their customers faster deploy Docker.

It serves as an essential tool when developers are building the groundwork for any modern app, as these open-source containers are a dramatic improvement for cloud development.

Back-end developers deploy Docker and build code with automated configuration and infrastructure, which speeds up the deployment process tremendously.

Docker offers high resiliency that allows developers to upgrade a product during its release cycle, make the required changes, test them, and roll them out to customers without disturbing the process.

Beyond that, it is more granular, promotes efficiency through its micro-service-based methods, and is a far more controllable solution. With Docker, developers gain the ability to deploy apps portably and in a scalable way regardless of the app deployment location, as Docker images are free from environmental limitations.

It maintains consistency while developing an app, leading to massive productivity and more fresh features, and less time debugging.

Docker-powered containers decrease the deployment time to seconds, which increases the cost-effectiveness, and of course, is an impressive feat by any standard. 

Kubernetes

As companies move to cloud-native and micro-service designs that deploy containers, they are searching for proven, sturdy platforms: this is exactly where Kubernetes comes into action.

This containerized platform-as-a-service (PaaS) solution builds a hardware extraction layer for developers. Back-end developers can quickly request the resources since resources come from an infrastructure shared across all development teams. Developers can provision and take advantage of Kubernetes developed tools for packaging, distribution, and testing.

Kubernetes is a cloud-agnostic as it runs efficiently on AWS, GCP, on-premises, or on whatever cloud provider you want. As a result, you can conveniently move workloads without rethinking the infrastructure or redesigning your application.

Currently, cloud providers are managing plenty of Kubernetes solutions for developers, providing complete Kubernetes platform management. Kubernetes has become a lucid standard for container orchestration tools, and the fact that containers are so lightweight makes it a cost-efficient option for developers.

Jira

Jira is a web-based tool initially developed for tracking bugs. Later, in the year 2012, it started its project management services. This tool mainly tracks bugs in web and mobile applications. Agile back-end developers use Jira to customize the app development workflow and release applications with more confidence.

Jira comprises four packages Jira Core, Jira Software, Jira Ops, and Jira service desk. This web-based project management solution uses Scrum and Kanban paradigms for controlling projects.

Jira provides a suitable project managing environment for different users like developers, engineers, technical and non-technical professionals, project managers, and so on through the range of packages it owns.

Users from different fields can get classified results through the use of plugins available in Jira. These plugins come in fully-featured test management packages that allow development teams to report any issue directly to Jira. 

Simply put, Jira allows users to organize software development tasks and prioritize them in a fun, rewarding, and flexible way.

Pivotal Tracker

Pivotal Tracker is an exclusively designed project-designing and management tool that lets software development teams form a picturesque about when a particular project might be completed based on the ongoing performance of the team.

This product-planning tool has been refined over ten years and optimized to provide the exact structure to expedite team collaboration and communication. The highly optimized solution supports an agile workflow, effectively ensuring that project status, documents, and conversations are conveniently accessible to the entire software development team.

Since Tracker was structured to be easy to use and simple to learn, developers can be sure of what to buckle down, and product owners know the correct status of their projects.

Pivotal Tracker is helping development teams create better software by strategically transforming how they build: it is aiding team collaboration, allowing easy access to story creation and notifications, showing fine details through the deployment of Project Analytics, empowering third-party apps and integrations, and revealing project history.

In addition, its automated velocity feature is providing an honest view of the development team’s future.

Slack

When you have a big development team to work with, you cannot be in the same space at the same hour with your community. It becomes difficult! Slack provides a way to stay energized and connected when you are working with a massive team by keeping you noticeable to every team member, every moment.

In addition, slack offers real-time communication and collaboration with your team. Slack can be a great alternative to email, instant messaging, and text messaging for your team: It successfully stores all those interaction styles in a single app.

With Slack, you can stop losing things in your mailbox, carry on with your video and voice conferences, share files with your teammates, and create an active community filled with fun and responsibility, whether or not they are in the office.

Google Pagespeed Insights

Google Pagespeed Insights is a fantastic web performance and analysis tool that monitors and evaluates the content of your web page. Developers can look forward to receiving both field and lab data about their web page.

Field data can help them capture real-world user experience, and lab data can help debug performance problems. Therefore, developers can gain insight into both real-world and virtual bottlenecks.

It provides reports on how well your page performs on both desktop and mobile devices and suggests a set of recommendations to make the page work faster.

Additionally, PSI provides a performance total that sums up the performance of your web page.

Apache

Apache is a free, cross-platform (works both on Windows servers and Unix), open-source software. The developers of Apache Web Server coded the software in a way that can be modified according to the developer’s requirements.

This feature gives Apache a notable advantage over other competitors without compromising on the general features. As a result, it is one of the industry-leading web servers, and this is well understood by the fact that Apache powers more than half of all the websites in the world.

This open-source software comes with a range of worthwhile offerings, such as Loadable Dynamic Modules, Real-time Status view, Multiple Request Processing modes, User and Session tracking, XML & FTP support, CGI support, and many others. In addition, Apache is compatible with almost every operating system, including Linux, Windows, macOS, etc.

GitHub

GitHub is a massive library of coding knowledge, and it is many, many things. GitHub offers a platform for open-source communication and even a social network, to be honest. Today, almost every software developer uses this open-source platform to manage their project.

Fundamentally, GitHub is incomparably powerful, and it is also the most practiced version control software around. GitHub brings all the advantages of a decentralized version control software to a centralized service.

Analogous to other developers, GitHub keeps a copy of your project. Software developers can use this copy as the project’s central repository to roll out their changes to and from the repository and share them with their collaborative teams. This allows developers to bring forward open-source projects and monitor revisions.

Developers can either use GitHub to build their profile as developers or deploy it to version control their project. Best of all, perhaps, GitHub provides a beautiful community for software developers to share their knowledge and collaborate with team members. It is web standardization at its finest.

GitLab

GitLab is a complete operation software development platform conveyed as a unit application (one data store, one interface, and one communication thread).

It allows development teams to manage, build, configure, and monitor the software development process, offering more streamlined work. This open-source platform helps your team iterate faster and innovate together. GitLab is a single point of truth that lets developers manage projects deploying no tools. Instead, development teams get to work together by utilizing industry-leading CI/CD tools.

From robust end-to-end automated security to vulnerability management and code quality, GitLab provides a tight grip and governance that never slows down the development and operation speed.

Bitbucket

Bitbucket is the Git storehouse management software structured for professional development teams. Bitbucket contains a specifically designated central place for developers to manage the Git repository. Developers can also use the main point to collaborate on the source code and guide themselves through the software development flow.

Bitbucket brings forth many worthwhile features, including workflow control to control team workflow, Jira integration for complete software development visibility, access control to the source code, pull requests for collaboration with in-line commenting, and full rest API to build workflow customized features.

Bitbucket comes with three deployment options. These are:

• Bitbucket Cloud- It comprises Pipelines (built-in CI tools) that let developers build, examine, and deploy applications from within Bitbucket.

• Bitbucket Server- It strongly integrates with Bamboo, a powerful CI/CD tool, and lets developers build software automatically. 

• Bitbucket Data Center- It provides vital benefits, such as high availability, performance at scale, and smart monitoring.

Datadog

Gain visibility into your servers, clouds, metrics, apps, and teams- see it all in a single place with Datadog.

It allows turnkey integrations to incorporate events and metrics seamlessly across the development stack. Datadog is a monitoring-as-a-service cloud application that clarifies developers about modern applications, enabling them to check, troubleshoot, and hone application performance by tracing requests, latency percentiles, and app performance.

In addition, Datadog allows thorough, unrestricted explorations of data through smooth analysis and filtration of log data. Developers can visualize traffic flow in cloud-native spaces by using human-readable tags, grouping anything from individual containers to data centers, and reporting key metrics.

Moreover, Datadog offers a single platform for proactively monitoring user experience by tracing vital user journeys, storing engineering data with artificial intelligence-powered tests, and detecting and alerting performance problems.

New Relic

The New Relic is a software-as-a-service platform that deploys a standardized Apdex score to set and rate the performance of an application. The Apdex score it uses is known as the application performance index that effectively runs the application across an app development ecosystem in a unified manner.

The SaaS offering extensively focuses on app performance and availability monitoring solutions. This observability platform lets developers input data from whatever digital source they like, fully understand the system, improve it, and build better software.

The Application Performance Monitoring capability of New Relic allows developers to gain access to trending and real-time data about performing web and non-web applications.

In addition, developers can benefit from the newly added features of New Relic that include native integration with third-party tools (PagerDuty and Slack), business transaction monitoring, error and availability monitoring, synthetic monitoring, external services performance monitoring, notifications, alerts, and end-to-end user monitoring.

Stack Overflow

Talking about Stack Overflow, it is the definitive answer site for back-end developers. No matter how good you are at developing back-end solutions, it is uncertain that you are the archive of all the knowledge. When you become doubtful about your know-hows, Stack Overflow is there to help you with the development task ahead of you.

Stack Overflow comprises an extensive collection of software and programming knowledge. Someone in the Overflow community is always there to solve the most esoteric problem your development team is facing. This knowledge sharing and association management platform helps development team members keep up with every bit of knowledge from within the team.

One can never think about losing vital team knowledge again with Stack Overflow software. Irrespective of the size of your team, be it small, large, or agile, Stack Overflow is your go-to for collaboration and knowledge sharing.

GitKraken

GitKraken is a Git GUI-based platform that works flawlessly, and that is worthy. GitKraken serves both development and non-development users equally and efficiently. This open-source distributed VCS serves software development tasks fluently.

It is a free-to-use version control system that executes every version control and software development task from large to minor projects with integrity, efficiency, and speed.

Developers can easily manage GIT on the command line. Nevertheless, they can deploy GUI Git clients (graphical user interfaces), such as GitKraken. It lets developers use Git reliably and efficiently on the desktop and offers a range of command-line operations. GitKraken encompasses the following features:

• Integrates with GitLab
• Built-in merge tools
• Gitflow support
• Easily adapts to the workspace of a user
• Commits signing
• Git Hooks support
• Reinforce single-click redo and undo functions

Visual Studio

Visual Studio is your ultimate development tool whether you are a back-end developer or a full-stack website developer. Visual Studio allows you to navigate your codes, write them, and fix them up fast.

The development tools of Video Studio’s container let you build high-quality apps and manage them with confidence. Visual Studio integrates with Docker and helps you build Docker images containing the dependencies of all your applications, thereby making it convenient to run apps on an array of services in container hosts.

You can use Visual Studio and write your services with ASP.NET Core and deploy the written application to any web server.

Postman API

Another efficacious tool that development teams can consider to make the web development process smooth and fluent is Postman API. This Application Programming Interface (API) is a tool that allows developers to construct, examine, and change APIs efficiently and conveniently.

Millions of developers worldwide use this API building and testing process to make their API development simple. The developers of Postman API encapsulate this development tool with almost any functionality that can help a developer program his application.

In addition, the tool features many enriching benefits, such as API to code conversion, code conversion for various languages, support for several HTTP methods, saving progress, and many more.

Additionally, Postman API aids developers in automating manual assessments and incorporate them into a continuous integration/continuous delivery pipeline, preventing the API in production from breaking because of any changes in the code.

WrapPixel

Have you got a bunch of commercial projects to finish before deadline? You can now get all of that done in the stipulated timeframe with Wrappixels’ open-source Admin Templates and UI Tools. 

It is easy to use the templates in any existing web project or to use them as a basis for developing new web applications. We have themes from various frameworks including Angular, React, Vue, Bootsrap, Nextjs, and Nuxtjs.

Wrappixel offers admin dashboard themes in both Free and Premium Versions. These templates work seamlessly on all devices and browsers, ensuring a smooth user experience.

Each premium template comes with detailed documentation, a 100% money-back guarantee, 1 year of dedicated support, and free updates.

You get ‘n’ number of font styles, various types of dashboard designs, RTL Support, Charts, Tables, Validation forms, Unique Demos, Widgets, UI Components, and many more elements. Plus, we provide extra customization services to make the template the way you want.   

Conclusion

So, now you have a clearer picture of the back-end, its advantages, and the capabilities of each back-end tool.

This is a long list of back-end development tools that every developer should be equipped with. From the commonly deployed back-end tools to the rare ones, you will find a range of tools here. But the list does not end here. There are other equally important back-end development tools, and you can explore them all as an efficient back-end developer.

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