Top SaaS product development tools

Empires like Microsoft and Salesforce run on the SaaS model. SaaS Products are some of the best ways to develop software that can serve millions over the web and mobile through a rapid, flexible software framework. Developing software is a substantially different process for SaaS companies. Sustaining costs get reduced dramatically without having to maintain various older releases, product cycles are far shorter, and the technology used is more current. The crux of a successful SaaS product is the ability to reach the market as fast as possible, meaning the speed of development. Great UX and pixel perfect execution of the product are also very important. The implementation of analytical tools to measure KPIs is also vital to the whole process. However, when getting started with your product, stability, scalability, proper documentation and quality of code is far more critical than flawless architecture. And when it comes to accelerating our SaaS development services, below are the tools we rely on.

Ruby on Rails

Rails is a popular server-side framework of choice among SaaS developers. It isn’t hard to see why. It’s easy to set up. It speeds up development. It is a framework full of proven feature implementations. Your developers won’t have to spend time reinventing the wheel. Your team will have a massive corpus of libraries at their disposal that will come in handy when developing your domain. Ruby and RoR work great in agile environments. Rails is at the core of GitHub, Basecamp, Zendesk, Shopify and more. It has a large community along with a suite of tools as well as ability to handle various web application issues. Ruby on Rails is our backend framework of choice. It might not always be the most efficient, and it does get in the way, instead of helping sometimes. But the community, suite of tools, and ability to handle common web application problems makes it a winner in my book.

NodeJS

A substantial amount of your load and scaling for a majority of SaaS products won't happen at your front or back-end but your database layer. NodeJS will serve you well here. The core concept of NodeJS is event-driven. It's more scalable compared to other server-side scripting languages. However, it does require familiarity with JavaScript to use Node.js.

AngularJS

AngularJS is a structural framework that allows developers to build complex, data-heavy apps in an efficient way. Some applications have a structure where the server is just an API server that handles data operations, and the UI is a client-side web application. This is a suitable arrangement for some applications, but not all. If the app needs a dedicated client-side front end, then AngularJS could be the way to go.

ReactJS

ReactJS relies overwhelmingly on the creation of components on single-page applications which are able to function independently. This compartmentalizes complex web development into tasks which you can focus on one at a time. It’s not as simple as copy and paste, but it does save time and hassle for your team when working on the task at hand. Also, the coding has to be SEO-friendly for it to be easily captured by search engines. Based on less retrieving of data, ReactJS promises quicker performance rates when creating single page applications. The virtual DOM approach in React also supports better performance, SEO, and maintainability. After JS, React Native is the next best thing allowing for a smooth transfer from a single-page application (SPA) to a mobile app. Overall, ReactJS is still considered a simple and lightweight library tailored to meet the needs of modern web development.

The choice of what you use ultimately comes down to personal preference and expertise. These are the tools we’ve honed our expertise in, and they have served us well. Working on a product isn’t easy, especially as you navigate the startup landscape littered with a seemingly infinite number of SaaS products. Below mentioned are economically viable, tried and tested tools that will make the journey far easier to traverse. If you’re looking for more than a tool, a partner to help you along your SaaS journey, we’re right here.