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10 Best Developer Tools Tools in 2026

By Toolradar Team · Updated February 2026

Tools for software development and DevOps

Key Takeaways
  • Kysely is our #1 pick for developer tools in 2026.
  • We analyzed 109 developer tools tools to create this ranking.
  • 6 tools offer free plans, perfect for getting started.

How the Top Developer Tools Tools Compare

The developer tools category is highly competitive in 2026, with Kysely and Novu both scoring 0/100 on Toolradar's editorial assessment, followed closely by Olostep at N/A/100. The tight scores reflect how mature this market has become.

All top-ranked developer tools tools offer free or freemium plans, making this an accessible category for teams of any size. Kysely stands out by combining a top score of 0/100 with free pricing.

1
Kysely logo

Kysely

Type-safe SQL query builder for JavaScript and TypeScript.

Free

Kysely is a state-of-the-art, type-safe SQL query builder designed for JavaScript and TypeScript environments. It provides a thin abstraction layer over SQL, allowing developers to write queries with precise result types and catch errors at compile-time. This focus on type-safety and predictability helps high-performing teams ship software with greater confidence and velocity. Built by SQL enthusiasts, Kysely emphasizes familiarity through its naming and structure, making it easy for SQL-proficient teams to become productive quickly. It supports a wide range of SQL queries, clauses, functions, and expressions, and offers intelligent, context-aware auto-completion based on the database schema. Kysely is highly extensible with a community-driven dialect system, supporting various SQL databases like PostgreSQL, MySQL, MS SQL Server, and SQLite out of the box. It's lightweight, has zero dependencies, and runs in any JavaScript environment, including Node.js, Deno, Bun, AWS Lambda, and browsers. Beyond query building, Kysely includes optional migration primitives for fine-grained control over database schema changes, and a plugin system to modify queries or results. It aims to provide a robust and flexible solution for developers who value type-safety and direct control over their SQL.

2
Novu logo

Novu

Open-source notification infrastructure for developers and product teams to build multi-channel delivery.

Freemium

Novu provides an open-source notification infrastructure that simplifies the process of building and managing multi-channel notification systems for modern products. It offers a single <Inbox /> component that allows developers to integrate a powerful notification inbox into their applications with minimal code. The platform is designed for developers and product teams, enabling them to deliver real-time, contextual notifications across various channels like in-app, email, push, SMS, and chat. Beyond basic delivery, Novu includes features like user preferences, message snoozing, real-time delivery, and workflow orchestration. It also provides a unified API for managing multi-channel notification workflows, a digest engine to combine multiple notifications, and a block-based email editor for creating customizable emails. Novu integrates with popular tools and providers such as Twilio, Resend, React Email, Clerk, and Stripe, making it a comprehensive solution for building world-class notification systems.

3
Olostep logo

Olostep

Turn any website into structured data and automate web research with a unified API for AI.

Freemium

Olostep is a Web Data API designed for AI agents, enabling users to extract clean, structured data from websites. It offers a unified API that can transform URLs into various formats like Markdown, JSON, or HTML, making web scraping efficient and reliable. The platform provides pre-built parsers for common data extraction tasks, such as emails, social media links, calendar links, and specific platform data like Instagram profiles, Google Search results, and Reddit posts. Users can also create custom parsers using prompts. Beyond simple data extraction, Olostep facilitates advanced web automation through its agent and batch APIs. Users can define complex web research workflows with natural language prompts, process large volumes of URLs, and get AI-powered answers from web searches. It's built for developers, offering SDKs in Python and Node.js, and is ideal for tasks like lead generation, brand protection, market research, and automating data collection for AI models.

4
Polynote logo

Polynote

An experimental polyglot notebook environment for data scientists and developers.

Free

Polynote is an experimental polyglot notebook environment developed by Netflix. It aims to provide a more integrated and powerful experience for data scientists and developers working with various programming languages and data sources. Unlike traditional notebooks that often treat different languages as separate cells, Polynote allows for seamless interaction and data sharing between languages within the same notebook. This tool is designed for users who need to combine the power of Scala, Python, and other languages in their data analysis, machine learning, and development workflows. It offers features like dependency management, integrated data visualization, and a more robust backend for handling complex computations, making it suitable for advanced data exploration and prototyping in a multi-language environment.

5
Firecrawl logo

Firecrawl

Turn websites into LLM-ready data for your AI applications.

Freemium

Firecrawl is a web data API designed to power AI applications with clean, structured web data. It offers advanced web scraping and crawling capabilities, allowing users to extract information from websites in various formats like Markdown, JSON, and screenshots. The platform is built to handle complex web pages, including those with heavy JavaScript and protective measures, promising high reliability and speed. This tool is ideal for developers and companies building AI agents, LLMs, and dynamic applications that require up-to-date and well-formatted web content. It provides SDKs for popular languages like Python and Node.js, as well as cURL and CLI options, making it easy to integrate into existing workflows. Firecrawl emphasizes performance, offering blazingly fast data delivery, often under 1 second, which is crucial for real-time AI applications. It's also open-source, fostering transparency and community contributions.

6
Scrapfly logo

Scrapfly

Effortlessly collect web data with battle-tested APIs for scraping, extraction, and screenshots.

Freemium

Scrapfly provides a suite of web data APIs designed for developers to overcome the challenges of web scraping. It offers robust solutions for collecting web pages, capturing screenshots, and extracting structured data using AI and LLMs. The platform is built for scalability and reliability, ensuring high success rates even against sophisticated anti-scraping systems. This tool is ideal for developers, data scientists, and businesses that require large-scale, accurate web data for various applications such as market research, competitive analysis, lead generation, and content aggregation. Its key benefits include automatic anti-bot bypass, extensive proxy rotation, flexible data formatting, and advanced JavaScript rendering capabilities, significantly reducing the effort and resources typically needed for complex web scraping tasks.

7
Yodlee logo

Yodlee

Financial data aggregation and analytics platform

Paid

Yodlee is a pioneer in financial data aggregation, providing APIs that connect applications to over 17,000 financial institutions worldwide. Acquired by Envestnet in 2015, Yodlee powers many of the leading personal finance, lending, and wealth management applications. The platform offers account aggregation, transaction enrichment, and financial insights that help businesses understand their customers' complete financial picture. Yodlee's data quality and extensive coverage make it a trusted choice for enterprise fintech applications.

8
MX logo

MX

Financial data connectivity and insights

Paid

MX is a financial data platform that helps organizations connect, enhance, and act on financial data. The company focuses on data quality and intelligence, offering not just aggregation but also transaction categorization, merchant identification, and financial insights. MX serves over 2,000 financial institutions and fintech companies, providing open finance APIs that enable better financial experiences. Their platform emphasizes clean, actionable data rather than just raw connectivity.

9
Finicity logo

Finicity

Open banking data and verification solutions

Paid

Finicity, now a Mastercard company (acquired in 2020), provides open banking APIs for financial data access, income and employment verification, and asset verification. The platform is particularly strong in lending use cases, helping lenders verify borrower information instantly. Finicity connects to over 16,000 financial institutions and is known for its verification accuracy and compliance focus. Their VOA (Verification of Assets) and VOIE (Verification of Income and Employment) products are industry standards.

10
TrueLayer logo

TrueLayer

Open banking payments and data for Europe

Paid

TrueLayer is a leading European open banking platform providing instant bank payments and financial data APIs. Founded in London in 2016, TrueLayer was an early mover in PSD2-compliant open banking. The platform enables account-to-account payments that bypass card networks, offering lower fees and instant settlement. TrueLayer connects to banks across the UK, EU, and Australia, making it the go-to choice for European fintech applications. Their Payments API is particularly strong for e-commerce and recurring payments.

Best Developer Tools For

Related Categories

What are Developer Tools?

Developer tools span the entire software development lifecycle—code editors, version control, CI/CD pipelines, monitoring, and everything in between. The right toolchain can 10x a developer's productivity; the wrong one creates constant friction.

The developer tools landscape has exploded. Every part of the stack now has multiple excellent options competing on speed, DX, and specific use cases. Cloud-based development environments are challenging traditional local setups. AI coding assistants are reshaping how code gets written.

What matters most is developer experience. Tools that reduce context-switching, automate tedious tasks, and stay out of the way will win. The trend is toward integrated platforms (Vercel, Railway, Render) over stitching together individual services.

Editor's Take

“After evaluating 10 developer tools? tools, Kysely stands out. For budget-conscious teams, Kysely (null/100, completely free) delivers strong value. The competition is fierce — the gap between top tools is narrower than ever, so the best choice comes down to your team's specific workflow and priorities.”

— Toolradar Editorial Team · February 2026

Key Data Points

10+
Tools analyzed on Toolradar
6
Offer free or freemium plans
N/A/100
Top editorial score

According to Toolradar's analysis across 10+ products, 60% offer free or freemium plans. The top-rated tools average a score of 0/100, with Kysely leading at /100.

Essential Developer Tool Categories

Code Editor / IDE

Where you write code. VS Code dominates, but Cursor's AI features and JetBrains' language-specific IDEs have strong followings.

Version Control & Collaboration

Git hosting, code review, and collaboration. GitHub is the standard; GitLab offers more built-in CI/CD.

CI/CD & Deployment

Automated testing, building, and deployment. The trend is toward platforms like Vercel and Railway that handle everything.

Monitoring & Observability

Logs, metrics, and traces. Know when things break and why. Datadog, Sentry, and open-source alternatives.

API Development

API design, testing, and documentation. Postman remains popular; Insomnia and Bruno are gaining ground.

AI Coding Assistants

GitHub Copilot changed everything. Now Cursor, Codeium, and others compete to make AI pair programming better.

Who Uses Developer Tools?

Developer tools serve different roles across the software development process:

Individual Contributors: Day-to-day coding, debugging, and shipping. Care most about IDE experience, AI assistance, and deployment speed.
DevOps & Platform Teams: Infrastructure, CI/CD, monitoring, and developer experience. Care about reliability, cost, and enabling other developers.
Engineering Leaders: Team productivity, security, and cost management. Need visibility into development velocity and system health.
Startups: Move fast with limited resources. Prioritize integrated platforms over assembling best-of-breed tools.
Enterprises: Security, compliance, and scale. Need self-hosted options, SSO, and audit logs.

How to Choose Developer Tools

Developer tools should accelerate your team, not slow them down:

  1. 1Optimize for developer experience. If a tool is frustrating to use, developers will work around it. Fast, intuitive tools get adopted; clunky tools get abandoned.
  2. 2Consider total cost of ownership. Free tiers are great for starting. Calculate costs at your scale—some tools get expensive fast. Factor in maintenance and operations time.
  3. 3Evaluate integration depth. Does it work with your existing stack? Deep GitHub integration matters. Can you trigger deployments from your workflow?
  4. 4Assess reliability and support. Downtime in dev tools stops all development. Check status pages and incident history. Enterprise support response times matter.
  5. 5Plan for growth. Will it scale? What happens with 10 developers? 100? Some tools hit performance walls or pricing cliffs at scale.

Developer Tools Market in 2026

AI is the biggest shift—coding assistants are mainstream, and AI-native IDEs like Cursor are gaining traction. Developer experience (DX) has become a competitive advantage. Integrated platforms (Vercel, Railway) are winning over stitching services together. Open-source alternatives to expensive monitoring tools are maturing. Edge computing and serverless continue growing.

Related Guides

Frequently Asked Questions

Should I switch from VS Code to Cursor?

If AI assistance is valuable to your workflow, Cursor is worth trying. It's a VS Code fork, so your settings and extensions mostly work. The AI features (tab completion, inline editing, chat) are more deeply integrated than Copilot. Many developers use both—Cursor for AI-heavy work, VS Code for stability.

Is GitHub Copilot worth $19/month?

For most professional developers, yes. The time saved on boilerplate, documentation lookup, and test writing typically exceeds the cost. Junior developers report learning benefits. Try the free trial and measure your productivity honestly. Alternatives like Codeium offer free tiers.

What's the best platform for deploying web apps?

Vercel is excellent for Next.js and frontend frameworks—great DX and preview deployments. Railway and Render offer more flexibility for backends and databases. For maximum control and lowest costs at scale, fly.io or direct cloud providers. Most teams start with Vercel/Railway and optimize later.

GitHub vs GitLab in 2026?

GitHub is the default—better ecosystem, more integrations, and where open source lives. GitLab is excellent when you want everything integrated (repos, CI/CD, issue tracking) in one platform, or need self-hosted. GitHub Actions has closed the CI/CD gap. Most teams choose GitHub unless they have specific GitLab preferences.

What's the best way to learn new developer tools?

Use them on real projects. Tutorials help with basics, but you learn tools by solving real problems. Start with free tiers, build something, and evaluate if the tool actually helps. The best tool is the one you'll actually use.

Quick Facts About This Category

#1
Kysely
Top rated
6
Free Tools
With free or freemium plans
10
Tools Reviewed
In this category
2026
Last Updated
February

Related Categories

Explore specialized subcategories:

Our Ranking Methodology

At Toolradar, we combine editorial expertise with community insights:

40%
Editorial Analysis
Features, UX, innovation
30%
User Reviews
Real feedback from verified users
15%
Pricing Value
Cost vs. features offered
15%
Integrations
Ecosystem compatibility

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