Build — Web, App, Game & AI Engineering

Frontend, backend, mobile, design, AI engineering, integrations, ecommerce, dev tooling, and curated stacks. The shipping-software side of the site.

For other areas of the site see Build, Make, Self-Host, Live, or Contribute. Cross-cutting picks: Self-Hosted Picks Index.

Frontend foundations

• Frameworks & Meta-frameworks — Next.js, React Router, TanStack Start, Astro, SvelteKit, Nuxt, Solid Start.
• UI Component Libraries — shadcn/ui, Radix, HeroUI, Mantine, Park UI, Material UI.
• Styling — Tailwind, CSS Modules, vanilla-extract, Panda CSS, StyleX, UnoCSS.
• Color & Theming — Radix Colors, OKLCH, culori, palette generators.
• Fonts & Typography — next/font, Fontsource, fontaine, capsize, Utopia.fyi.
• Icons — Lucide, Heroicons, Phosphor, Tabler, Iconify.
• Animation — Motion (Framer Motion), GSAP, AutoAnimate, React Spring.

Data & state

• State Management — Zustand, Jotai, Redux Toolkit, Valtio, Legend State.
• State Machines — XState, Zag, Robot.
• Data Fetching — TanStack Query, SWR, Apollo, urql, Relay.
• Forms — React Hook Form, TanStack Form, Conform, Formik.
• Specialized Form Inputs — phone, address, currency, OTP, color, masks.
• Validation — Zod, Valibot, ArkType, Effect Schema.
• Tables / Grids — TanStack Table, AG Grid, MUI Data Grid, RevoGrid.
• Routing — TanStack Router, React Router, Wouter.

Backend & data

• Backend Frameworks — Hono, Fastify, NestJS, tRPC, oRPC, Elysia.
• Databases & ORMs — Postgres, Drizzle, Prisma, Kysely, Convex, Neon, Turso.
• Auth — Better Auth, Auth.js, Clerk, Stack Auth, Logto, WorkOS.
• Authorization (RBAC / ABAC / ReBAC) — Cerbos, OpenFGA, Casbin, Oso, CASL, AWS Cedar, Permit.io.
• OIDC / Identity Providers — Logto, Keycloak, Authentik, ZITADEL, Ory.
• Job Queues / Background Jobs — pg-boss, BullMQ, Inngest, Trigger.dev, Cloudflare Queues.
• Workflow Engines (Durable Execution) — Temporal, Restate, Inngest, Trigger.dev, DBOS, Cloudflare Workflows.
• Message Brokers & Event Streaming — Kafka, Redpanda, NATS, RabbitMQ, GCP Pub/Sub.
• Webhooks — Svix, Hookdeck, Cloudflare Tunnel, ngrok.
• Realtime — Liveblocks, PartyKit, Pusher, Ably, Supabase Realtime, Yjs.
• Search — Meilisearch, Typesense, Algolia, Pagefind, Orama.
• Rate Limiting — Upstash Ratelimit, hono-rate-limiter, Cloudflare WAF.
• Bot Protection / CAPTCHA — Cloudflare Turnstile, hCaptcha, Anubis.
• Secrets Management — Doppler, Infisical, dotenvx, SOPS, Vault.
• Feature Flags & Experimentation — Statsig, GrowthBook, PostHog, Flagsmith, OpenFeature.
• API Gateways & Reverse Proxies — Caddy, Nginx, Traefik, Kong, APISIX, Zuplo.

Server libraries

• Logging — pino, Winston, consola, debug, LogTape.
• HTTP Clients — fetch, undici, ofetch, ky, axios.
• Caching — lru-cache, unstorage, keyv, Upstash Redis, Cloudflare Cache.
• Crypto, JWT & Hashing — jose, @node-rs/argon2, @noble/*, Web Crypto.
• Functional Utilities — Remeda, ts-pattern, neverthrow, Effect, type-fest.
• Serialization Formats — Protobuf, Connect-RPC, MessagePack, FlatBuffers, CBOR, Avro.
• Compression & Archives — fflate, zip.js, brotli, zstd, restic.

Cross-platform

• PWA / Offline / Service Workers — Serwist, Workbox, Vite PWA, Dexie, PGlite.
• Mobile (Native) — Expo / React Native, Lynx, Tamagui, NativeWind.
• Mobile Packaging (Wrap web) — Capacitor, Tauri Mobile, Hotwire Native.
• Desktop Apps — Tauri 2, Electron, Wails, Neutralino.
• Browser Extensions — WXT, Plasmo, CRXJS.
• WebAssembly Tooling — wasm-pack, jco, Wasmtime, Wasmer, Spin.

Mobile Development

• Mobile — iOS Native Development — Swift, SwiftUI, Xcode, and the full first-party iOS toolchain in 2026.
• Mobile — Android Native Development — Kotlin, Jetpack Compose, Android Studio, and the full Google-blessed Android stack.
• Mobile — Flutter — Google's Dart-based cross-platform UI toolkit for iOS, Android, web, and desktop.
• Mobile — Kotlin Multiplatform (KMP) — Share business logic (and increasingly UI) across iOS, Android, desktop, and web from one Kotlin codebase.
• Mobile — Compose Multiplatform — JetBrains' Compose UI on iOS, Android, desktop, and web — the UI layer for KMP.
• Mobile — Skip (Swift → Kotlin Transpiler) — Write SwiftUI for iOS, get a real native Kotlin/Compose Android app from the same source.
• Mobile — .NET MAUI & Other Cross-Platform — .NET MAUI, NativeScript, Lynx, Quasar — the "second-tier" cross-platform options.
• Mobile — React Native (Deep) — New Architecture, Hermes, Fabric / TurboModules, Expo SDK internals — the 2026 RN landscape.
• Mobile — UI Component Libraries & Kits — Material, Cupertino, NativeWind, Gluestack, Tamagui, and platform-specific component sets.
• Mobile — Testing Frameworks — Unit, integration, UI, and E2E testing across iOS, Android, RN, Flutter, KMP.
• Mobile — Cloud Test Labs — Real-device labs for iOS and Android — Firebase Test Lab, Browserstack, Sauce, AWS Device Farm.
• Mobile — CI/CD & Build Tools — Codemagic, Bitrise, EAS, Xcode Cloud, GitHub Actions self-hosted macOS, and the build / signing pipeline.
• Mobile — Fastlane & Code Signing — The Apple/Google signing gauntlet — Fastlane match, App Store Connect API, Play App Signing.
• Mobile — Push Notifications — APNs, FCM, OneSignal, Pusher Beams — sending pushes to iOS and Android in 2026.
• Mobile — In-App Purchases (RevenueCat & friends) — StoreKit 2, Google Play Billing, RevenueCat / Adapty / Glassfy — IAP in 2026.
• Mobile — Analytics & Attribution — PostHog, Mixpanel, Amplitude, Aptabase, AppsFlyer, Adjust, Branch, SKAN 4.
• Mobile — MDM & Internal Distribution — TestFlight, Firebase App Distribution, Play Internal, Jamf / Kandji / Mosyle / Intune.
• Mobile — Debugging Tools — Reactotron, Charles Proxy, Proxyman, Hermes Inspector, Layout Inspector, Maestro Studio.
• Mobile — Databases & Storage — SQLite, Room, GRDB, SwiftData, MMKV, Realm, WatermelonDB, Drift — local-first storage choices.
• Mobile — App Store Optimization (ASO) — AppFollow, Sensor Tower, AppRadar, store reviews APIs, keyword tracking.
• Mobile — Snapshot / Visual Regression Testing — Paparazzi, Roborazzi, swift-snapshot-testing, golden_toolkit, Loki — visual diff testing for mobile.
• Mobile — Accessibility — VoiceOver, TalkBack, Accessibility Inspector, Accessibility Scanner, axe for hybrid.
• Mobile — Performance Profiling — Instruments, Android Studio Profiler, Perfetto, Flutter DevTools, MetricKit, Firebase Performance.
• Mobile — Crash Reporting — Sentry, Firebase Crashlytics, Bugsnag, Embrace, Instabug — mobile crash + error monitoring.
• Mobile — Wear, TV, Auto, VisionOS — watchOS, tvOS, visionOS, CarPlay, Wear OS, Android TV, Android Auto, Tizen.
• Mobile — Localization (i18n / l10n) — Apple String Catalogs, Android plurals, ICU MessageFormat, Crowdin, Tolgee, Languine.

Content & editing

• Rich Text Editors — Tiptap, Lexical, BlockNote, Plate, Slate, ProseMirror.
• Visual Page Builders — Puck, Builder.io, Plasmic, Craft.js, GrapesJS.
• Headless CMS — Payload, Sanity, Strapi, Directus, Tina, KeystoneJS.
• Markdown / MDX — Shiki, remark, rehype, fumadocs-mdx, Velite.
• Documentation Frameworks — Fumadocs, Astro Starlight, Nextra, VitePress.
• PDF / Document Generation — PDFme, react-pdf, pdf-lib, Puppeteer.
• Spreadsheets & CSV — PapaParse, ExcelJS, SheetJS, Univer.
• Code Editors & Playgrounds — Sandpack, Monaco, CodeMirror 6, StackBlitz WebContainers.

Graphics & games

• 3D / WebGL / WebGPU — react-three-fiber, drei, Three.js, Babylon, Threlte, WebXR.
• Whiteboards & Canvas — tldraw, Excalidraw, Konva, Fabric.js.
• Diagrams & Flowcharts — xyflow / React Flow, Mermaid, D2, JointJS.

Game Development

• Game Development (Overview) — The full game development landscape — engines, art, audio, netcode, distribution, jams.
• Game Engines (3D / general) — Godot, Unity, Unreal, Bevy and the rest of the general-purpose 3D engine field.
• Game Engines (2D) — Phaser, PixiJS, LÖVE, MonoGame, libGDX, GDevelop, Cocos and the 2D-focused field.
• Game Engines (code-first / minimal libraries) — raylib, SDL3, sokol, ggez, bracket-lib — when you want a library, not an engine.
• Game Engines (specialized) — Ren'Py, RPG Maker, GB Studio, roguelike toolkits, Roblox Studio — engines built around one genre.
• Pixel Art Tools — Aseprite, Libresprite, Piskel, Pyxel Edit — sprite and tile drawing.
• Tile & Level Editors — Tiled, LDtk, Trenchbroom — engine-agnostic level editing.
• 3D Modeling & Rigging for Games — Blender, MagicaVoxel, Mixamo — making and prepping 3D assets for games.
• Game Animation & Mocap — Spine, DragonBones, Live2D, Cascadeur, Rokoko, Move.ai — 2D rigs to markerless mocap.
• Voxel Tools — MagicaVoxel, Goxel, VoxEdit — voxel modeling and export.
• Particle & VFX — Niagara, VFX Graph, Effekseer, PopcornFX — particle systems and game VFX.
• Procedural Terrain & World Generation — Houdini, Gaea, World Machine, MapMagic — terrain and world tools.
• Free Asset Stores & Sources — Kenney, OpenGameArt, Quaternius, Polyhaven, Synty — where to find free game assets.
• Game Audio (FMOD, Wwise, Steam Audio) — Audio middleware, spatial audio, runtime audio engines for games.
• SFX & Music Generators / Sources — bfxr, ChipTone, Incompetech, FMA — synthesizing and finding game audio.
• Multiplayer & Netcode — Mirror, FishNet, Photon, Nakama, Colyseus, Hathora — multiplayer building blocks.
• AI, Pathfinding & NPC Behavior — Recast & Detour, A* Pathfinding, behavior trees, ML-Agents, Convai, Inworld.
• Game UI Frameworks — UGUI, UI Toolkit, UMG, Godot Control, NoesisGUI, Coherent, Ultralight.
• Input Systems — Unity Input System, Unreal Enhanced Input, Steam Input, controller binding.
• Anti-cheat — Easy Anti-Cheat, BattlEye, VAC, Vanguard, Cerberus.
• Game Localization — Crowdin, Lokalise, I2 Localization, POEditor — translation workflows for games.
• Source Control for Games — Git LFS, Diversion, Unity VCS / Plastic, Perforce / Helix Core.
• Game Build & CI / CD — GameCI, Unity Cloud Build, Unreal BuildGraph, EAS for games.
• Distribution & Stores — Steamworks, EOS, itch.io, Poki — where and how games ship.
• Game Analytics — GameAnalytics, Unity Analytics, Aptabase, Firebase, GameDiscoverCo.
• VR / XR — OpenXR, Quest, Unity XR, Unreal XR, A-Frame, VRChat, Resonite.
• Game Design & Narrative Tools — Twine, Yarn Spinner, Ink, articy:draft, Notion for game design docs.
• Game Testing & QA — Test Runner, AltTester, Gauntlet, Playwright for browser games.
• Performance Profiling for Games — RenderDoc, Unity Profiler, Unreal Insights, Nsight, PIX, Apple Instruments.
• Game Jams & Community — Ludum Dare, GMTK Jam, itch jams, learning channels, awesome lists.

Media

• Audio & Video Players — Vidstack, Mux Player, Plyr, Howler.js, wavesurfer.js.
• Real-time Video / Voice — LiveKit, Daily, Stream Video, mediasoup, Jitsi.
• Speech & Transcription — Deepgram, AssemblyAI, Whisper, ElevenLabs.
• OCR & Computer Vision — Tesseract.js, MediaPipe, Mindee, Transformers.js.

AI engineering

• AI / LLM Tooling — Vercel AI SDK, Mastra, LangChain, Ollama.
• AI Agent Frameworks — Mastra, LangGraph, OpenAI Agents SDK, Anthropic Agent SDK, Inngest Agents.
• AI Evals & LLM Testing — Promptfoo, Braintrust, Inspect AI, Langfuse, LangSmith.
• MCP (Model Context Protocol) — official SDKs, Smithery, Cloudflare Workers MCP.
• Document Parsing for RAG — LlamaParse, Unstructured, marker, docling.
• Content Moderation — OpenAI Moderation, Hive, Perspective, Llama Guard, Lakera.

Integrations

• Email — Resend, Postmark, React Email, MJML, Nodemailer.
• File Uploads / Storage — UploadThing, R2, Tigris, Backblaze, Uppy.
• Payments — Stripe, Lemon Squeezy, Polar.sh, Paddle.
• Subscriptions & Billing — Stripe Billing, Lago, Orb, Stigg, Schematic.
• Internationalization — next-intl, i18next, Paraglide, Lingui.
• OG Images & Social Cards — Satori, @vercel/og, Bannerbear.
• Cookie Consent & Privacy — c15t, Klaro, vanilla-cookieconsent.
• Embeds & oEmbed — react-tweet, react-player, iframely, unfurl.js.
• Chat Bots & Bot Frameworks — Slack Bolt, discord.js, grammY, Twilio.
• Web Scraping & Browser Automation — Playwright, Cheerio, Browserbase, Stagehand.
• Geolocation & IP Intelligence — MaxMind, IPinfo, Cloudflare geo headers.
• DNS & Domain APIs — Cloudflare DNS, Route 53, Vercel DNS, deSEC.

Display & UX

• Maps & Geo — MapLibre, Mapbox, Leaflet, deck.gl, MapTiler.
• Charts — Recharts, Tremor, ECharts, Visx, Nivo, Chart.js.
• Calendars & Scheduling UIs — Schedule-X, FullCalendar, Cal.com.
• Onboarding & Product Tours — Driver.js, Onborda, Shepherd.
• Drag & Drop — dnd-kit, Pragmatic drag-and-drop.
• Carousels & Sliders — Embla, Swiper, Splide, Keen Slider.
• Lightbox & Image Gallery — yet-another-react-lightbox, PhotoSwipe.
• Command Palette & Keybindings — cmdk, kbar, tinykeys.
• Image Editing & Cropping — react-easy-crop, sharp, browser-image-compression.
• QR Codes & Barcodes — qrcode, html5-qrcode, bwip-js.
• Notifications / Toasts — Sonner, react-hot-toast, Novu.
• Date & Time — date-fns, Day.js, Luxon, Temporal.

Discovery / SEO

• SEO & Metadata — Next Metadata API, schema-dts, unhead.
• Sitemap & Feeds — next-sitemap, feed (npm), IndexNow.

Ecommerce

• Ecommerce Platforms — Medusa, Saleor, Vendure, Shopify Hydrogen, Swell, Spree, Sharetribe.
• Shipping & Fulfillment — EasyPost, Shippo, AfterShip, ShipStation, ShipBob.
• Sales Tax, VAT & Tax Compliance — Stripe Tax, TaxJar, Avalara, Quaderno, Lemon Squeezy MoR.
• Reviews, Ratings & Loyalty — Yotpo, Judge.me, Trustpilot, Smile.io.

Design

• Vector Design Apps — Penpot, Inkscape, Graphite, Boxy SVG, Affinity, Figma — designer-side vector.
• Raster Image Editors — GIMP, Krita, Photopea, Pixelmator, darktable.
• Wireframing & Prototyping — Penpot, Figma, Balsamiq, Wireflow, Mockflow — low-fi to high-fi.
• UI Kits & Design Resources — Design-side UI kits and templates that pair with the dev-side primitives.
• Design Systems & Token Tooling — Tokens Studio, Style Dictionary, Specify, Supernova — design-side authoring.
• Color Tools (Designer-side) — Coolors, Realtime Colors, Khroma, Stark — palettes, contrast, color-blindness.
• Typography Tools (Designer-side) — FontBase, Fontstand, Glyphs Mini, Birdfont, Fontsource browser.
• Icon Design & Management — Icon8, IconKitchen, IconJar, designer-side icon tooling.
• Mockups, Screenshots & Device Frames — Shottr, CleanShot X, Screen Studio, Frame X, Mockuuups.
• Screen Recording & Demo Videos — OBS, Shottr, CleanShot, Loom, Screen Studio, Tella.
• Motion & Animation Design — Rive, LottieFiles, Cavalry, Jitter, Phase, Linearity Move.
• 3D & Spatial Design Tools — Blender, Spline, Womp, photogrammetry, glTF pipelines.
• Image Optimization (Designer-side) — Squoosh, ImageOptim, SVGO, HandBrake — drop-folder pipelines.
• Design Handoff — Penpot Inspect, Figma Dev Mode, Zeplin, code-first via Storybook.
• Design Feedback & Annotation — Pastel, Vercel Comments, BugHerd, Markup.io, video review.
• Presentations & Decks — Slidev, Marp, RevealJS, Pitch, Beautiful AI, code-first decks.
• Brand Guidelines & DAM — Frontify, ResourceSpace, Eagle, Brandfetch — honest about paid space.
• Designer Browser Extensions — ColorZilla, WhatFont, VisBug, axe, Polypane.

Data & Analytics

• Data Warehouses & Analytical Databases — DuckDB, ClickHouse, StarRocks, Doris, Druid, Pinot, ParadeDB.
• Lakehouse Table Formats — Iceberg vs. Delta vs. Hudi vs. Paimon, REST catalogs (Polaris, Unity Catalog OSS, Nessie).
• Query Engines & Federated SQL — Trino, DuckDB, DataFusion, chDB, Steampipe, pg_duckdb, Spice.ai.
• Time-Series Databases — TimescaleDB, InfluxDB, QuestDB, VictoriaMetrics, GreptimeDB.
• Vector Databases — Qdrant, Weaviate, Milvus, Chroma, pgvector, lancedb, sqlite-vec.
• ETL / ELT & Ingestion — Airbyte, Meltano, dlt, Sling, SeaTunnel, PyAirbyte.
• Change Data Capture (CDC) — Debezium, PeerDB, Sequin, Maxwell — streaming row-level changes.
• Reverse ETL — Hightouch, Census, Polytomic, RudderStack, Multiwoven.
• Event Tracking & CDP — RudderStack OSS, Snowplow OSS, Jitsu, Aptabase, Counterscale, Dittofeed.
• Data Orchestration — Airflow, Dagster, Prefect, Kestra, Mage, Flyte, Windmill.
• Data Transformation & Modeling — dbt-core, SQLMesh, sqlfluff, SQLGlot.
• Stream Processing — RisingWave, Materialize, ksqlDB, Flink, Spark, Bytewax, Pathway, Quix.
• Semantic Layers & Metrics — Cube, dbt Semantic Layer / MetricFlow, GoodData.CN, Lightdash.
• Data Quality & Testing — dbt tests, Great Expectations, Soda Core, Pandera, Frictionless.
• Data Observability — Elementary, data-diff, Re_Data, Whylogs, Monte Carlo, Bigeye.
• Data Catalog & Lineage — DataHub, OpenMetadata, Unity Catalog OSS, Polaris, OpenLineage, Marquez.
• Notebooks & Reactive Computing — Jupyter, Marimo, Quarto, Observable, Hex, Deepnote.
• Data Exploration & EDA — Polars, DuckDB, pandas, ydata-profiling, Visidata, Datasette.
• Data Apps & Internal Tools — Streamlit, Dash, Marimo, Solara, Reflex, NiceGUI, Panel, Gradio.
• BI & Dashboards — Metabase, Superset, Redash, Lightdash, Evidence, Vizro.
• Embedded Analytics — Cube, Superset embedded, Metabase embedded, Evidence, Lightdash embedded.
• Data API Gateways — Hasura, PostgREST, Postgraphile, Supabase, Pocketbase.
• Lightweight Web & App Analytics — Pirsch, GoatCounter, Counterscale, TelemetryDeck, Aptabase, Microsoft Clarity.

Tooling & ops

• Build Tools / Bundlers — Vite, Turbopack, Rspack, Rolldown, esbuild.
• Monorepo Tools — Turborepo, Nx, Moon, pnpm/Bun workspaces.
• Linting / Formatting — Biome, ESLint, oxlint, Prettier.
• Testing — Vitest, Playwright, Cypress, Storybook, MSW.
• Specialty Testing — Chromatic, Argos, Stryker (mutation), Pact (contract), fast-check.
• Accessibility Testing — axe, Pa11y, Lighthouse, jsx-a11y.
• Load Testing & Benchmarking — k6, Artillery, Autocannon, Mitata, Tinybench.
• Faker, Seed Data & Fixtures — Faker, Drizzle Seed, Snaplet, fishery, zod-mock.
• CI / CD — GitHub Actions, Buildkite, Dagger, Earthly, Changesets.
• Dependency Updates — Renovate, Dependabot, ncu, Snyk.
• Security Scanning — Snyk, Semgrep, Trivy, GitGuardian, OWASP ZAP, Socket.
• Analytics — PostHog, Plausible, Umami, Microsoft Clarity.
• Observability / Errors — Sentry, Highlight, OpenTelemetry, Axiom.
• Status Pages & Incidents — OpenStatus, Better Stack, Uptime Kuma, Incident.io.
• Backup & Disaster Recovery — WAL-G, Litestream, restic, Neon branching.
• Deployment / Hosting — Vercel, Cloudflare Pages/Workers, Fly, Railway, Coolify.

Dev environment

• CLI & TUI Frameworks — citty, Commander, Clack, Ink, oclif.
• Codemods & AST Tools — ts-morph, jscodeshift, ast-grep, semgrep.
• Dev Environments — mise, fnm, Devbox, Docker Compose, Codespaces.

Dev tools (apps you use)

• API Clients — Bruno, Hoppscotch, REST Client, HTTPie.
• Database GUIs — TablePlus, Beekeeper, DBeaver, Drizzle Studio.
• OpenAPI Tooling — Scalar, Hey API, openapi-typescript, Spectral.
• GraphQL Codegen & Tooling — gql.tada, GraphQL Code Generator, Pothos.
• API Reference Generation — TypeDoc, api-extractor, fumadocs-typescript, Magidoc.

Product & support

• Customer Support & Live Chat — Chatwoot, Plain, Crisp, Tawk.to.
• Surveys & User Feedback — Formbricks, Tally, PostHog Surveys, Microsoft Clarity.
• Compliance (SOC 2 / ISO / GDPR / HIPAA) — Vanta, Drata, Secureframe, Sprinto, SafeBase.

Curated families

• The TanStack family — Query, Router, Start, Form, Table, Virtual.
• Starters & Scaffolds — create-t3-app, create-next-app, shadcn templates.