Categories Overview

The categories below cover the choices you make on a typical web project. Each page lists the most popular options as of May 2026 with a "pick this if…" line at the bottom.

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.

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.
• Game Development — Phaser, PixiJS, Excalibur, Kaboom, Defold, Colyseus.
• Whiteboards & Canvas — tldraw, Excalidraw, Konva, Fabric.js.
• Diagrams & Flowcharts — xyflow / React Flow, Mermaid, D2, JointJS.

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.

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.