Quick scaling, high performance, real-time development, cross-platform deployment and easy maintenance are terms synonyms with Node.js.

Considering the business benefits Node.js brings to the table, no wonder why it has appealed to a diverse range of businesses. On a regular basis, Node.js is used by 98% of Fortune 500 companies. It includes eBay to Netflix.

Through this post, we’ll help you dig deeper into the top 7 apps built with Node.js from the world’s leading business giants and why they adopted Node.js.

But let’s first have a short overview of Node.js and understand why developers and companies alike are using it for app development.

What Is Node.js?

An open-source and JavaScript runtime environment built on Google Chrome’s V8 engine, Node.js helps build scalable and fast web applications with ease.

It makes use of an event-driven and non-blocking I/O model, making it fast, efficient, lightweight and ideal for real-time data-intensive applications.

Node.js is not either a programming language or framework but a cross-platform runtime environment that comes with a rich catalog of various JS (JavaScript) modules simplifying the development of complex web and mobile applications.

Top Node.js App Development Stats to Watch Out

If you’re still torn as to whether or not you should choose Node.js for your next product development project, have a look below at some Node.js development statistics to reach a conclusion:

• ⦁ The world’s leading tech giants such as PayPal and LinkedIn are using Node.js for their mainstream apps.
• ⦁ Node.js is extremely ideal for high-traffic applications.
• ⦁ According to the 2021 Stack Overflow Developer Survey, Node.js is the sixth most popular technology among developers.
• ⦁ Research suggests that Node.js is among the list of preferred technologies for startups.

• ⦁ Some of the reasons why companies include Node.js in their tech stacks include lower development cost, enhance app performance, boost developer productivity and others.

Top 7 Apps Built with Node.js

With the aforementioned stats, no wonder why companies across industries invest in Node.js app development. Let’s now cut to the chase and dive into the top 10 apps built with Node.js.

1. Netflix

Netflix is the world’s most popular subscription-based streaming service that enables users to stream movies and TV shows without ads. It operates in over 190 countries and clocked 221.8 million subscribers around the globe as of the fourth quarter of 2021.

Earlier, Netflix was utilizing Java on the back end and JavaScript on the front end, which required the team to be excel at both languages. Moreover, they had to make double efforts for error handling, debugging and activity tracking.

Being a server-side JavaScript runtime, Node.js enables developers to write the same code for both the back end and front end of a web application.

“The front-end engineers were having to write a lot of Java code to produce the website, but they also had to write a lot of JavaScript on the client side. With Node, they can do all their work in JavaScript.” said Kim Trott, director of user interface engineering at Netflix.

Benefits of Node.js to Netflix:

• ⦁ Streamlined the whole development process because of the common language used for both server-side and client-side.
• ⦁ A whopping 70% lower startup time for the new application
• ⦁ Enhanced level of customization for each user
• ⦁ Improves build times

2. LinkedIn

LinkedIn is the world’s biggest professional networking platform with more than 770 million users from over +200 countries & territories. It is one of the noteworthy apps built with Node.js. It has 810 million users from more than 200 countries.

In 2011, the company replaced its back-end mobile infrastructure based on synchronous Ruby On Rails with an event-based asynchronous system. That’s why LinkedIn decided to switch to Node.js primarily because of its excellent scalability and performance efficiency.

“Node provides an evented system with a single process which executes multiple requests. It has no concept of thread-locals forcing you to make your code stateless and modular. Although Node has added support for domains; it is mostly untested for high qps services.” said Deepank Gupta, Senior Software Engineer at LinkedIn. 

Benefits of Node.js to LinkedIn:

• ⦁ A significant reduction in the number of servers being used – from 30 to 3
• ⦁ Faster development process; both the backend and frontend team merged into one single squad.
• ⦁ Doubled traffic capacity
• ⦁ New mobile app is up to 20x faster in some cases

3. Uber

Uber is the worldwide leading online transportation network company operating in over 80 countries and 900 cities all over the world (as of September 2020). The app connects consumers with drivers who use their own vehicles.

As of the second quarter of 2021, the company clocked 100 million monthly global users. It is one of the first Node.js adopters.

Uber decided to go ahead with Node.js to power its massive matching system because of the technology acumen to meet Uber’s growing business needs and to enhance data processing capabilities

Benefits of Node.js to Uber:

• ⦁ Enable quick processing of a large number of user requests
• ⦁ Elimination of errors and bugs on the fly without the need to restart
• ⦁ Quick deployment of the new code
• ⦁ Strong active open-source community of developers who constantly optimize the technology

4. eBay

eBay is one of the world’s largest marketplaces, offering consumer-to-consumer and business-to-consumer internet sales services. It has 183 million active users and operates in 37 countries.

The company, for a long time, has been using a JAVA-based architecture. To fulfill a large number of service requests every day, eBay chose Node.js due to its scalability efficiency.

“We started with the basic Java infrastructure, but it consumed many more resources than expected, raising questions about scalability for production. These concerns led us to build a new mid-tier orchestrator from scratch, and Node.js seemed to be a perfect fit.” said Senthil Padmanabhan, Principal Web Engineer at eBay.

Benefits of Node.js to eBay:

• ⦁ Easy and fast deployment
• ⦁ Speed up the development due to the same tech stack for both frontend and the backend part
• ⦁ Performance and scalability

Also Read: eBay Business & Revenue Model: How Does It Work & Make Money?

5. PayPal

PayPal is one of the world’s biggest online paying systems that facilitates digital payment and acts as an electronic substitute to conventional paper methods like checks. As of 2021, the company has a presence across over 202 countries/regions with 377 million active users.

Before moving to Node.js, the engineering teams at PayPal were segmented into two teams: ones who code for a browser (making use of HTML, CSS and JavaScript) and other ones who code for an application layer (making use of Java). Therefore, the primary blocker for the company was the boundary between the browser and server.

With the decision to move from Java to Node.js, the company was able to use the common language for both the browser and server applications.

“Node.js unifies our engineering specialities into one team which allows us to understand and react to our users’ needs at any level in the technology stack. And All of our consumer-facing web applications going forward will be built on node.js ” said Jeff Harrell, director of engineering at PayPal.

Benefits of Node.js to PayPal:

• ⦁ The new app was built 2x faster with fewer people
• ⦁ 35% decrease in the average response time for the same page
• ⦁ 33% fewer lines of code
• ⦁ 40% fewer files
• ⦁ Doubled request per second

6. Twitter

Twitter is one of the world’s most popular social networking platforms with 290.5 million monthly active users and 340 million tweets per day.

As 80% of users access Twitter from a mobile device, the company made a switch to Node.js for Twitter Lite primarily to offer a better mobile experience for users.

Benefits of Node.js to Twitter:

• ⦁ Twitter Lite loads under 5 seconds on a 3G speed connection.
• ⦁ Speed up the design and development process
• ⦁ Resulted in easy maintenance

7. GoDaddy

GoDaddy is one of the world’s most popular domain name and web hosting service providers. As of the fourth quarter of 2021, the company clocked more than 20 million users worldwide. It is one of the web apps built with Node.js. In fact, it was one of the first early adopters of Node.js.

The company made a switch to Node.js from .Net when they revamped their website in 2016.

“You might have seen, if you’re a GoDaddy user, recently we did a pretty large re-branding of the site and we rolled that out in about an hour. That went really smoothly and a lot of that was thanks to Node.js.” said, Charlie Robbins, Director of Engineering for the UX platform at GoDaddy.

Benefits of Node.js to GoDaddy:

• ⦁ User performance increased by 4 times
• ⦁ Reduced server infrastructure costs by 10 times
• ⦁ Launched the rebranded website within 1 hour

Hire Node.js Developers to Future-Proof Your Application 

If you are thinking of building or already have a similar on-demand streaming app like Netflix or an eCommerce platform like eBay and want to achieve similar results as they have using Node.js, the first step is to hire skilled Node.js developers for your project.

We at InfoStride strive to help entrepreneurs, startups and businesses like you to hire high-performing Node.js developers with a cooperation model that best meets their budget and project requirements. Whether you want to hire one or more Node.js developers on a full-time, hourly, monthly or project basis, you can count on us with the following benefits:

• ⦁ Recruitment savings: We provide you with only vetted Node.js developers who have passed our technical, English proficient and soft skills assessments. That way, you can save yourself from the hassle of investing your money and time in sourcing quality talent.

• ⦁ No training and infrastructure investment: We provide continuous learning to our developers to stay ahead of the new trends. Your hired resources will work from our development facility armed with new technology and all amenities.
• ⦁ Administrative support: We make it easy to onboard Node.js developers by managing payroll, taxes, compliance and other related formalities for your hired developers. This enables you to fully focus on what matters most – building or enhancing your product.

Interested? Just tell your needs – whether you need help with end-to-end development from concept to design to deployment and support or with just one phase of development for your project. We’ll deploy Node.js developers that perfectly align with your requirements and goals.

Conclusion

In this post, we’ve covered a few apps built with Node.js. There are many more that have made the switch to Node.js to leverage the benefits technology has to offer.

If you’re also facing similar challenges as these big-name companies for their mainstream app such as slow development process due to different languages for server-side and client-side or not being able to handle increased user requests, Node.js is an indeed solution for your product.

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