What is a tech stack (and how do you build the right one for your business)?

Investing in a strong tech stack is a crucial foundational step in building a successful product or website.   

Having the right tech tools in place from the start makes it easier to build your product, and ensures it can evolve to keep meeting the needs of its (hopefully) ever-growing user base.

Keep reading to learn

• What a tech stack is

• Why getting your tech stack right is so critical to long-term success

• What kind of tools to include in your tech stack

• Tips from product leaders on how to build the right stack 

What is a tech stack?

A tech stack (or tool stack) is the set of technologies used to develop an application or website, including programming languages, frameworks, databases, front-end and back-end tools, and APIs. 

Why getting your tech stack right is critical to long-term success

The choices you make when building your tech stack can have significant downstream effects on your business, influencing

• What kind of products and integrations you’ll be able to build 

• How efficiently you’ll be able to work 

• What type of skills you’ll need to hire for

Of course, the process of selecting tech stack components always involves trade-offs. Some technologies save time but allow for less customization, others are better for certain audience segments (for example, iPhone users)—and others are more scalable but require more ongoing maintenance. 

However, it’s possible to assemble a stack that meets your needs now and evolves and matures with your company.

3 tips for putting together an effective, foolproof tech stack

1. Include as many scalable tools in your tech stack as possible

Use tools that can scale with your business as it grows.

Many well-known backend solutions (such as AWS) give you the option to automatically add additional servers as you need them, rather than having to estimate your usage and pay for capacity upfront. 

As for utilities and business apps that aren’t part of your core product, invest in options that have low switching costs or pricing tiers to accommodate future growth. 

For example, a small ecommerce company might start with an affordable Shopify plan, which, as the company grows, is easy to update to Shopify Plus, or migrate to a custom site that it can now afford to maintain.

2. Pick the right combination of tools for your tech stack

Before the days of ubiquitous system-as–a-service (SaaS) products and services, tech stacks were relatively simple.

There was LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP), an older standard for building PHP-based web applications—and non-open source alternatives, such as WAMP (for those who preferred Windows to Linux). 

Today, however, there’s a wealth of tools that product teams and engineers combine to build and maintain the perfect product for their market segment. 

A start-up company still finding traction might lean toward low-cost, flexible options it can switch out later, while another might choose technology that maximizes scalability to meet the demands of enterprise customers.

Components of a modern tech stack

Here are the basic modern tech stack components along with some popular options for each:

• Operating systems and programming languages: choose these based on the environment you’re most comfortable developing in and the type of application you want to optimize. You may end up with several, depending on how you want to build the backend and the user experience and what devices you’re building for.

Popular operating systems and languages include Linux, iOS, Android, Swift, Java, Ruby, Python, and Javascript.

• Servers and load balancing: this category includes servers, content distribution networks, routing, and caching services that let your applications send and receive requests, run smoothly, and scale capacity as needed. The larger services (like Amazon and Google) often offer the same components as their smaller counterparts, but they typically allow you to purchase each service as a line item, so you can mix and match based on your product requirements and preferred pricing structure.

Popular services include AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, Apache, Nginx, CloudFlare, and Fastly.

• Data storage and querying: This layer of the stack consists of relational and non-relational databases, data warehouses, and data pipelines that allow you to store and query all of your real-time and historical data. These components are key for storing data about what happens inside your app and how users behave when using it. Later, you can search this data and use it to improve your product.

Popular data infrastructure tools include MySQL, Azure SQL Synapse, MongoDB, Redshift, PostgresSQL, Snowflake, Splunk, Talend, and Fivetran.

• Backend frameworks: a framework is a collection of languages, libraries, and utilities designed to help developers build applications. Frameworks often include some of the basic functionality you’ll need to build an app, and provide structure for things like organizing and communicating with your database, handling user requests, and sending out registration or password reset emails. While some developers choose to forgo frameworks and code everything from scratch, they often end up with a more complicated and time-consuming build.

Popular frameworks include Ruby on Rails, Django, Laravel, Spring, and .NET.

• Frontend framework: the services and frameworks you use to build the user experience, including the user interface and all the client-side functionality in your product.

Popular frontend frameworks and tools include AngularJS, React, Bootstrap, jQuery, Emberjs, and Backbonejs.

• API services: the applications that help you connect to the tools that make up your extended tech stack. Some API services are simply collections of thousands of pre-built APIs, while others are API gateways that help manage traffic when you need to send and receive large quantities of information from other systems.

Popular API platforms include Segment, Google Apigee, MuleSoft, Tealium, and Zapier.

• Monitoring and performance tools: a category of tools that helps you understand how each layer of your tech stack is performing. Monitoring and performance tools collect and analyze data about the technical performance of your software, and are designed to track the health of servers, databases, services, and other internal systems.

Popular options include Contentsquare, New Relic,Dynatrace, and Datadog.

• Business intelligence (BI) solutions: BI tools combine data gathered from multiple parts of your company and the market and are designed to help track your business performance, so you can make higher-level business decisions. Many offer innovative ways to report on and visualize data.

Popular options include Microsoft Power BI, SAP BusinessObjects, Tableau, Looker, and Qlik.

• Behavioral and product analytics: an emerging but valuable class of tools used to track, store, and analyze user behavior at every stage of the customer journey. Some teams analyze this data in the analytics tools themselves, other teams pipe this data into data warehouses (some teams do both). The best of these tools offer proactive insights and keep data clean and organized.

Popular options include Contentsquare, Google Analytics, Amplitude, Mixpanel, and Countly.

3. Pick the right product analytics tools for your tech stack

You should be extra careful when selecting the product analytics tools you add to your tech stack. 

These tools tell you how your current product is performing, what features are being used, and what parts of your product give people trouble. You can use this information to make key decisions on pricing, new feature prioritization, and marketing campaigns.

Because analytics tools give you such valuable insight, using the wrong one can derail your product development process. So be sure to pick the right one.

How Contentsquare fits into (and powers up) your tech stack

Use Contentsquare’s Product Analytics, Experience Analytics, Experience Monitoring, and Voice of Customer products to track your customers’ behavior across your websites, apps, and other branded experiences—for a multi-session, multi-device understanding of your user journeys, so you can optimize them for engagement and retention.