Rails or Laravel, take your pick. Personally, I've been using Laravel + Filament. It's so fast to get up and running with & it doesn't hamstring you when you want to do anything more complex.
Ask HN: Would you still choose Ruby on Rails for a startup in 2025?
21–30 of 182 posts
Re: Ask HN: Would you still choose Ruby on Rails for a startup in 2025?
#22Yes absolutely, although I don't see anything wrong with sticking to Go either if you know and like it.
Rails 8 just gives you so much out of the box for a small start up that it would be my personal choice.
Having Hotwire for PWAs without having to have a frontend build pipeline or Hotwire Native for iOS and Android allowing you to reuse for your existing web frontend for example.
Or using Kamal for deployments to cheap commodity servers without having to setup K8s or use expensive cloud services.
Even things like ActionText for rich page content are a big win.
I mean you can replace everything later if you grow big enough to need separate mobile, devops and frontend teams but if it's only a few of you why bother when you could be delivering your MVP?
Re: Ask HN: Would you still choose Ruby on Rails for a startup in 2025?
#23No.
However, Rails addresses many items on The List.
Hence, it's worth using it as a checklist.
In reality, things like cache-busting codes are pretty straightforward to write in and choices about how to represent database entities and validate incoming data require contextual and experiential validation, one size (ActiveRecord) truly doesn't fit all.
One is well served to learn Rails for many reasons, but i would not start a green field 2025 project with any framework.
I have been burned by rapid development frameworks in the past, not Rails, but anyway, by now I've been rolling my own stacks for awhile, and it was mainly a question of language ecosystems.
Have a gander at Crystal Lang, BTW, and Amber and Lucky frameworks
Re: Ask HN: Would you still choose Ruby on Rails for a startup in 2025?
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
I just opened the official starting guide from the official RoR website and am very excited, to be honest. I mean, the Go way of as few dependencies as possible and no opinionated frameworks is cool, but getting so much done for you is such a nice thing when you want to build fast. Also, switching to a purely REST API with just render json: is unbelievably fast. Writing the same in Go would include a lot of boilerpla…
> Writing the same in Go would include a lot of boilerplate. Yes, it would be very hard for LLM to write this boilerplate. It’s so long it would not fit in its limited context brain ;)
still you have to maintain the pile of boilerplate code and whoever does it, has a very narrow context window (aka human)
Re: Ask HN: Would you still choose Ruby on Rails for a startup in 2025?
#25i would, especially if there is mobile ui on horizon (hotwire)
+ added ports and adapters (aka hexagonal architecture, there are many articles on how to do it in ror)
disclaimer: i work with ror since 2006 so i have a strong bias.
Re: Ask HN: Would you still choose Ruby on Rails for a startup in 2025?
#26I am in technical diligence so I talk to companies going from start up to mid stage all the time (ie when they get bought or are getting a big investment). I've been doing it for six years now. My personal anecdotal observation is that companies now tell me it is much harder to hire for Ruby than for Python or Node back ends, for what that's worth. I also, for whatever reason, seem to encounter more companies with "s…
I've found Rails over the last few versions to be very easy to upgrade. Where I've had problems it's been 3rd party libraries that try to force alternatives to core behaviour like ActiveModel but then break their own API a year down the line. cough Looking at you Dry::Validation. You just do things like sticking to POROs for business logic it's pretty smooth. I just follow the advice in the Sustainable Rails book. ht…
Yeah, that's why I said I have no idea why that is. I'm sure it's not caused by Rails but rather some kind of secondary associative reason. (ie, rails devs leave and they have a hard time replacing with seniors or something). Coming from a Python background I find it weird. But it's definitely a thing.
Re: Ask HN: Would you still choose Ruby on Rails for a startup in 2025?
#27I wouldn't because it is difficult to recruit and find developers for it.
Re: Ask HN: Would you still choose Ruby on Rails for a startup in 2025?
#28Yes, I would. In fact, I'd use any boring technology [0]. Anything that's been around and battle tested. If I was at a startup trying to solve a business problem, the last thing I'd want to do is bruise my knuckles fighting with my tools. Rails provides an opinionated way to structure your codebase as well as many existing modules that just work. It's not exclusive in this space, but it's a safe bet. You can get any…
Is it boring technology? I'm actually reluctant to pick up Rails because it had always been sold by the Basecamp cult and Jason Fried gives off Musk vibes.
Many opinionated frameworks are also less reliable because of the layers of abstraction, so I'd also associate opinionated framework = sexy and temporary.
I've never actually used Rails in production, just did some tutorial, so I'm probably wrong about this.
Re: Ask HN: Would you still choose Ruby on Rails for a startup in 2025?
#29I use node-ts. Why? I have access to every library I will need from any provider or for any task like phone number validation.
Node is fast enough, easy to develop, deploy, and scale. Anything that is slow can be ported to Go.
It is easy to find solutions to my immediate problems using LLMs.
I’m just using express and my data layer consists of neo4j and qdrant. All code is single responsibility and I use layered architecture. Easy to test and feed in to AI.
I used to work in rails, mostly to port existing code to Go or node. I found it way too messy and complicated, and our codebase was awful. I am in the minority though as I know many love rails.
Re: Ask HN: Would you still choose Ruby on Rails for a startup in 2025?
#30Yes, it has everything (+ lots of packages/gems because of Ruby) and you'll likely be able to write a Web App / API much faster than in Go or any other language.
I've worked in multiple languages, and personally enjoy Go and Rust, but nothing, even Django, comes close to the speed I can address a business/user need by using Rails.
When running a Startup, you want to quickly be able to try new approaches, and if they suck, you just remove the code and start again, or change. Rails is unmatched that way.
It's worth saying that Rails doesn't come with any kind of library for you to abstract business domains and you should avoid callbacks (specifically after_save / after_commit can be really bad in big applications with technical debt), so look for a library for this or write pure Ruby classes.