The best tech tools for developers, ranked honestly, are VS Code, Git, Docker, Postman, and a good package manager — in roughly that order of daily screen time. That’s not a hot take; it lines up with what Stack Overflow found in 2023, and it lines up with what I see on pretty much every dev machine I work alongside. The hype cycle pushes different names every six months, but the actual workflows don’t move that fast.
So instead of another list sorted by GitHub stars, here’s how these tools shake out by what you actually touch before lunch.
Tools Ranked by Daily Dev Usage
Stack Overflow’s 2023 survey put VS Code at 73% developer market share, which surprised nobody who’s looked at a dev machine recently. It’s been climbing since 2018. At this point, choosing it isn’t really a choice so much as skipping a decision entirely. JetBrains IDEs keep a loyal following, starting at $249/year, and honestly for big Java or Kotlin codebases the refactoring tools alone justify that price. VS Code is just faster to open and has more extensions, which is enough for most work most days.
Git is at the point where listing it feels almost redundant — it’s infrastructure, not a tool you select. Postman has around 25 million users, which tracks, because people grumble about the newer versions feeling bloated and then open it anyway because the alternatives are genuinely worse for API testing. Homebrew quietly moves over 2 billion package installs a year, remarkable for something most developers configure once and never think about again. Linux runs on 53% of professional developer machines, so the gap between local and prod has narrowed considerably.
Cost and Licensing Tradeoffs
GitHub Copilot runs $10/month for individuals. If you’re writing boilerplate more than an hour a week it covers itself, in my experience. I spent the first couple of weeks ignoring half its suggestions, then realized somewhere around week three that repetitive tasks were just getting done faster. Rough personal estimate, not a lab result. Real enough to keep paying.
Docker Desktop is where things get complicated. The free tier is fine for personal projects, but Docker changed its licensing in 2022 so companies with more than 250 employees or $10 million in revenue need a paid plan, starting around $21/month per user. A lot of teams quietly missed that update. Worth checking before your next audit.
What Most Developers Actually Install First
When I set up a new machine, the order goes: Homebrew, Git, VS Code, then whatever runtime the current project needs. Docker comes in fourth or fifth, not first. Postman usually lands within the first week once API work starts. JetBrains tools only appear if the project specifically calls for them — the $249 annual cost is easy to justify on a team budget but harder to swallow personally when VS Code covers 90% of the same ground for free.
The best tech tools for developers are mostly the boring ones that have been around long enough to actually work. The install order above has stayed pretty stable across the last three years, at least among developers I’ve watched set up new machines, though I’ll admit a few newer tools are starting to show up earlier in that sequence.
FAQs
Is GitHub Copilot worth the $10 monthly fee?
For most developers writing repetitive code daily, yes. It tends to earn back its cost fairly quickly with regular use, though for logic-heavy or highly specialized work the suggestions get less useful and the value is harder to feel.
What is the best free IDE for developers in 2024?
VS Code, and it’s not particularly close. That 73% market share reflects something real: it starts fast, the extension library is enormous, and there are no commercial restrictions to work around.
Is Docker Desktop free for professional use?
Not always. Companies over 250 employees or $10 million revenue need a paid plan starting around $21/user per month since the 2022 licensing change.
