Do Companies Still Use Ruby on Rails in 2025?

Short answer: yes. Plenty of established, successful companies still use Ruby on Rails in 2025. 

Its popularity may have waned and it’s not as cool as it was around 2010, but it’s a proven technology that has been constantly getting better since its release in 2004. To this day, many developers sing its praises in communities like Hacker News and Reddit:

• “In my ~20 years of doing development professionally, I've never found anything that comes close to the productivity you get out of Rails on a new project (even if you're new to Ruby/Rails).”

• “Once I found Ruby on Rails, I've never looked back. Simply put, no other framework I've worked with (in the Python and JS ecosystems, where I started out years ago), would come close in terms of speed - measured in the number of features as I can ship with Rails. It's just that good, and Ruby is an absolute joy to write.”

• “RoR remains a great tool for getting things done.”

With Ruby on Rails, companies can react swiftly to changing market demands and deliver robust solutions. As long as you have access to skilled Ruby on Rails developers, you can rapidly build and deploy secure, scalable applications. 

Key takeaways:

• Major companies scale massively with Rails: GitHub deploys their 2-million-line Rails monolith 20 times daily with 1,000+ engineers, Intercom handles 150,000 requests/second, and Shopify calls itself "the biggest Rails app in the world"

• Rails keeps innovating: Rails 8.0 was released in 2024 with "No PaaS Required" philosophy, it’s preconfigured with Kamal 2 to enable deployment anywhere in under two minutes, and new Solid adapters that let apps run efficiently on SQLite alone

• Thriving ecosystem: Over 5,000+ contributors on GitHub, 2.3 million developers using Rails, and 640+ million total gem downloads prove the framework's massive adoption

• Small teams achieve big results: Judge.me serves 500,000+ e-commerce shops with just 10+ engineers, companies choose Rails for rapid development and easy scaling

• Strong industry commitment: Rails Foundation keeps expanding with new Core members like 1Password and Judge.me, signaling renewed business investment in the framework's future

Should You Use Ruby on Rails in 2025?

Ruby on Rails holds a firm place in web development, especially for businesses that value speed, simplicity, and reliability. Knowing the framework’s strengths, it’s easy to see why Ruby on Rails remains a trusted framework for building web applications in 2025.

Boosting Developer Productivity

Rails’ "convention over configuration" philosophy reduces decision fatigue for Ruby on Rails developers, allowing them to focus on business logic. Built-in tools accelerate development by automating repetitive tasks. Ruby's expressive and concise nature enables developers to write clean, readable code quickly.

Supportive Community and Ecosystem

Rails benefits from a vibrant and supportive community. A vast collection of open-source gems covering a wide range of functionalities is available, and regular updates and maintenance ensure the framework stays current with modern web development practices. Just look at the numbers:

• On GitHub, Rails has over 5,000+ contributors improving the framework every day and it’s used by over 2,3 million developers.

• The Rails gem has over 640,502,103 total downloads. Just the latest version, 8.0.2, has been downloaded 4,098,587 times since its release in March 2025 (as of July 2025, so across four months).

Thanks to regular updates and a strong ecosystem, Ruby on Rails usage in 2025 remains solid among companies that enjoy using stable technology.

Driving Simplicity and Convention

Rails follows the "Don't Repeat Yourself" (DRY) principle, promoting code reusability and maintainability. The MVC (Model-View-Controller) architecture provides a clear structure for organizing code. Sensible defaults and conventions allow developers to build applications quickly without extensive configuration.

Improving Scalability

Rails has addressed previous scalability concerns. Advancements in Ruby's performance, such as the introduction of JIT (Just-In-Time) compilation, have improved overall speed. The framework now supports features like API-only applications, making it suitable for microservices architectures, and integration with modern front-end frameworks allows for more flexible and scalable application structures. 

Enhancing Security and Reliability

Rails prioritizes security and reliability. Built-in security features protect against common web vulnerabilities like SQL injection and cross-site scripting (XSS), and regular security updates, along with a proactive approach to addressing vulnerabilities, maintain the framework's reputation for reliability. This reliability has made Rails a great choice for companies that handle sensitive data, from fintech startups to healthcare platforms.

Which Industries Use Ruby on Rails in 2025?

Thanks to its speed, security, and scalability, it’s a good choice for any modern company that needs to stay competitive. Take e-commerce, for instance: platforms like Shopify use Rails to manage high transaction volumes and create flexible, scalable storefronts that can grow with demand. Fintech companies also trust Rails for its robust security features and modular structure, which help them meet tough standards for data protection and regulatory compliance.

In the SaaS world, Rails’ quick development cycles give both startups and established companies an edge, making it easy to roll out user-friendly applications that customers can rely on. Rails shines in the CMS space for content-heavy websites, supporting fast content delivery, easy customization, and impressive scalability – essential qualities for media-rich sites. Finally, in Healthcare, Rails supports secure, compliant application development, facilitating platforms that handle sensitive data, streamline patient management, and enhance telehealth experiences. 

Which Companies Use Ruby on Rails in 2025?

Many top brands continue to rely on Rails, appreciating its mature ecosystem, solid security features, and the support of a lively community. Rails has repeatedly shown that it can handle a wide range of demands, from global e-commerce platforms to social networks and collaborative tools, making it possible for teams to build high-traffic, adaptable applications and roll out updates quickly.

In this chapter, we’ll take a closer look at some of the diverse companies that have made Ruby on Rails their foundation and see how this versatile framework has helped drive their success. Here’s a look at top companies using Ruby on Rails and how they’re leveraging its capabilities:

GitHub

GitHub is the world's leading code hosting and collaboration platform where developers store, share, and collaborate on software projects. Since its inception, GitHub has operated as a Ruby on Rails monolith that has grown to nearly 2 million lines of code with more than 1,000 engineers collaborating on it daily. The platform maintains an aggressive deployment schedule, shipping code as often as 20 times per day.

GitHub has pioneered an innovative approach to Rails maintenance through weekly automated upgrades. Every Monday, a scheduled workflow triggers a pull request that bumps their Rails version to the latest commit, with nearly every week featuring a Rails upgrade deployment. This process has dramatically reduced upgrade timelines from months to under a week. They've achieved similar efficiency with Ruby upgrades, successfully upgrading from Ruby 3.1 to Ruby 3.2 within a month of release and adopting Ruby 3.2.1 on release day.

GitHub chooses Rails because it enables rapid iteration while maintaining stability at massive scale. Their weekly upgrade strategy delivers multiple benefits: developers get access to the latest Rails improvements including better database connection handling and faster view rendering, they've eliminated nearly all custom Rails patches, security updates become standard practice, and they avoid disruptive "big bang" migrations. This approach also strengthens their engineering team by catching bugs early and contributing back to the Rails community, creating a virtuous cycle that improves both GitHub's application and the broader Rails ecosystem.

Intercom

Intercom is the AI Customer Service company on a mission to help businesses provide incredible customer experiences. Founded in 2011, they offer advanced AI-powered customer service solutions including Fin, their flagship AI agent, and the Intercom Customer Service Suite. 

Intercom's impressive scale is powered by their two-million-line Rails monolith that handles massive traffic volumes. At peak performance, they serve 150,000 HTTPS requests per second and 50,000 background job requests per second, driving more than two million SQL calls and twenty million cache hits per second. Their deployment process is highly efficient, running 100,000+ tests on each pull request with a P75 completion time of six minutes, while end-to-end deployments complete in under twelve minutes with rollbacks taking just two minutes.

Rails has been at Intercom's core since day one, starting on Rails 3.0.3 and growing through continuous upgrades. They follow trunk-based development with engineers merging small pull requests to main throughout the day. Rails enables Intercom to keep their infrastructure simple—doubling request volume simply requires adding more hosts. The framework allows their teams to move fast, scale smoothly, and power innovations like their AI agent Fin, which now supports millions of conversations every day. In 2022, Intercom became a founding Core member of the Rails Foundation, demonstrating their commitment to the framework that keeps their engineers happy and productive while building world-class customer service experiences.

1Password

1Password is a security company known for password management that has expanded into Extended Access Management (XAM) through their acquisition of Kolide. Kolide integrates with SSO providers to ensure that unsecured devices cannot access company applications, serving companies like Databricks, Discord, Anduril, Robinhood, Hugging Face, and Asana.

Kolide operates as a Rails application that handles significant scale, serving thousands of web requests per second and processing billions of asynchronous jobs every month while maintaining 99.99% annual uptime. The platform powers device trust for millions of authentications across their client base. Starting as a Rails app in 2019, Kolide currently runs on Rails 8, Rack 3, and Ruby 3.3 with an HTML over the Wire frontend approach.

1Password chose Rails for Kolide because of the framework's security-focused defaults and built-in protections, including CSP DSL, attribute-level database encryption, and signed IDs. The framework's approach to making secure development practices the default path aligns with 1Password's security-first mission. As Extended Access Management has exceeded expectations since the acquisition, 1Password has committed to expanding their Rails usage and became a core member of the Rails Foundation, with leadership joining the foundation's board of directors.

Doximity

Doximity is the largest digital platform for U.S. medical professionals, serving over 2 million healthcare professionals including 80% of U.S. doctors, 90% of graduating medical students, and 60% of nurse practitioners and physician assistants. As of March 31, 2024, 17 of the top 20 hospitals use their enterprise platforms. The company provides communication, workflow, and telehealth tools, with their Doximity Dialer product supporting 63 million telehealth visits between April 2020 and March 2021.

Doximity operates a 15-year-old Rails monolith that started on Rails 2.3.5 and now runs on Rails 7. The application has accumulated over 30,000 commits from hundreds of contributors and supports 45+ applications. Their development team of over 150 developers deploys 80+ times per day using Rails' MVC architecture and convention-over-configuration approach for efficient onboarding and scaling.

Doximity chose Rails for rapid prototyping and iteration capabilities that allowed their small initial team to build and test features quickly. The framework's built-in tools like Active Job handle background processing, while Rails console enables debugging in staging and production environments. During the pandemic, they scaled their Dialer team from 3 to 16 engineers in weeks to meet increased demand. Rails' polymorphism features and tools like Large Hadron Migrator enable zero-downtime migrations on databases with hundreds of millions of rows, allowing continuous evolution without major rewrites.

Shopify

Shopify is the “biggest Rails app in the world.” It’s a global e-commerce platform that enables millions of merchants to create full websites and online stores. 

According to their own blog post from 2021, Shopify runs on a Rails monolith called Shopify Core that uses a podded architecture for horizontal scaling. This architecture splits the database into subsets, with each pod containing a distinct portion of shops and running Shopify independently. Every table in the podded database connects to a shop, allowing the platform to process incoming HTTP requests, background jobs, and asynchronous events while preventing data leaks between different merchants' stores. This approach enables Shopify to scale horizontally without the complexity of full microservices architecture.

Shopify chose Rails for its convention-over-configuration philosophy, which helps maintain code quality across their large developer organization. They implement domain-driven design within their monolith, splitting code into domains while maintaining a shared database structure. The company has developed custom tooling and automation around Rails, including a translation platform that handles creation and publication of translations through git, and a maintenance task system built over Active Job that works with their podded infrastructure. Rather than enforcing database relationships at the schema level, Shopify enforces foreign keys only through ActiveRecord models, and they use structure.sql files instead of running extensive historical migrations to maintain deployment efficiency.

Gusto

Gusto is a provider of HR, payroll, and benefits solutions that was founded in 2011 as ZenPayroll and rebranded in 2015 when they expanded beyond payroll services. The company has grown to approximately 3,000 employees with hundreds of Rails developers on their engineering teams.

Gusto's Rails infrastructure consists of two monoliths that handle their core business operations. They have adopted packwerk for gradual modularization, allowing them to divide their codebase into domain-based packages while maintaining encapsulation through public interfaces. This approach enables them to manage complexity within their large monolithic applications without requiring a complete architectural overhaul.

Gusto chose Rails as their foundation and has committed to the framework's long-term success by becoming a Contributing member of the Rails Foundation. They actively contribute to the Rails ecosystem through their rubyatscale tooling and maintain several open source projects. Their Head of Security maintains Brakeman, a static analysis security tool used within Rails applications for security auditing. The company supports the broader Ruby community by sponsoring individual open source contributors, Ruby user groups like Boulder Ruby Group, and hosting developer events across their Denver, New York City, and San Francisco offices.

Judge.me

Judge.me is a product reviews platform founded in 2015 that helps e-commerce merchants collect and manage customer feedback. The company supports more than 500,000 e-commerce shops across 140+ countries, processing over 70 million orders monthly and generating more than 2 million verified buyer reviews each month.

Judge.me operates on a Rails monolith that has powered their platform since day one and continues to scale with their global growth. With a lean engineering team of just over 10 people, the company relies on Rails' developer-friendly characteristics and rich ecosystem to rapidly build and maintain features while handling high traffic volumes. This approach enables them to stay competitive in the fast-moving e-commerce tools market while maintaining system efficiency.

Judge.me chose Rails for its productivity benefits and has remained committed to the framework for 10 years since the company's founding. The framework's philosophy and ecosystem align with their development approach, allowing their small team to manage a platform serving hundreds of thousands of merchants globally. In 2025, Judge.me became a Core member of the Rails Foundation, demonstrating their long-term commitment to the framework. The company actively supports the Rails community through sponsorship of London's Rails meetup, reflecting their investment in the ecosystem that powers their infrastructure.

Is Ruby on Rails Still Being Improved in 2025?

Ruby on Rails isn't just keeping up with modern web development, but constantly innovating. Released in 2024, Rails 8.0 solved real problems developers face today while maintaining the framework's core philosophy of developer happiness and productivity. Improvements are made everyday, with multiple GitHub commits per day and weekly updates about issue fixes on the Rails blog.

Rails 8 comes preconfigured with Kamal 2 for deploying your application anywhere, whether to a cloud VM or your own hardware. Kamal takes a fresh Linux box and turns it into an application or accessory server with just a single "kamal setup" command. This represents a shift toward the "No PaaS Required" philosophy, enabling developers to deploy production-ready applications in under two minutes.

The framework's new Solid Cable, Solid Cache, and Solid Queue simplify infrastructure requirements. They allow applications to run efficiently on SQLite alone while maintaining enterprise-grade performance.

Rails enjoys unprecedented industry support. The Rails Foundation keeps expanding with new companies, signalling a renewed business interest in the future of the framework.

Rails continues to attract developers because it solves the fundamental challenge of web development: enabling teams to build and scale ambitious applications rapidly while maintaining code quality and developer satisfaction. Twenty years after its creation, Rails isn't just surviving, it's setting a unique standard for what modern web frameworks could be.

Should You Use Ruby on Rails in 2025?

Rails remains a reliable and capable choice for web development, backed by continuous performance improvements that make it faster and more efficient than ever. Its compatibility with modern tools and front-end technologies allows development teams to seamlessly integrate Rails with their favorite tools.

This framework has proven time and again that it can meet diverse business needs. Companies stick with Rails because of its stability, strong community, and robust ecosystem. Rails may not be as flashy as the newest JS frameworks, but its combination of productivity, flexibility, and scalability keeps it a practical choice for businesses that value reliability and long-term support.