Ask HN: Would you still choose Ruby on Rails for a startup in 2025?

Hacker News Discussion ↗

Overall sentiment on Rails for 2025 startups

  • Many would still choose Rails, especially for early-stage, small teams or solo founders.
  • Others prefer Next.js/TypeScript, Django, Laravel, Go, or .NET, often driven by existing skills or hiring concerns.
  • Several argue the tech stack rarely determines startup success; familiarity and speed of execution matter more.

Speed, productivity, and “boring tech”

  • Strong consensus that Rails is extremely productive: “batteries included” (auth, jobs, mailing, admin-ish features, Hotwire, etc.) lets teams focus on business logic.
  • Compared to Go or bare Node/Express, Rails reduces boilerplate (migrations, job queues, scaffolding) and is said to accelerate MVPs dramatically, especially combined with LLM-based code assistants.
  • Some group Rails with other “boring, battle-tested” stacks (Django, Laravel, Symfony) that are favored for reliability over novelty.

Maintainability, “magic,” and long-term cost

  • Critics point to heavy metaprogramming and “magic” (e.g., invisible bindings, callbacks, DSLs) that can make debugging and refactoring difficult, especially when developers over-optimize for DRY.
  • Some report legacy Rails apps full of hard-to-diagnose bugs or stuck on old versions.
  • Others counter that vanilla Rails upgrades are manageable; problems usually come from poor architecture or 3rd‑party libraries, not the framework itself. Community norms have shifted away from clever metaprogramming toward clearer code.

Performance and scaling

  • Rails is acknowledged as slower than Go/Rust and similar to or slightly faster than Python, but many argue most web apps are I/O-bound and can scale Rails with hardware and database tuning.
  • Examples of long-lived, high-traffic Rails monoliths suggest practical scalability; performance issues are said to concentrate at the database layer.
  • Some still prefer Go/Rust/Elixir for infrastructure, extreme performance, or concurrency-heavy workloads.

Ecosystem, hiring, and community

  • Rails benefits from a mature ecosystem (gems, Rack, job systems, deployment tools like Kamal) and good documentation.
  • Several commenters say hiring experienced Ruby/Rails developers is now harder than for Node/Python/PHP, and worry this may worsen.
  • Others downplay this, saying good generalists can learn Rails quickly.

Governance, leadership, and politics

  • A visible minority is wary of the framework’s de facto leader and sponsoring company, citing controversial public views and centralized influence (e.g., decisions about TypeScript support).
  • Some see this as a meaningful reason not to adopt Rails; others either ignore it or consider the community and broader maintainer set sufficient to mitigate individual influence.

When not to choose Rails

  • Advised against when:
    • You already have deep expertise in another suitable stack.
    • You need tight integration with Python-heavy ML stacks.
    • You expect very high performance/infra demands better served by Go/Rust/Elixir.
    • Hiring in your region for Ruby is clearly difficult.