33 front-end development tools developers use in 2024 

Today more than ever, we have choices. Some applications help heal the plants, we meet future partners through dating apps, we have AI that "does the work for us" and so on. Front-end development tools are no exception to this extensive range of options. The landscape is richer and more sophisticated than ever. Developers invest in premium tools to enhance workflows, boost productivity, and deliver advanced user experiences.

So, what are the must-have tools for front-end developers? If, you want to know which tools you should add to your toolbox, keep reading.

To put it simply, everything you see on the website buttons, links, headers, and footer animation is part of front-end development.

To accomplish that, front-end developers use a wide spectrum of computer languages, tools, and frameworks to bring a website’s design and functionality to life. Some of the technologies are:

Here are some key statistics and trends in front-end development tools for 2024, backed by data from recent reports:

According to Netlify's 2023 State of Web Development, Astro is showing the highest growth in usage and satisfaction, with weekly downloads on NPM reaching 197,435.

According to a recent W3Tech survey, 98.9% of all websites use JavaScript as a programming language.

Considering all these trends let’s see which development tools are must-haves.

Sit back, enjoy, and learn, because I have prepared the ultimate list of web development tools by categories that are key to the entire software development ecosystem.

Frameworks offer a collection of files that map out for styling and structuring websites. With pre-built components such as navigation menus, buttons, and typography, there is no need to code those elements from ground zero.

I need to start with the most popular one. React, an open-source JavaScript is used to create user interfaces. Because of the features it offers, it excels at web development, making it one of the fastest libraries out there.

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Vue.js is a declarative and component-based programming style built on top of the standards of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. This method encourages an organized and modular code structure, which makes it easier to design UIs.

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Angular is ideal for creating dynamic web applications because it extends static HTML to dynamic HTML subsequently making it more convenient for you to build dynamic and rich websites.

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Bootstrap's focus is on responsive and mobile-first websites. It provides pre-built HTML, CSS, and JavaScript design components to help developers in building user interfaces.

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jQuery simplifies HTML document traversal, event handling, and animation.

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NextJS is used to create server-rendered React apps and webpages. It offers code splitting, automatic server-side rendering, and support for static exports out of the box. NextJs's versatility is further enhanced by its support for API routes and static site generation.

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A utility-first CSS framework that provides low-level utility classes to build custom designs directly in your markup.

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Check out our code starters if you want to see how these frameworks work together.

While code editors give you fast access to edits and coding, IDEs offer features such as debugging and testing for a variety of development tasks.

Sublime Text is one of the most popular code editors because supports various programming and markup languages and provides features like syntax highlighting, auto-completion, multiple selections, and a powerful command palette.

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With WebStorm, you can get started coding JavaScript and TypeScript right away. It provides better performance when dealing with large codebases.

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Komodo Edit is a lightweight yet versatile text for dynamic programming languages such as Python, PHP, Ruby, and JavaScript.

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Package managers are important tools for automating the process of installing, updating, customizing, and managing software libraries or packages within a software project.

The Node package manager for JavaScript. NPM lets you publish, discover, install, and develop node programs, as well as discover code packages that you can reassemble according to your needs.

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Designed as an NPM alternative, Yarn focuses on speed, reliability, and security.

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APT is mainly used to install, remove, and upgrade packages on Debian-based Linux Distribution. I. Apt is the front-end of the dpkg package manager and the file extension is .deb. Apt resolves dependencies automatically.

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Design tools create stylish and intuitive UI. Developers use them for the implementation of design elements.

Figma is a cloud-based design tool that allows collaboration between designers to create UIs for mobile and web applications.

Sketch is a vector graphics editor for macOS primarily used for UI and UX design of websites and mobile apps.

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The world's largest collection of free animations can be found at LottieFiles, including thousands of unique designs that are suitable for both personal and commercial use. You can also change the color, height, width, animation speed, and so on to match the theme of your website.

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This is an open-source library of font families that includes an interactive web directory for browsing the library, and APIs for using the fonts via CSS and Android. The fonts are available in multiple weights, styles, and scripts and you can find everything you need to improve typography.

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This color palette generator allows you to go through all the existing color palettes and search for palettes based on color, topic, and style. Coolors also allow you to generate new palettes if the existing ones don't suit your design.

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It is possible to work concurrently with other members of your team on a project using VCSs, which provide a structured mechanism for collaborative coding. These are the most popular VCS tools:

Git collaborates with other developers on a project and tracks code changes. It enables you to successfully track updates made over time to the code repository by the developers.

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On the other hand, GitHub is an internet-based platform that allows the hosting and sharing of Git repositories. It is the biggest git repository platform with many incredible features that let developers work together and host their code online.

File and directory changes can be monitored over time using Apache Subversion, a centralized VCS. With its tools, numerous developers can work on a project at once through collaborative software development.

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Using responsive design tools, you can develop and test web applications that adjust to various screen sizes and devices. There are a couple of them that you should consider:

Chrome DevTools is a set of debugging tools included in the Chrome browser. It enables you to analyze, troubleshoot, and alter your websites quickly. It enables you to inspect and update HTML components and CSS properties in real-time, monitor network requests, analyze performance, and check local storage.

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Responsively is an open-source browser extension that allows you to visualize and interact with your websites across multiple device viewports.

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Viewport Resizer is a browser-based tool that enables testing and previewing how a website or web application responds to different viewport sizes, such as smartphones, tablets, and desktops.

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These tools provide advanced features such as variables, mixins, and nested rules, which make stylesheets more maintainable and modular. This improves code organization, and reuse, and minimizes redundancy.

Sass, Less, and Stylus extend CSS by adding variables, nesting mixins, and other features. It's an excellent solution for organizing huge and complex stylesheets.

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Grunt is a JavaScript runner used to automate repetitive activities. It is useful for automating routine processes such as minification, compilation, unit testing, and linting. Grunt provides over 6k different plugins for installing and automating specific tasks with minimal effort.

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Lighthouse is a performance optimization tool that provides audits for performance, accessibility, progressive web apps, SEO, and more. Lighthouse enables you to optimize UX by offering insights into resource utilization, loading times, and rendering processes.

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Postman is an API platform for building and using APIs. It simplifies each step of the API lifecycle and streamlines collaboration.

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ESLint is a static code analysis tool that detects problematic patterns in JavaScript code and guarantees compliance with coding standards and best practices.

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Often considered as a headless CMS, Webflow is actually a low-code website builder that with its drag-and-drop feature helps build responsive websites without coding. It generates clean, semantic HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

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Find more about Webflow pricing plans: Is Webflow too expensive

Speaking about headless CMS, let’s see its role in the development process.

Headless CMS enables a frontend agnostic approach because it decouples content management from content presentation, providing a bunch of benefits that streamline development. Here's how a headless CMS can significantly help front-end developers in their work.

A headless CMS delivers content using APIs, often RESTful or GraphQL, allowing front-end developers to fetch material dynamically. This strategy makes it easier to integrate content into apps and helps developers structure their data retrieval more efficiently.

For example, as a frontend developer, you can use a GraphQL query to fetch specific fields from multiple content types in a single request, optimizing the application's performance and reducing the number of network calls.

With a headless CMS, you are not tied to any specific frontend framework or technology. You can use the tools and libraries they prefer or that are best suited to the project. Whether you React, Vue.js, Angular, or even a static site generator like Gatsby, the headless CMS can provide content via APIs that integrate with any of these tools.

Learn more:

Content updates can be made independently of the frontend codebase. Once content is updated in the CMS, it is instantly available through the API, allowing for real-time content management without redeploying the front-end application.

A headless CMS fits well with modern frontend development practices such as a composable architecture. Developers can build reusable components that fetch and display content, making the codebase more modular and maintainable.

Just like Figma, a headless CMS comes with roles and permissions that facilitate collaboration between developers, content creators, and marketers. This segregation of duties allows each team to work more efficiently in their areas of expertise.

You have an ultimate list of tools, the only thing left to do is to choose your tech stack. I won’t tell you which one to use, I will just list the tools you need so you can do your work in the best possible way. Here’s the list of tools:

And last, but not least, consider BCMS headless CMS, as a collaborative front-end CMS platform with integrated UI development and content modeling tools. Create, share, and improve your code seamlessly to get further, faster, and more modern websites and app development.