Key considerations when selecting technologies for your startup project.
Why Your Tech Stack Matters
For startups, choosing the right technology stack is a decision that echoes through every phase of growth. Your tech stack affects how quickly you can ship your MVP, how easily you can hire developers, how much your infrastructure costs, and how smoothly you can scale when growth arrives. A poor choice does not always reveal itself immediately—it often manifests months later as slow development velocity, difficulty finding qualified engineers, or an architecture that buckles under real user load. The goal is not to pick the most cutting-edge technologies but to select a combination that balances developer productivity, ecosystem maturity, hiring availability, and long-term scalability. This article walks through the key decisions and our recommendations based on years of building products for startups.
Frontend Choices: React vs Vue vs Angular
On the frontend, React remains the dominant choice for startups in 2026, and for good reason. Its massive ecosystem, extensive third-party library support, and enormous talent pool make it the safest bet for most projects. Next.js has become the de facto React framework, providing server-side rendering, static site generation, API routes, and an excellent developer experience out of the box. Vue.js is an excellent alternative if your team prefers a more opinionated framework with a gentler learning curve—Nuxt.js provides similar capabilities to Next.js in the Vue ecosystem. Angular is best suited for large enterprise applications with complex forms and strict architectural requirements, but its steeper learning curve and heavier footprint make it less ideal for fast-moving startups. For most startups, we recommend React with Next.js as the starting point.
Backend Choices: Node.js vs Python vs Go
Your backend technology should align with your team's expertise and your application's requirements. Node.js with TypeScript, particularly using frameworks like NestJS or Fastify, is our most frequent recommendation for startups. It allows full-stack JavaScript/TypeScript development, which simplifies hiring and enables code sharing between frontend and backend. Python with Django or FastAPI is excellent for data-heavy applications, machine learning integrations, or teams with strong Python expertise. Go is the right choice when raw performance and low resource consumption are critical—it excels at building high-throughput APIs and concurrent systems. For most web applications and SaaS products, Node.js with TypeScript provides the best balance of productivity, performance, and hiring ease.
Database: PostgreSQL vs MongoDB vs Both
Database selection is often over-complicated. PostgreSQL should be your default choice—it is a battle-tested, feature-rich relational database that handles structured data, JSON documents, full-text search, and even geospatial queries. With tools like Prisma or Drizzle as your ORM, PostgreSQL provides an excellent developer experience. MongoDB makes sense when your data is genuinely unstructured or semi-structured, and your access patterns are primarily document-oriented. In practice, many startups benefit from using PostgreSQL as their primary database and adding Redis for caching and session management. Avoid the trap of choosing MongoDB simply because it feels easier to get started with—the flexibility of schemaless documents often becomes a liability as your application grows and data integrity becomes important.
Mobile Development: React Native vs Flutter vs Native
If your startup needs a mobile application, the build-vs-buy and cross-platform-vs-native decisions are significant. React Native is our top recommendation for most startups because it shares the React mental model with your web frontend, enables significant code reuse, and has a mature ecosystem with libraries like Expo simplifying the development workflow. Flutter offers excellent performance and a polished UI framework, but it uses Dart—a language your team likely does not know—which means additional hiring and training costs. Native development with Swift for iOS and Kotlin for Android delivers the best performance and platform integration but doubles your development and maintenance effort. For startups that need to move fast and reach both platforms, React Native with Expo provides the best trade-off between speed and quality.
Cloud and Hosting: AWS vs Vercel vs Railway
Where you host your application significantly impacts both developer experience and operational costs. Vercel is the natural home for Next.js applications, offering zero-config deployments, automatic previews for pull requests, edge functions, and generous free tiers. For backend services, Railway provides a modern PaaS experience that makes deploying databases, APIs, and background workers straightforward without requiring deep DevOps knowledge. AWS offers unmatched breadth and scalability but comes with significant complexity—it is best suited for teams with dedicated infrastructure engineers or applications that need specific AWS services. For most early-stage startups, we recommend Vercel for the frontend and Railway or Render for backend services, migrating to AWS only when specific requirements demand it.
The Boring Technology Principle
One of the most valuable pieces of advice for startup CTOs comes from Dan McKinley's essay "Choose Boring Technology." The core idea is that every technology choice carries an innovation token—a limited budget of complexity that your team can absorb. Spend those tokens on the things that make your product unique, not on your infrastructure. Using PostgreSQL instead of the newest distributed database, deploying to a managed platform instead of running Kubernetes, choosing REST over GraphQL when your data fetching is straightforward—these boring choices free up your team's cognitive capacity for the problems that actually differentiate your product. Exciting technology is appealing, but shipping features that customers value is what keeps a startup alive.
Our Recommended Starter Stack
Based on our experience building products for dozens of startups, here is the stack we recommend as a starting point for most web applications and SaaS products: Next.js with TypeScript on the frontend, NestJS with TypeScript on the backend, PostgreSQL as the primary database with Redis for caching, Prisma as the ORM, Vercel for frontend hosting, Railway for backend hosting, and GitHub Actions for CI/CD. This stack provides a consistent TypeScript experience across the entire codebase, excellent developer tooling, straightforward deployment, and a clear upgrade path as your product scales. Of course, every project has unique requirements—if you are building a real-time collaboration tool, a machine learning product, or a high-frequency trading platform, different choices may be appropriate. The key is to start with proven, well-supported technologies and deviate only when your specific needs demand it.