It can be challenging to know how to create things with technology—there are so many tools! A tech stack refers to a collection of tools used to accomplish a broad or specific purpose. In this article, we'll call that purpose (like building a website or running an app) a solution.
Generally, a full tech stack, which may occasionally be called a 'solutions stack,' consists of:
If that seems intimidating, don't panic. The key terms will all be explained below, along with examples of common stacks.
The 'front-end' of a stack is a collision of metaphors. Front-end refers historically to the 'front of house' parts of a business. The elements of the company that deal directly with the public, like serving staff at a restaurant.
In the stack metaphor, that kind of functionality would live at the 'top' of the stack. In any case, front-end tools focus on the part of whatever is being built (a product, service, website, etc.) that a human being interacts with, known as the User Interface (UI). On a website, front-end tools would be the design tools used to make web pages.
Back-end tools refer to components that enable the business to function. In the restaurant analogy, this would be the kitchen staff, management, and anyone else who works behind the scenes to make sure customers get their meal.
Back-end tools in a website stack might include a Content Management System (CMS). This system is not immediately visible to end-users (like those reading a newspaper's website), but might be visible to non-technical business users (such as journalists, who must upload their finished writing in order for it to be published as an article to the site).
This Content Management System makes the website work; in this sense, back-end tools can be thought of as an infrastructure layer.
Development teams begin by practicing computational thinking—converting complex problems into unambiguous instructions for a machine. Programmers convert these instructions into machine-readable steps in programming languages (a bridge between how programmers think and how machines process instructions, which is an unreadable set of ones and zeroes).
Either they create something entirely custom or re-use patterns and frameworks made by others to perform standard functions. The collection of these steps and functions makes up what is known as the source code of a program.
Data is the raw material that we turn into useful information through our solutions. In the newspaper website example, there are several data sets like news stories, a library of images, logs of activity of website visitors, and comments left by users.
Databases are a specific kind of tool that organizes data into records and fields. A record for a given news story might have several fields, like its headline, sub-heading, and body text.
Sometimes data is not stored inside the solution's stack but is pulled in or 'streamed' from outside sources. This is often accomplished via an API, one of the most crucial building blocks of digital value.
API stands for Application Program Interface, a standardized way to pass data and commands between various systems to help them work together stably and securely. APIs enable software developers to connect multiple apps and devices without reinventing standard functions. APIs provide the lowest common denominator between systems, allowing for both human-to-machine and machine-to-machine interactions.
You can learn more about APIs in our guidebook on the topic.
Explore some common tools for different stack types below. This is not an exhaustive list and may not even cover all common components per stack, but it should give a sense of the kinds of tools to expect in a given area.
Some tools listed are generic tool types, and others are specific tools.
Tools Notice:
Specific tools may show the company's tagline for their offering or our paraphrased version for clarity. Specific tools listed may link to their own website, which is outside our control. Causeit, Inc., the creator of this Digital Fluency Guide, does not receive any sponsorship money or affiliate revenue from any listed company. However, members of the Causeit team may own stock in publicly-traded companies shown here, either directly or via ETFs/mutual funds/other assets. Causeit also does not represent any of these companies or make statements on their behalf. The referenced companies/tools are shown primarily as examples of commonly discussed solutions in the marketplace and development communities and are not rigorously ranked or scientifically selected.
A general productivity stack contains desktop and mobile operating systems, file storage, and office software. The exact contents of productivity stacks vary based on the nature of the work to be performed but are generally focused on the functions used to create intellectual outputs like documents and plans.
Connect everything. Achieve anything.Accelerate work and unlock potential with powerful apps that connect your data, workflows and teams.
Navigate a connected world.
The apps you love.From a place you can trust.
Use Google Docs to create, and collaborate on online documents. Edit together with secure sharing in real-time and from any device.
Collaboration stacks comprise tools and datasets that enable teams to work together, including communication and project management.
From the small stuff to the big picture, Asana organizes work so teams know what to do, why it matters, and how to get it done.
Spend less time hunting things down and more time getting things done. Organize your work, create documents, and discuss everything in one place.
Friendly and intuitive collaboration for business teams and their projects, built for cross-team coordination and breaking down silos.
Stay organized, focused, and in charge. Tackle anything from small projects to large initiatives. You may or may not be a project manager, but now you can be the boss of any project with a powerful, easy-to-use app.
Make amazing things happen together at home, work, and school.
The online collaborative whiteboard platform to bring teams together, anytime, anywhere.
Slack is your digital HQ Transform the way you work with one place for everyone and everything you need to get stuff done.
Collaborate and get more done. Trello boards enable your team to organize projects in a fun, flexible, and visual way.
The all-in-one business communication platform from Meta that securely combines chat, video, groups and your intranet with the work tools you already use every day. Think Facebook, but for your company.
Community and marketing stacks contain tools for a company to engage with its customers, user communities, and other stakeholders. They are also related to web stacks, among others
Discover, engage and convert your most valuable customers — all from one flexible go-to-market foundation.
Social is your superpower. Easily manage all your social media and get results with Hootsuite.
The modern customer communications platform that unifies every aspect of the customer journey, from conversion to engagement to support.
We build bridges between companies and customers.
Deliver cross-channel personalized experiences at every step of the customer lifecycle with campaign management.
HR & People stacks are focused on the logistics of human 'resources' in companies and can include work scheduling software, coaching/learning & development tools, and performance review functions. They parallel finance and operations stacks, especially for payroll and workforce budgeting functions.
Holistic performance and engagement solutions for today's HR leaders
Changing the world through learning: empower lifelong learners and career growth to drive innovation at your company.
As the rate of change accelerates, our platform keeps you agile. From configurable security to extensible frameworks, to embedded machine learning, we help you adapt at the speed of business.
Web stacks power websites and parts of web apps. They include design tools, content management systems, embedding tools to help place third-party content like YouTube videos, and servers to facilitate fast access to content from many places.
Build beautiful sites for any browser or device. Quickly create and publish web pages almost anywhere with web design software that supports HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and more.
Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a simple mechanism for adding style (e.g., fonts, colors, spacing) to Web documents.
Craft empowers the entire creative process.
Understand how users behave on your site, what they need, and how they feel, fast.
Build better products: powerful, self-serve product analytics to help you convert, engage, and retain more users.
Node.js is designed to build scalable network applications.
PHP is a popular general-purpose scripting language that is especially suited to web development.Fast, flexible and pragmatic, PHP powers everything from your blog to the most popular websites in the world.
The site you want — without the dev time: your website should be a marketing asset, not an engineering challenge.
Weglot helps online businesses grow by turning their website multilingual in minutes.
Strategy and innovation stacks are intended to help leaders make critical decisions and align the rest of the organization without constraining autonomy. Strategy and innovation stacks may connect to ideation tools, business planning and team alignment tools, trendcasting and monitoring functions, and other intra- and entrepreneurial tools.
They may overlap or be contained within enterprise resource planning solutions (ERPs) and many other stacks in the organization but are distinct due to the 'elevation' at which they operate.
Connect everything. Achieve anything.Accelerate work and unlock potential with powerful apps that connect your data, workflows and teams.
The all-in-one market intelligence platform to discover, harvest and share insights.
Insights to drive stronger performance
IdeaScale is an innovation management solution that links organizations to people with ideas. Collaborative innovation can change the world—not just your business. Find ideas to aid in digital transformation, to face the age of automation, and to fight climate change, inequality and beyond. Connect to the ideas that matter and start co-creating the future.
Connect business and technology teams to align strategy with outcomes at enterprise scale.
Drive On-Strategy Delivery at Speed: Focus on the investments that matter. Empower your teams to do their best work.
Official Measure of the Digital WorldTry it now. Similarweb is the fastest, easiest way to discover what’s really happening online.
Join the 6M+ employees at 500+ enterprise companies that are using Spigit to bring the power of collective intelligence to every business challenge.
Capture relevant information, curate deeper insights, and share them with ease. All-in-one powerful platform.
Product and user experience stacks are essential for digital companies. Common tools within them help manage user journeys and customer experience, and connect to business or technology stakeholders. They can connect with nearly all other stacks in a company or may exist as a function across several stacks.
Design the incredible. Lifelike in every sense. Create stunningly real UI/UX designs and stand out from the rest.
Product management made easy with a flexible platform that helps you manage strategy, understand user needs, prioritize, and align your teams around clear roadmaps.
Give your teams self-service product data to understand your users, drive conversions, and increase engagement, growth and revenue.
Figma connects everyone in the design process so teams can deliver better products, faster.
Connect business and technology teams to align strategy with outcomes at enterprise scale.
Build better products: powerful, self-serve product analytics to help you convert, engage, and retain more users.
Feedback boards your users will love. Nolt is a beautiful, collaborative place for all your user requests.
Boost Your Marketing with Interactive Content: Use Outgrow’s simple, no-code tools to acquire qualified leads.
Software that makes your software better: helping you deliver better product experiences for happier and more productive users.
ProductPlan is a roadmap platform that aligns your team so you can build what matters.
Productboard helps product managers understand what customers need, prioritize what to build next, and rally everyone around the roadmap.
Customer & user feedback software: survey visitors on your website or app with Qualaroo Nudges™.
Deliver cross-channel personalized experiences at every step of the customer lifecycle with campaign management.
Sketch gives you all the tools you need for a truly collaborative design process. From early ideas to pixel-perfect artwork, playable prototypes and developer handoff. It all starts here.
Heap analyzes your complete dataset to quickly illuminate hidden insights so you can act with confidence. With Heap you can see and understand every single thing your users do.
Data stacks support various stages of the data supply chain. Advanced data stacks are connected to artificial intelligence and machine learning stacks.
Data-Driven. People Powered.With Analytics for All, anyone can solve problems by turning data into breakthrough insights.
Add cognitive capabilities to apps with APIs and AI services. Azure Cognitive Services bring AI within reach of every developer and data scientist.
Search your way. Analyze at scale.
Python is a programming language that lets you work more quickly and integrate your systems more effectively.You can learn to use Python and see almost immediate gains in productivity and lower maintenance costs.
R is a language and environment for statistical computing and graphics.
The Data Platform for the Hybrid WorldGo from visibility to action, fast and at scale — for security, observability and beyond.
Heap analyzes your complete dataset to quickly illuminate hidden insights so you can act with confidence. With Heap you can see and understand every single thing your users do.
You can read more about Development Operations and associated tools in Introduction to DevOps.
Achieve your goals with the freedom and flexibility to build, manage, and deploy your applications anywhere. Use your preferred languages, frameworks, and infrastructure—even your own datacenter and other clouds—to solve challenges large and small.
Overcome challenges at every stage of remote engineering and learn how Microsoft engineering teams have enabled remote development.
Collaborate on code with inline comments and pull requests. Manage and share your Git repositories to build and ship software, as a team.
Cloudflare is designed to run every service on every server in every data center across our global network. It also gives your developers a flexible, Internet-scale platform to deploy serverless code instantly across the globe.
Modern monitoring & security: see inside any stack, any app, at any scale, anywhere.
Accelerate how you build, share, and run modern applications.
Millions of developers and companies build, ship, and maintain their software on GitHub—the largest and most advanced development platform in the world.
From planning to production, bring teams together in one application. Ship secure code faster, deploy to any cloud, and drive business results.
Kubernetes, also known as K8s, is an open-source system for automating deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications.
Build, run, manage and secure your apps across clouds with VMware Cross-Cloud™ services.
Finance and operations stacks support the smooth function of companies' essential logistics. Depending on the industry and size of a firm, they vary considerably. Commonly they include accounting software, contract management tools, and other workflow and compliance functions.
From the small stuff to the big picture, Asana organizes work so teams know what to do, why it matters, and how to get it done.
Corporate Cards. Reimbursments. Receipt Scanning. One App, All Free.
Adapt and innovate with a hyperconnected business—give everyone the insights and freedom to thrive by connecting your data, processes, and teams with intelligent business applications.
Drive On-Strategy Delivery at Speed: Focus on the investments that matter. Empower your teams to do their best work.
Discover the innovations your business can leverage today to become a more resilient, sustainable, and intelligent enterprise.
Business tools and advice from real experts
We build bridges between companies and customers.
Payments Infrastructure for the Internet
As the rate of change accelerates, our platform keeps you agile. From configurable security to extensible frameworks, to embedded machine learning, we help you adapt at the speed of business.
Zendesk makes customer service better. We build software to meet customer needs, set your team up for success, and keep your business in sync.
When selecting a tech stack (or its components), it's important to consider any tradeoffs or tensions among the following:
While stacks are often oriented around verticals (like finance or marketing within a company), some functions make more sense if they are 'horizontal.' Common horizontal functions include:
To dive deeper into a set of use cases for horizontal (or aggregation) strategies across stacks, you can read Scott Brinker's quick article "Matrixed Tech Stacks with Both Horizontal and Vertical Aggregation Platforms."
Components of a tech stack are sometimes interchangeable.
For example, a global company might have a website stack that is the same in most countries, apart from having regional social media plugins (Korean sites might use Kakaotalk, Chinese sites Weibo, and US sites Facebook).
Elsewhere, one part of a company may prefer a third-party CRM like Salesforce while another department has a custom-built solution they don't want to change. Smart technology leaders anticipate a need for this interchangeability and interoperability in their architecture of stacks and the design of their components.
A lot is said about platforms in the technology world, as well as platform business models and multi-sided platforms. Stacks refer to the technological components of these platforms.
For example, a multi-sided platform like Amazon may have datasets and infrastructure reflected in one or more stacks. These stacks also provide functionality for the marketplace and community elements of Amazon. Generally, a platform has multiple stacks within it, providing various smaller solutions that collectively make up a larger ecosystem.
A toolchain is a set of tools used together, sometimes in sequence. For example, when checking software functionality, developers may use a collection of tools in a 'testing toolchain.'
Toolchains generally do not comprise all of the functions needed for a solution to work. Sometimes, toolchains perform a horizontal function across several stacks, such as checking application security.
In the past, it was quite common for a stack to be one giant program where all functions were nearly inseparable. Over time, stack thinking emerged to help technologists accommodate the need for multiple software and hardware providers, and the need for certain components to be added—or removed—in the future.
You can read more about the shifting role of IT departments in our guide to the changing nature of IT.
Components in the stack can sometimes be thought of as a 'service,' an ongoing function provided by another part of the organization or even a different company.
For example, a company may have many different tech stacks for different departments, but provide one consistent login (or 'authentication') system for all users to simplify and secure that step.
Microservices go even further and provide sub-sets of a complete service. For example, a microservice might provide the 'captcha' tool designed to trick hackers' machines as they attempt to log in to human systems.
Sometimes, stacks encompass entire data supply chains. More commonly, the data supply chain affecting a particular user, function, or dataset passes through multiple stacks. Additionally, there are stacks specific to data processing and management.
Confused? Fair enough. It's easier to think of the relationship between data and stacks when thinking of data as water that moves in lakes and streams rather than files in a file cabinet. You can read more about data, including analysis, machine learning, and AI, in the data guidebook.
