Why Ruby on Rails is still the right choice in 2026

Every few months, another piece asks whether Ruby on Rails is dead. The reasoning is always the same: fewer GitHub stars than the latest JavaScript framework, a few spots lost in the Stack Overflow survey, conclusion drawn.

I've been reading these pieces for most of my career. Meanwhile, GitHub runs on Rails. So does Shopify, and they process more transactions on a single Black Friday than most webshops do in an entire year. Basecamp, Zendesk, GitLab: all Rails. These are companies with the resources to rebuild in any technology they want. They don't, and that's a deliberate choice made anew every year.

Writing Rails off based on hipeness confuses popularity with fitness for purpose.

Why those conventions work

Rails has a strong opinion about how you build an application: where your code lives, how database migrations work, what routes look like. Convention over configuration, it's called. New developers sometimes find that condescending. Until they join a project they didn't start themselves and immediately find their way around. No debates about folder structure, no week spent configuring things before the first page renders.

For whoever pays the invoices, what matters most is this: new hires are up to speed within days, five-year-old code stays readable, and a change costs days instead of weeks.

Rails 8

Rails 8 shipped at the end of 2024. To me, it's the most interesting release in years, because it tackles an old pain point: peripheral infrastructure. A serious Rails application used to quickly need Redis for caching, Sidekiq for background jobs, and a solid deployment setup around all of it.

Rails 8 pulls that in-house. Solid Queue runs background jobs directly on your database. Solid Cache does the same for caching. Kamal 2 deploys with zero downtime to plain servers, without Kubernetes and without locking you into a single cloud provider.

Fewer moving parts means fewer things breaking at three in the morning. And a hosting bill that's noticeably lower.

Who is Rails the right choice for?

Rails fits best with web applications and SaaS products where you want to adjust quickly based on user feedback. If you already have a Rails application in-house, you rarely need to rewrite it: modernizing is almost always cheaper and less risky. And when it comes to getting a lot done with a small team, little else comes close to Rails.

Is Rails always the answer? No. For a mobile app or a purely static site, there are better options, and we'll say so plainly.

At Refaktory, we've been building and maintaining Rails applications for more than ten years, for Belgian and Dutch companies, for government bodies, and for international organizations. Not sure whether Rails fits your project? Come talk to us. You'll get an honest verdict, even if that verdict is "no Rails."

Frequently asked questions

Is Ruby on Rails still relevant in 2026? Yes. GitHub, Shopify, GitLab, and Zendesk run on it today. And with Rails 8, caching, background jobs, and deployment are now built into the framework itself, so you need fewer external services than before.

Is Rails slow compared to other frameworks? Rails doesn't win benchmarks, and it doesn't need to. In nearly every web application, the bottleneck is the database or the network, rarely the framework. What Rails does excel at is development speed and maintainability, and you feel that every month on the invoice.

Which major companies use Ruby on Rails? GitHub, Shopify, Basecamp, Zendesk, and GitLab run on it today. Airbnb and Twitch were built on it and grew into major platforms on it.