Too many tools: How to manage frontend tool overload

People naturally struggle to perform actions and continue day-to-day tasks with an abundance of choices . Too many indistinguishable choices reduce clarity in the decision-making process and simplicity in every individual task. This abundance of options has negatively affected every field of software engineering, including frontend development.

In the past, developing a web app was simple, especially with the limited availability of stable, simple frontend development tools. In 2010, any developer could easily start building a web app to solve any general business requirement using JavaScript, jQuery, PHP, HTML, and CSS. They could use Adobe Dreamweaver or any syntax-highlighting-enabled code editor, and quickly ship the final product via FileZilla FTP.

Now, developers need to construct an optimal development toolkit for themselves by choosing tools from dozens of frontend frameworks, libraries, languages, build tools, testing frameworks, package managers, code editors, deployment tools, and AI tools, even before writing a single code line.

Even after initiating a codebase, they have to observe rapidly changing tools to constantly improve codebases by also migrating to new tools if needed.

The abundance of tools has made modern frontend development chaotic. And it’s started negatively affecting the frontend developer experience.

Let’s study how the growth of frontend development created so many tools, and how to manage tool overload.

Why did the early frontend development era (2009–2013) feel simpler?

Frontend development went through a special period where any developer could easily build and ship a generic product without facing tool overload. In the 2009–2013 era, frontend development felt simpler compared to its current state.

That’s due to the following factors:

Constrained defaults created a shared baseline

Ask most experienced, senior web developers from the 2009–2013 era about the tools they used in that period. The majority will mention JavaScript, jQuery, PHP, HTML, and CSS. These were the only popular, easily accessible, fully-featured, deployment-friendly, simple tools that were available.

ASP.NET, JSP, and Python were available for web development in this era, but they couldn’t compete with the previously-mentioned stack due to a lack of public awareness, development complexity, limited developer productivity-focused features, and limited third-party hosting options.

Developers could easily initiate a web project without facing a recommended tool overload since those tools were the industry default.

Developer expectations were modest, and projects weren’t complex

“The past programmers were the real programmers” is true.

Past developers didn’t seek libraries to avoid just ten lines of code, code generators or AI tools to skip reading API documentation, and frameworks/boilerplates to skip mastering codebase architecture .

They were always ready to learn, experiment, discuss, and code. The modest developer expectation was a major reason to stick to the existing tool set.

Almost all past general web apps had simple codebase architectures, UIs, and implementations. Developers didn’t want to seek tools to reduce project complexity:

Standards were simple, and the experiments were fewer

In this era, browsers didn’t implement the same behavior for several JavaScript, HTML, and CSS features (e.g., browsers had different CSS vendor prefixes).

Browser compatibility was a major factor to consider during development, but all browsers implemented a generic feature set based on well-accepted web standards to build simple web apps:

• CSS2 and CSS3 versions’ features were enough to achieve fair usability in UIs
• XHTML wasn’t as semantically-enhanced as HTML5, but it was simple and had enough features
• ECMAScript didn’t bring frequent features and enhancements, but had enough stable features under ES3 and ES5
• The XMLHttpRequest API for AJAX programming, and other basic web APIs, like the DOM API

Browsers didn’t have frequent releases with so many experimental web standard implementations and deprecations. Developers didn’t have to learn advanced web standards every month to make sure that their codebases stayed up to date.

The trade-off: limited flexibility, but less decision fatigue

There were a few choices while selecting frontend development tools, and they also came with limited features. Here are all the widely used frontend development tools in the 2009–2013 period:

• UI design: XHTML, CSS, jQuery UI, and Bootstrap
• UI programming: JavaScript, jQuery, PHP, JSP, and ASP.NET (to generate HTML)
• Code editors: Adobe Dreamweaver, Sublime Text, Notepad++. Developers could use any code editor, even the one that comes with the operating system, since they had modest expectations from a code editor
• Deployment: FTP (FileZilla) to a third-party host or using a Bash script if developers have their own servers

Most developers used JavaScript, jQuery, PHP, HTML, and CSS without build tools, package managers, frameworks, and many libraries to build any general web app. Their choices were limited, but they didn’t spend hours researching which tool to use. They shipped products pretty fast:

What caused the explosion of tools post-2015?

After going through the simplest frontend development era from 2009 to 2013, the developers entered an innovative era in the 2014–2015 period.

A silent war waged between traditional, simple web development and the growth of single-page apps (SPAs). The exponential growth of frontend development tools was mostly due to the following factors:

Rapid ECMAScript releases and evolving web standards

ECMAScript had only three major specification releases (ES2, ES3, and ES5) between the first release of the JavaScript implementation in the Netscape Navigator 3.0 browser and 2015. ECMAScript didn’t create any major releases with new language features during the 2009–2015 period, so that period was undoubtedly the most stable period of JavaScript.

No build tools were required to fix JavaScript version compatibility since web apps used stable, mature JavaScript ES5 and earlier features.

ECMAScript started creating new major releases every year right after 2015 with the release of the notable ES6. Thousands of polyfills, several transpilers, build tools, and package managers were born to fix JavaScript compatibility issues:

WebSockets became popular. WebAssembly and WebRTC were introduced. Many built-in web APIs were improved with feature extensions (e.g., the DOM API integrated various observer APIs) after 2015. The developer community built many tools to improve the developer experience with new web standard implementations.

SPA and TypeScript adoption fuel ecosystem growth

In early frontend development, developers used the page-based technique for building web apps. They decomposed the app into multiple pages, linked relevant scripts and stylesheets to each page, and adjusted routing by configuring web servers.

This approach was beginner-friendly and didn’t require additional UI development, state management, routing, caching libraries, or frontend frameworks . Vanilla JavaScript and jQuery were enough to handle the whole client-side app logic.

Around 2016, SPAs (single-page apps) became popular with the RESTful API communication pattern, and the rapid growth of React, Angular, Vue, and Svelte. The JavaScript developer community and tech companies started building state management solutions, routers, UI kits, boilerplates, and various libraries for popular frontend libraries.

Several frameworks, including Remix, Next.js, Gatsby, and Docusaurus, were born to turn the popular React library into a framework to compete with frameworks like Angular and Vue. The popularity of TypeScript also created many packages, such as type collections, project starter kits, validators, and code generators. TypeScript development made other tools like module bundlers, build tools, and linters popular, as well.

SPA and TypeScript adoption created a spike in the new tool innovation and development timeline. Here is how a few development choices in 2011 have turned into so many in 2025:

Open-source funding and GitHub hype-driven tool proliferation

Open-source development was a popular, effective development strategy from the initialization of the free software movement, initiated by Richard Stallman in 1983. This model became popular in top tech companies and worldwide developer communities after 2015, with the promising growth of GitHub as the world’s largest Git repository hosting platform.

Top tech companies started:

• Open-sourcing tools they’d built for internal development requirements to boost the organization’s popularity and let the open-source community improve the project
• Motivating employees to innovate new open-source projects and contribute back to the open-source tools the company uses
• Funding open-source projects

Developers started using open-source contributions to show their programming expertise and find new career opportunities. Some developers became tool maintainers by contributing to open-source full-time.

Meanwhile, GitHub released more features and turned the traditional Git hosting platform into a futuristic, fully-featured social coding and deployment platform, and introduced more tools under GitHub Actions.

The evolved open-source development was a major reason for the rapid growth of new frontend development tools.

Generative AI accelerated the creation of new tools

By pre-training AI with existing human-created knowledge, generative AI introduced a promising solution. Developers could now automate literally any manual task in the software development lifecycle.

ChatGPT’s explosion in 2022 was just the start. Devs started using publicly available generative AI models and APIs to create numerous automation tools that help them ship products faster after:

• Coding: AI-powered code editors and plugins that can write or improve code based on natural language instructions
• Design: Diagram generators, sketch/prototype generators, and AI software architect agents
• CI: AI-powered code reviewing bots, security testers, and test generators
• Conversion: Design to code tools, e.g., Builder.io, a Figma to code tool, and idea to product tools
• Project management: Task estimators, task description generators, and task scheduling tools

Thousands of AI tools came to the software market, promising productivity enhancements. The result has been an AI tool war that’s leading us towards AI tool overload.

The dominant ChatGPT in 2022 started losing popularity due to new competitor tools, creating an AI tool fragmentation:

How many tools are we really talking about?

Is the number of tools enough to reduce clarity in modern frontend development decision-making?

According to Wikipedia, there are more than 3.1 million packages on the NPM registry. The majority of them are frontend development tools, including libraries, polyfills, frameworks, utilities, etc. If we sum up all the frontend development tools that exist outside of NPM to NPM packages, we indeed get millions. However, only a small percentage of these are actually popular and usable.

Studying developer surveys, like the State of JavaScript and the Stack Overflow annual developer survey, and exploring technical newsletters, like JavaScript Weekly, are good approaches to estimate the number of tools that we can include in modern developer decision-making.

The following table summarizes the available popular frontend tools based on popular developer surveys:

Category	Popular tools
Frontend libraries/frameworks	React, Angular, Vue, Svelte, Preact, Lit, Solid, Alpine.js, HTMX, Qwik, Stencil.js, Remix, Nuxt.js, Flutter, React Native, Astro, Gatsby, Docusaurus,
UI and styling	Tailwind, Bootstrap, Ant Design, Materialize, MUI, Bulma, Foundation, Open Props, UnoCSS, Semantic UI, Pico.CSS, Chakra UI, Blaze UI, Vuetify, daisyUI, Quasar, styled components, Emotion, clsx, cva
Building and packaging	Vite, Webpack, esbuild, Rollup, Bun, Parcel, Turbopack, Rspack, Rsbuild, Farm
Code editors	VsCode, JetBrains IDEs, Visual Studio, Vim, Notepad++, Neovim, Claude Code, Zed, Sublime Text, VsCodium, Windsurf, Cursor, Fleet, LiteXL
Frontend languages	JavaScript, TypeScript, CoffeeScript, Flow, Elm, Dart, Kotlin, Python, Go, PureScript, ClojureScript
Testing	Jest, Vitest, Testing Library, Mocha, Jasmine, Cypress, Playwright, Pupeteer, Chai, Selenium, Storybook
Desktop/mobile app development (for turning web apps to native desktop/mobile apps)	Electron, Nw.js, Tauri, Wails, NodeGUI, Flutter, React Native, Neutralinojs, Compose Multiplatform, Electrino, Webview C++, Electrobun, Buntralino, Cordova, Ionic
Package managers	npm, pnpm, Yarn, Bun, ni, Cotton, Deno
State management	Redux, Zustand, Jotai, Recoil, Valtio, MobX, ngRx, NGXS, RxJs, Akita, Pinia, Vuex, Nano Stores
Server communication	Fetch, Axios, Got, SuperAgent, Ky, Needle, Wretch, xior, WebSocket, Socket.IO, Pusher, Apollo, gRPC

There are about 10 frontend development tool categories, and each category has more than 10 options.

That puts us at about 100+ popular frontend development tools. Apart from these primary choices, there are millions of dependency packages on NPM and other package registries. Moreover, the modern AI tool war started introducing several developer-productivity-focused, competitive AI tools every single day. Similar to the growth in NPM registry, this flooded the ecosystem with AI-powered developer tools.

This number is enough to complicate modern frontend development, harden decision-making, and affect the overall developer experience!

Why the abundance of tools can hurt DX

New, innovative tools bring more flexibility to frontend development choices and improve developer experience, but tool overload can negatively affect developer experience:

Decision fatigue: too many choices slow down projects

In 2010, developers didn’t have to research the optimal frontend toolkit for building a web app — they could build anything with a small collection of tools. But now, developers have to decide which framework, libraries, build tool, boilerplate, code editor, UI kit, programming language, styling language, and test runner to use before even writing a single code line.

The abundance of tools slows down project initialization. Their competitive, indistinguishable features make it difficult to know where to begin.

Steep learning curves, especially for newcomers

Each popular frontend development tool comes with different concepts, features, and development practices. They often put a unique, thick abstraction layer over built-in web APIs and development techniques. Mastering any frontend tool is hard, especially for newcomers.

Frontend development tools usually improve productivity in large-scale projects, but the unique concepts that come with each tool complicate modern frontend development.

For example, beginners can implement a simple, dynamic status text with native web technology as follows, without learning new abstract concepts over the traditional DOM:

<div class="app">
  <span id="status">Wait...</span>
</div>

<script>
  setTimeout(() => {
    document.querySelector('#status')
      .innerText = 'Ready.';
  }, 2000);
</script>

In React, beginners will have to learn the component lifecycle, JSX, Hooks, and build tools to do the sample implementation:

import React, { useState, useEffect } from 'react';

export function App() {
  const [label, setLabel] = useState('Wait...');

  useEffect(() => {
    const timer = setTimeout(() => {
      setLabel('Ready.');
    }, 2000);
    return () => clearTimeout(timer);
  }, []);

  return (
    <div className='App'>
      <span>{label}</span>
    </div>
  );
}

Ecosystem fragmentation leads to unstable codebases

Frontend development tools come with different APIs, coding styles, paradigms, and dependencies, and make frequent new feature implementations and deprecations. In a fragmented ecosystem, where too many tools exist to solve literally anything, developers often tend to integrate various rapidly changing tools with their codebases to boost their coding productivity.

As a result, frequently changing, unstable features, different coding styles, APIs, paradigms, and patterns mix up and affect the stability and quality of codebases.

Tool churn creates maintenance and migration costs

Frontend tools come with various promising benefits and proven DX enhancements. Dev teams often integrate these new tools by discarding existing ones

For example, a sample web app project initiated in 2005 can go through the following rapid frontend development tooling additions and removals, known as tool churn:

Year	Tool churn
2005	Uses vanilla JavaScript, HTML, PHP, and CSS
2010	Integrate jQuery for AJAX and DOM manipulation
2011	Use jQuery UI elements
2015	Use React components in HTML/PHP pages
2016	Migrate to modern React using Create React App and use a Node.js RESTful backend Use Mocha for testing
2017	Rewrite UI using MUI components
2018	Started using Redux
2019	Migrate to TypeScript
2020	Use Jest for testing Replace Redux with Recoil Start using Rollup
2021	Use React SWR for caching Switch to React context API
2022	Start using Vite
2023	Replace React SWR with TanStack Query
2024	Migrate to Next.js

In the above example, tool churn is low before 2015 and skyrocketed after 2015. The above example focuses on UI development-focused tool churn, but tool churn happens with code editors, extensions/plugins, and any other development tool.

Tool churn is time-consuming, challenging, costly, and is burning out developers at work with unstable codebases.

How to manage DX in an era of tool overload

Developers love to stay up-to-date with technology and learn new technologies, but they don’t like to get burned out at work due to an overload of modern tools and tool churn.

Devs don’t like to dive deep into documentation and online communities of dozens of dependencies before choosing a dependency package. We all like to get benefits from modern tools, but don’t like to let them ruin the developer experience.

Here is how you can manage developer experience with tool overload:

Lean on community conventions and proven ecosystems

Design patterns become popular not solely because a top tech giant uses them. Specific technologies gain developer attention not solely because they’re backed by a top tech giant.

The community success of a specific development convention or technology is a key reason behind its popularity. For example, Node.js became so popular not solely because LinkedIn, Netflix, and eBay started using it . Its proven productivity was a key reason behind its popularity.

This is true for all popular technologies, conventions, and development techniques such as MVC, REST, GraphQL, SPA, NoSQL, Docker, Vue, and Next.js.

Adhering to top community conventions and proven ecosystems guarantees a good developer experience for general projects. For example, React, Vue, and Angular are proven tools for general use cases:

Pick tools with healthy documentation and support, not just hype

A sudden spike in hype of a specific technology due to an effective marketing strategy doesn’t always guarantee its long-term success. Apart from the quality of the solution, healthy documentation, and community support guarantee long-term success. Imagine what React, Vue, or Angular would be without proper documentation and developer support, or Node.js without up-to-date API documentation?

With healthy documentation and good developer support, developers can:

• Do a quick feasibility study before deciding on a tool without diving too much into implementation documentation, GitHub issues, or release histories
• Avoid time-consuming migration decisions by requesting developer support to solve critical issues.
• Upgrade to new versions productively using official migration guides and tools:

  

Optimize for team needs and stability over novelty

The goal of maintaining a stable, healthy codebase is to offer a usable, stable product for users. Using new tools doesn’t always guarantee codebase stability and satisfy the team’s needs.

Sometimes, an old but well-maintained tool can work better than a new one. Choosing stable, mature, well-maintained tools by discussing with the team improves overall developer experience within the team. You don’t need to choose a new, futuristic, rapidly changing tool just to go with trends.

Adopt change only when the benefit is clear and measurable

Mindlessly using trending tools, conventions with frequent migrations and rewrites typically don’t add any benefits to codebases or developer experience. These habits just increase tool churn, waste developer hours, make codebases unstable, and negatively impact everyone’s productivity.

Evaluating specific tools with experiments or quick research — then integrating them only if they bring clear benefits — will help reduce unwanted tool churn.

For example, in an open-source project that I maintain, I still use a Rollup-based build script added by a contributor about four years ago. I don’t need to look for another build tool since switching the build tool doesn’t bring any measurable benefit to the project:

Encourage continuous learning without chasing every new trend

Continuous learning to be up-to-date and chasing every new trend are two different things. Learning new technology using newsletters, blogs, podcasts, and techtalks is great. But if we start randomly chasing new technology, then there is a problem.

For example, if you notice trending CSS-in-JS libraries, you shouldn’t instantly think about introducing them to your codebases. Instead, you can learn their benefits with experiments and consider using them only if you face issues with the current styling technique and notice an optimal situation to apply.

Learning about — but not chasing — new trending tools makes you an up-to-date developer. Just don’t go overboard.

Conclusion

The growth of development tools increased the flexibility of frontend development approaches and improved the developer experience. However, the abundance of tools has made everything chaotic and started negatively affecting developer experience, creating decision fatigue, steep learning curves, and increasing tool/code churn.

It’s the developer’s right to choose the right tool for the right scenario or decide not to use a tool for a specific scenario at all. Developers define their own DX with their choices and expectations.

When everyone uses a specific trending tool, no one is forcing you to use it unless your company recommends it. But still, you can discuss concerns about the recommended tool. Choosing the right tool based on the development scenario, regardless of the hype, brings a better developer experience for everyone.

Focus on clarity, stability, team satisfaction, and continuous learning, but don’t chase trending technologies and let them ruin the team’s developer experience .

The post Too many tools: How to manage frontend tool overload appeared first on LogRocket Blog.

 

This post first appeared on Read More