NodeJS is an open-source server-side runtime environment built on Google Chrome's JavaScript V8 Engine, creating fast and scalable internet applications. In other words, it is simply a JavaScript runtime, providing developers with a lightweight, fast, and modern way to execute code in their local environment.

With over a billion downloads, Node.Js thrives in building real-time applications, the Internet of Things, and microservices. Nowadays, many giant tech companies and internet applications are adopting NodeJS in their tech stack, big time. That's why we wanted to list nine top apps built with Node. You will be surprised that many applications you are using in your day-to-day life are built on NodeJS.

1. Paypal

Paypal is one of the largest and most well-known worldwide systems for Internet payments. The platform enables its users to transact with each other online quickly and easily in more than 100 currencies across more than 200 markets. As of 2019, the service has over 305 million active customer accounts, using Node.js to build the consumer-facing side of its web applications.

1.1 Why Node?

PayPal made a remarkable decision to migrate from Java to JavaScript and Node.js back in 2013. PayPal's engineering teams are no longer segmented into those who coded for the browser(using HTML, CSS, JavaScript) and those who coded for the server(using Java). There is only a single language -Javascript used for both the browser and the server. It resulted in a 200ms faster page response time and doubled the number of requests they could handle per second.

1.2 Results

• According to Brainhub, the NodeJS efforts have provided PayPal with great technical returns, loading the web application almost twice as fast with fewer people.
• Doubled the number of requests served per second while decreasing the average response time by 35%.
• Get 33% fewer lines of code and 40% fewer files compared to their previous Java-based application.

2. Netflix

2.1 Why Node?

Netflix is the world's largest video streaming provider, including movies and series, available in over 190 countries. In June 2018, Netflix reported over 130 million subscribers worldwide and required an extremely scalable solution to handle all the requests and approx. One billion hours of weekly video data streaming.

Speed and load time were critical aspects to consider in a high-traffic video content provider like Netflix. The whole user interface on Netflix.com is built with Node. Netflix decided to have the same language on the back and front sides of their product to deliver a lightweight, modular, and fast application. This solution is perfect for developers to build a single page and decrease its startup time for the application by learning runtime environments within a short time. They have managed to go from 40 minutes to under 1 minute thanks to many modules instead of implementing some features.

2.2 Results

• The startup time of the application was increased by 70%.
• Fast deployment by using single languages used for both client and server-side.
• Offer Customizable user.
• Netflix's web app load time has been reduced by 70%. Node.js has proven to be an effective solution, so the company decided to move the entire data access layer to Node.

3. LinkedIn

3.1 Why Node?

LinkedIn is the world's largest and most valuable professional network and builds a strong and growing business. It is a social network that mainly focuses on professional networking and career development. Nowadays, LinkedIn is available in 24 languages and already has more than 706 million members in over 200 countries and regions worldwide.

Back in 2016, Microsoft paid $26 billion to acquire LinkedIn. It enables Microsoft access to the biggest business-oriented social media platform. LinkedIn's front-end API servers are written in Node.js.LinkedIn has decided to choose Node.js to perform at such a scale to have a great technological solution in place.

In 2011, they switched to Node.js, and it came to many benefits that came along with that decision. After switching to Node.js, the LinkedIn development team realized the advantages of using Node.js to empower the server side of its mobile app.

3.2 Results

• The resources have been freed, and cut the number of servers from 30 to 3.
• Enough headroom remains to handle 10x current levels of resource utilization.
• Doubled traffic capacity up to 10 times faster on the client side.
• Node.js sped up the development process by combining front-end and back-end mobile teams into one single unit.
• Much better performance and lower memory overhead than other tested options, running up to 20x faster in some scenarios.
• Programmers could leverage their JavaScript skills.

4. Twitter

4.1 Why Node?

Twitter is a social media site, and its primary purpose is to connect people and allow people to share their thoughts in short messages – tweets. It's grown to be a popular micro-blogging site, with more than 330 million users worldwide.

In 2017, software engineers at Twitter decided to completely rewrite their mobile web app using Node.js to optimize interface speed and network efficiency while providing a high-quality user experience. Before they began working on Twitter Lite, their front-end was written primarily with JavaScript, while the back-end used Scala.

Twitter Lite is designed to serve emerging world markets and locales where users have expensive data plans, lack of storage, or unreliable connectivity. They discussed the role of Node.js — an open-source JavaScript runtime based on Chrome's V8 engine — in Twitter's development work and plans for retooling the company's apps.

4.2 Results

• App loading quickly on slower connections.
• Optimized for a 30 percent faster launch time.
• Twitter Lite takes less than 1MB on a smartphone - reduced resource consumption, no longer require people to download a 20MB iOS or Android app on their smartphones.

5. Godaddy

5.1 Why Node?

Founded in 1997, GoDaddy is one of the world's largest domain registrars and web hosting companies, with more than 19 million customers and 61 million domains under management at the end of 2019. Apart from those two, GoDaddy offers a wide range of other services like eCommerce solutions, SSL certificates, professional business email, website builder, etc.

The company's entire back-end is based on Node.js infrastructure. As of 2016, GoDaddy decided to migrate to Node.js instead of using Apache, Antonio Silveira. Initially, it was written using C# and SQL Server to be later changed to Node.js-based Cassandra NoSQL. This decision brings significant high performance for Godaddy in web application development by using Node.js.

5.2 Results

• Cutting down ten times fewer servers, hosting the customer websites, writing unit and integration tests quickly, and deploying new features.
• Reducing time to first byte (TTFB) from ~60ms to around ~12ms.
• Allowing handle the same load with only 10% of the hardware.
• The new mobile app has better performance, consumes lower memory, and is 20 times faster than the previous Ruby on Rails-based version.

6. eBay

6.1 Why Node?

eBay is an American online shopping website where millions of people trade every day, best known for its auctions, consumer-to-consumer, and business-to-consumer sales. The total users of the e-commerce giant has increased dramatically, and by 2019 surpassed 183 million users in over 32 countries.

eBay requires not only scalable but also fast and reliable solutions. eBay's app used to run on Java, which showed long startup times and poor performance. As a platform with huge traffic, eBay needed a technology that would speed up the development to catch up with front-end iterations.

Node.js easily qualifies as one of the primary open-source tools that eBay leverages. eBay's platform team has built some incredible tools to build and deploy Node.js applications to production successfully.

6.2 Results

• Maintaining live connections to servers for nearly 200 million eBay users every day.
• With Node, the company achieved quick and stable real-time connection with the server and enabled eBay-specific services in its first "Talk" project.

7. Trello

7.1 Why Node?

Trello is a collaborative work management app designed to track team projects, highlight tasks underway, show who they are assigned to, and detail progress towards completion. A platform like this requires instant propagation of updates in real-time without latency and holding a lot of open connections, so an event-driven, non-blocking server seemed like a good choice.

That is the reason Trello is one of the companies that use Node.js for its server side. Trello needs to juggle several real-time connections on the server to ensure that updates come smoothly and on time.

7.2 Results

• Node.js provided an extremely lightweight Single Page Application.
• Thanks to Node.js, Trello can handle updates with zero latency.
• Node.js architecture enabled to cut expenses of development and prototyping.

8. Groupon

8.1 Why Node?

Groupon is the largest marketplace for coupons, deals, and discounts in the world. It connects subscribers with local merchants by offering different deals each day for local goods and services such as restaurants, theatres, and retail stores. In 2019, Groupon operated in 15 countries worldwide and had over 48 million active users.

When Groupon achieved the mark of 200 million downloads in 2019, it faced scalability issues. That is when the company turned to Node.js and held the world's largest production deployments of Node.js.

In 2012 company realized that the previous tech stack (Ruby on Rails, Java, and PHP) was rendered obsolete, and it wasn't very easy to maintain the application.

In June 2015, Groupon migrated the whole web and mobile traffic from a Ruby on Rails stack to a new Node.js stack. As a result, the company serves the same traffic with less hardware compared to the old architecture. Additionally, teams make changes to the application independently and quicker than before. NodeJS was an excellent solution for their problem, and it took almost one year to overcome all the problems they were facing in the process to finish the transition finally.

8.2 Results

• Becoming the most significant production deployment of Node.js of all time.
• Enabling 3,400 back-end services to run thanks to the high scalability of Node smoothly
• Doubling the loading speed.
• Simplifying and accelerating The migration to a different platform has been simplified and accelerated by Node.js.
• Web pages got faster by about 50% and can serve much higher traffic than Ruby on Rails page.

9. Walmart

9.1 Why Node?

Walmart is a prominent American retail company operating several grocery and department stores across the world. It currently offers more than 23 million items for sale and is rapidly expanding. The company already sees close to 20,000 hits per second on its website and mobile app during the holiday season, so it needs to build a fast, reliable, usable, and bulletproof eCommerce system to reach its goals of becoming a leader in the online retail space.

According to Statista, Walmart made $482 billion in revenue last fiscal year, operates under 59 different names within 28 countries, and serves approx. 270mln customers weekly. Walmart discussed their transition to Node.js back in 2012 in Walmart's mobile applications.

As one of the companies that use Node.js, Walmart relies on the framework for its UIs and an orchestration layer to create application programming interfaces (APIs) for its various apps. Orchestration layers permit developers to integrate multiple applications or services. Walmart app users can use one platform to access several distinct functions.

9.2 Results

• Offering better performance.
• Modularity allows to implement changes and fix bugs much faster.
• Providing some very sophisticated features to mobile users on the client-side using Node
• Saving time by customizing content based on device type and browser capabilities
• Handling multiple concurrent requests to update its site effectively.
• Helping to keep the content in front of Google and other search indexing robots with the help of React.js
• Creating universal JavaScript, allowing Walmart to take full advantage of its talented JavaScript developers in all areas of its business.

Summary

Many famous companies are using Node.js on the back-end of their applications around the world. It's performant, it's JavaScript, and it highly improves the development speed. If you want to achieve similar results, consider choosing Node.js for your next project.

Node.js is best used in applications that require frequent interaction with the client side. Node web servers efficiently process multiple incoming requests from the client side and send quick responses back. Thus, the application can serve many users without making them wait for long while the page is loaded. Since JavaScript is a single language running on both the client and server side of the program, it ensures stable communication.

Is your application going to join this group? If you're looking for a simple solution that takes a shorter time to develop and is efficient – Node.js seems to be a clear choice. Still not sure whether it's the right fit for you? Tell us about your project, and we'll help you decide.