Is Rails still relevant in 2025?

Definitely! Many big companies continue to use it, startups still use it to ship quickly, and many beginners learn Rails to build their first web application.

Both Ruby and Rails are under very active development. Rails 8 just came out in late 2024 with improved caching, background job processing, and easier deployment options. Rails 7, which DHH called “fulfilling a vision”, brought simpler JavaScript handling and real-time features built-in. Ruby 3.3 shipped with major performance improvements, making Rails apps even faster.

But for me, the #1 reason why Rails is still relevant in 2025 … it’s still one of the best tools to quickly turn your ideas into reality.

I built Code Q&A in Rails for exactly that reason. Surprisingly, even 20+ years after its initial release, after endless hype-cycles for other frameworks, it’s still one of the most “batteries included” frameworks ever made. Which means it’s still one of the most productive frameworks ever made, with legions of loyal developers and an extensive ecosystem.

Today the trend in web development is to build apps like they do at the biggest companies like Meta and Amazon, with client-side rendered frontends and microservices or lambdas using Kafka for event streaming, and NoSQL databases. But for many, many, many applications, especially in the beginning, your app is simple and you don’t need that complexity. You need to store some data in a database and your application is a series of HTML pages with relatively simple UIs.

As an engineer, you always need to try to use the right tool for the job, taking into consideration how much time and money you have to spend, how many people are going to work on the project, realistically how big your initial user base is going to be (hint: it’s going to be a lot less than you think), etc.

If you are a late-stage, venture-backed company with hundreds of engineers and tens of thousands of users … sure, build out a full microservices / micro-frontend / event sourced / cloud-native architecture.

But if you and a few people are trying to launch an idea quickly to get product/market fit, you should consider Rails.