10 best developer productivity tools to use in 2024

Ensuring your team has the best tools helps create a more efficient development process and improves developer experience, allowing your team to do their best work with fewer obstacles. If your team struggles with efficiency, code quality, or collaboration, developer productivity tools can help maintain code and decrease your overall time to market.

From integrated development environments (IDEs) to version control software and machine learning, we'll explore different ways your team can strive for a product with reduced costs, enhanced customer satisfaction, and better scalability. 

Here are the top 10 developer productivity tools to explore in 2024.

Table of contents

1. GitHub
2. Visual Studio Code
3. SaltStack
4. Postman
5. Sourcegraph
6. Sentry
7. Copilot
8. iTerm2
9. Figma
10. Codeium
11. How to choose the right developer productivity tools for your team

Most development teams need little introduction to GitHub, the cloud-based collaborative platform for planning, creating, and managing code. However, less commonly highlighted features include creating custom automated workflows, cloud-based development environments, and third-party integrations that can reduce repetitive or lengthy tasks. You can integrate tools like Slack, Jira, and Trello to create a seamless team collaboration experience that keeps everyone informed.

Best for: GitHub is perfect for development teams that want assistance managing their code environment; it enables better collaboration on development projects through features like code review and pull requests.

Features:

• Cloud-based code repositories

• Project management organization

• Pull request and code review tools

Price: $0-$21/user/month

Visual Studio Code's lightweight development environment supports add-ons for various programming languages, making it an adaptable tool for multi-language teams. It's cross-platform, meaning it can be deployed to team members on Windows, macOS, and Linux without hassle. With features like intelligent code completion and Git integration, you can empower developers to work faster while collaborating with others and tracking code changes.

Best for: Visual Studio Code is best for teams seeking an IDE that's easy to approach and allows for a wide range of customization; it provides a code editing solution with collaborative features, a wide variety of integrations, and debugging tools.

Features:

• Code editing with intelligent completion

• Wide language and platform support

• Built-in collaborative Git integration

Price: Free

For teams seeking better control over their infrastructure at scale, SaltStack, also called Salt, is a powerful solution. This infrastructure automation platform enables teams to define and monitor a set system state to ensure proper configuration. Teams can quickly deploy and manage infrastructure configurations and allow the remote execution of commands and scripts for maintenance or troubleshooting. SaltStack can integrate with tools like Ansible, Puppet, or Docker, working with your existing flow.

Best for: SaltStack is ideal for development teams that need to manage and configure infrastructure easily. It offers automation features to reduce repetitive tasks and can help reduce errors within your system for greater uptime.

Features:

• Defines system configuration states

• Remotely executes scripts and commands

• Monitors for changes and trigger actions

Price: Free (extra cost for enterprise support)

Postman is an API development environment that makes designing, testing, and documenting APIs more straightforward. It facilitates creating more transparent documentation and ongoing collaboration among your team. It can also help improve your developer experience approach by automating repetitive API testing tasks and continually observing the performance and availability of your APIs.

Best for: Postman is ideal for development teams with API developers. It allows APIs to be designed, tested, and documented more efficiently. Leaders can use Postman to validate APIs before development, preventing potential issues.

Features:

• Build and send HTTP requests

• Fully inspect HTTP responses

• Organize and manage API requests

Price: $0-$39/user/month

Sourcegraph is a code search and navigation tool that can help your team navigate its codebase. If your team needs to understand and maintain a complex codebase, Sourcegraph can help by searching across multiple repositories. It can also provide intelligent code suggestions and integrate with code review tools such as GitHub to help give your team additional context. Sourcegraph works across various languages and frameworks.

Best for: Sourcegraph is an excellent solution for larger development teams and enterprise organizations dealing with complex codebases. It can also assist teams with code quality issues by providing detailed metrics.

Features:

• Universal code search function

• Intelligent code suggestions

• Code review tools and metrics

Price: $0-$59/user/month

Sentry is a robust real-time monitoring platform for development teams that could benefit from an extra set of metaphorical eyes on their code, helping them seek out and identify errors. Via a centralized dashboard, the tool can help teams locate mistakes within their code, understand their overall impact, and resolve the issue. Sentry also offers performance monitoring metrics that give teams a better understanding of response times and latency within their development process.

Best for: Sentry is best for teams that require assistance during the QA phase, identifying errors and performance bottlenecks. Team leaders can also use the tool to better understand the impact errors have on their user base.

Features:

• Prioritizes issues based on impact

• Integrates with development tools

• Provides team collaboration features

Price: $0-$89/month

Microsoft Copilot is one of many large language models developers are likely familiar with in 2024; it can answer questions and help developers write more efficient code. However, beyond research, Copilot can be a troubleshooting assistant, locating inefficiencies and bottlenecks within code. When learning a new language or framework, encourage your team to explore Copilot as a learning tool that can provide guidance and help explain concepts with custom-targeted examples.

Best for: With the rise of AI, Copilot is an option every development team should explore. It can assist junior developers with basic coding questions and provide more complex troubleshooting and ideation opportunities for team leads.

Features:

• Provides code efficiency suggestions

• Generates complex functions with a prompt

• Supports a wide range of programming languages

Price: $0-$20/user/month

Designed for developers running macOS, iTerm2 offers a customizable terminal emulator that can integrate with other applications. Development teams who work within the command line on macOS can utilize iTerm2's shortcuts and multiple panes features for greater flexibility and efficiency. Developers can also record terminal sessions for later playback or sharing, an underused and powerful tool to promote learning opportunities and capture information for more effective retrospectives.

Best for: Due to its platform exclusivity, iTerm2 is only for development teams operating on macOS, but Windows users can get a similar set of benefits out of Windows Terminal. Teams that spend a lot of time within terminals will likely see significant developer productivity benefits after the initial learning curve, and will find it much easier to discover and leverage new Open Source tooling.

Features:

• Offers powerful terminal emulation

• Automates tasks with scripting

• Terminal users can leverage Screen or Tmux for multitasking and long-running sessions 

• Connects remotely to SSH/Telnet servers

Price: Free

At the mention of Figma, every member of your UX development team's ears will perk up. Known well within the UX and design communities, Figma is a solid option for laying out user interfaces and prototyping. Still, with new features, it becomes an even more powerful tool for developers. Using the Dev Mode ability, design and engineering teams can collaborate more efficiently with enhanced handoff measures and integration with platforms such as Visual Studio Code.

Best for: Figma is best for teams looking to improve productivity by using a single source of truth for design specs, streamlining collaboration between designers and developers and reducing the need for time-consuming handoffs.

Features:

• Design and prototyping

• Real-time collaboration

• Visual Studio Code integration

Price: $0-$75/seat/month

Codeium shows the power of AI in software development; it's an extension that enables developers to work within their native editors faster and more efficiently. If your team is falling behind due to inefficient research or coding practices, Codeium can provide a speed boost. In addition to autocomplete features, developers can use prompts within the editor to generate code, create comment documentation, or resolve problematic bugs. Codeium Chat also enables developers to have open-ended AI-driven conversations directly within their IDE as a developer assistance feature.

Best for: Codeium is ideal for development teams looking to speed up their process by integrating an advanced autocomplete and auto-code generation solution without the need to switch IDEs or languages.

Features:

• Intelligent autocomplete function

• In-IDE AI prompts and commands

• Compatible with a wide range of IDEs

Price: $0-$24/month

Choosing the right developer productivity tools for your team begins with a single question: What development process do you want to improve? By understanding your team's goals with methods such as the SPACE productivity framework, you can select a tool with impactful features and benefits. 

For example, a large team struggling to manage its codebase would likely benefit from Sourcegraph, but it would have little impact on a team with a simple codebase.

Once you've pinpointed a challenge, such as code review practices that need improvement or excessive time spent on troubleshooting, you can start your search for the perfect developer productivity tool. With code review, the solution may be as simple as establishing a detailed code review checklist for your team to follow.

When turning to productivity tools, it's important to ensure that the selected solution directly addresses your problem and offers a tangible benefit. In our code review example, Visual Studio Code and Copilot would be two robust solutions to use together due to the former's Git integration and the latter's problem-solving capacity.

When selecting the best developer productivity tools for your team, be sure to consider these questions:

• How big is your team, and can the solution handle your workload?
• Does the developer productivity tool integrate well with your current development methodology?
• Can the selected tool integrate and scale with your existing tools, project management platforms, and communication systems?
• Does the solution cost fall within your IT budget, and will it offer a measurable benefit when compared to its service cost?
• Will your team integrate well and use the tool within the development process? How steep is the learning curve?

Developer productivity tools can provide development teams with robust solutions that help drive productivity through better project management, code analysis, and software engineering metrics. Pluralsight Flow is one such platform that can provide leaders with a better understanding of their cycle times and other metrics, creating a more capable development process. Obtain actionable insights that your productivity tools are making an impact with Flow’s valuable metrics.

Get a demo of Pluralsight Flow today and see how your team can level up.