It feels weird to announce the annual State of JavaScript survey while it's still warm out and the leaves haven't even turned red yet, but this year we're switching things up and running the survey a bit earlier than usual, to make sure we have plenty of time to analyze the results before the end of the year.
So you can already go ahead and take the survey right now!
Bringing Back-end Back
One of the biggest complaint leveraged at the survey over these past few years has been that it ignored a whole subset of the JavaScript ecosystem, namely back-end frameworks.
This was not done out of lack of consideration for the topic: in fact my original plan was to give JavaScript on the back-end its whole other dedicated survey.
But at 6 surveys this year (State of JS, CSS, HTML, React, [AI], and Devs) I'm already stretched thin as it is, so I've had to give up on a separate survey, at least for now.
So instead, I'm bringing back-end frameworks back as its own full-fledged section of the main State of JS survey. And just in time as well, since there are quite a few interesting additions to the scene popping up in recent years, such as Hono, Elysia, and tRPC.
Mobile & Desktop and Monorepo Tools
To make space for the new back-end section, the Mobile & Desktop and Monorepo Tools sections have been downgraded to single questions this year.
I think that's an acceptable downside, since these sections are not relevant to a large chunk of respondents.
Pushing JavaScript Forward
One of the goals of the survey is to provide more data to the people who are actively contributing to JavaScript, both as a language and as an ecosystem.
A good example of this is this new question about why respondents rely on bundlers:
The idea behind this question is to try and see what benefits people derive from adding build steps to their workflow. And who knows, if we can one day manage to incorporate those benefits in JavaScript itself, we might even be able to start going bundler-free!
2026 Suggestions
If you see something that is missing from the survey, do not hesitate to leave a comment here.
Anecdotally, one suggestions that I've heard a couple times now is to ask respondents which package manager and/or registry they use. Turns out, some folks are building interesting alternatives to npm, and it might be something worth measuring in future surveys.
Take the Survey!
With all this out of the way, go check out this year's survey!
P.S. I have noticed that Dev.to has been running its own community surveys, which may appear under posts such as this one. In the interest of avoiding any confusion, let me clarify that these surveys are wholly unrelated to the survey mentioned here!
Top comments (2)
2026 Suggestions, not to you as a survey, but to the JavaScript/TypeScript and software developer community in general: can we please focus more on fixing bugs and solving problems than adding new (syntax) features every year?
The survey starts with Which of these (new) syntax features have you used? And, apart from Error.cause and RegExp.escape, none of those new features I didn't use even looks interesting enough to look up what they are. Meanwhile, we still struggle with npm peer dependencies, deprecations and vulnerabilities, package manager syntax and obscure configuration errors, browser support and most devs still don't seem to care about accessibility, usability and performance. We, as software developers, should fix our priorities eventually!
It’s great to see the community emphasizing real-world developer needs like bundler benefits and package manager alternatives. For frontend-heavy SaaS products, insights from this survey can guide smarter tool choices and streamline build processes for better UX performance.