Companies spend 4.5 trillion dollars—that’s trillion with a T—on IT each year, with internal tools taking up an increasing slice of the pie. May

The 2023 State of Internal Tools

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2023-05-22 10:00:05

Companies spend 4.5 trillion dollars—that’s trillion with a T—on IT each year, with internal tools taking up an increasing slice of the pie. Maybe that’s no surprise: businesses run on a lot of manual processes, and manual processes can often be made more efficient with the right internal tooling.

In order to run faster and reduce the manual effort, many companies build things like admin panels, dashboards, and custom tools on top of their databases, SaaS tools, and CRMs. The way that building is done varies from company to company—and sometimes even team to team.

Over the last few years, we've been surveying engineers and operators to dig into the details of how they design, build, maintain, and evaluate the performance of their internal tools. This year, we surveyed over 2,200 people (more than half developers and engineering leaders)—and given the macroeconomic climate, we were especially interested in how their processes, priorities, or technologies have changed.

How are companies building their internal tools? What languages, libraries, and resources are the most widespread? Has anything major shifted? Largely, last year’s popular technologies seem just about as popular as ever.