You have probably heard that Ruby on Rails is not the right fit for building SaaS solutions. There are experts that say that this is an excellent web development framework for developing SaaS products while others say that it’s not a good choice for this purpose.
If you’re building a SaaS solution, you have to consider these three important aspects - performance, security, and scalability.
There are many successful SaaS products built with Ruby on Rails, which are fast, secure, and scalable. In this blog post, we will take a look at top 5 successful SaaS solutions built with Ruby on Rails.
Shopify
Who hasn’t heard of Shopify? It’s a big name on the Internet and it uses Ruby on Rails. This SaaS product is an eCommerce platform that lets you create your own online store. Using this SaaS solution, you can easily build your shopping site even if you do not have much technical knowledge. It has made the lives of online store owners a lot easier.
To build an online store with Shopify, you do not require any design skills because you can choose from hundreds of themes and you can easily customize the design.
Managing products and tracking sales are extremely easy with this SaaS product. You can allow your customers to checkout with several methods such as cash on delivery, debit and credit cards, UPI, wallet, etc. This platform also gives you thousands of apps for marketing, accounting, shipping, customer support, and so on. You can make your fulfilment process effortless using third party shipping apps.
Shopify offers different ways to sell such as online store, Facebook Shop, and so on, and offers different sales channels such as Pinterest and Amazon.
[Source: Shopify]
According to BuiltWith, a total 1,208,788 websites have been built with Shopify, out of which 682,777 sites are currently using this technology while 526,011 sites have used it historically.
As of writing this blog post, at least 600,000 online businesses use this SaaS solution, and it has 1,000,000 active users. (Source: The official Shopify website)
According to ShopifyandYou.com, in 2016, at its peak, more than $555,716 in transactions took place in just one minute.
[Source: Shopify&You]
John Duff, Shopify’s director of engineering gave a talk in 2013 discussing the scalability of this great SaaS solution. You can find the presentation here. We get the following important information from his talk: Total 9.9 M orders, an order is placed every 3.2 seconds, 2,008 sales per minute, 50,000 RPM, 45 millisecond page response time (which means Shopify is superfast), and 13.3 billion requests.
GitHub
GitHub is another popular SaaS product which uses Ruby on Rails. This is an amazing software development platform used by millions of developers. It allows you to manage open source and business projects, host your code, and collaborate with other programmers. This SaaS solution gives you a powerful platform to work on software projects together.
[Source: GitHub]
There are 80 million repositories worldwide on this site, and 27 million developers and 1.8 million organizations and business are using this platform. Big companies like Google, Facebook, IBM, SAP, Airbnb, PayPal, Bloomberg, NASA, and Spotify use this SaaS product. (Source of this information: GitHub.com)
Basecamp
Basecamp is a leading project management software. This is a powerful SaaS product that heavily uses Ruby on Rails. You can use this software to manage your projects and easily work with your team. This SaaS product has made project management and team communication a breeze. A big number of businesses are using Basecamp to do their work in a systematic way and save some time.
When you work with your team members in an ad hoc manner, you end up wasting too much of your precious time. But when you organize your stuff and try to work systematically, you can do more in less time. Basecamp helps you to become more productive at work by making project management and online collaboration easier.
[Source: Basecamp]
They started in 2004 and now in 2018, they have 2,838,046 registered users.
[Source: Basecamp]
They have 99.998% uptime since the launch of their product, according to their official site. So there is no doubt that Ruby on Rails has been able to fulfil the needs of the Basecamp team.
Zendesk
Zendesk is an awesome SaaS product built with Ruby on Rails. This is a very useful customer support software, trusted by Uber, Slack, Shopify, Box, L’Oreal, Groupon, and other companies. They say that more than 110,000 companies trust them.
[Source: Zendesk]
This SaaS solution gives your customers better customer support services with an amazing help desk tool, ticketing system, and other tools. It offers products such as call center software and live chat app. Using their analytics and reporting tools, you can analyze data and improve your results. In simple words, you can greatly improve customer experience using their array of products.
UserVoice
UserVoice is another example of a successful SaaS product which is built with Ruby on Rails. This is a powerful customer feedback application, trusted by big companies like Microsoft and OSIsoft. This SaaS solution allows you to develop high-quality products using customer feedback. It generates intelligent data from product feedback.
[Source: UserVoice]
Customer satisfaction is the key to business success, and if you want to satisfy your customers, you have to know what they want. Through feedback, you can learn what they like and what they don’t like, get constructive criticism about your products, and can gradually improve your products by making adjustments in them. So customer feedback is crucial to business success.
UserVoice provides you with an appropriate way for collecting feedback from your customers, users, and your team members. Then it gives you useful insights from your customer feedback. They have made it clear that they can scale with your product and users.
Final words
In this blog post, we have seen that many successful SaaS solutions have been built with Ruby on Rails and all of these solutions are fast, secure, and scalable, which means we can build high-quality SaaS products using Ruby on Rails. But to improve the performance, security, and scalability of your software, you have to learn useful techniques and apply them.
If you have any questions or if you need help in building your app, do not hesitate to contact us. :)
