2021 Stack Overflow Survey: Top Frameworks, Languages, and Salary Trends

Stack Overflow’s 2021 Developer Survey shows a major shift in front‑end languages and frameworks while most other programming languages remain relatively stable.

“This year’s survey differs from previous years. We started the 2020 data collection in February, and by the time we were ready to publish the results, the global work and daily‑life reality had changed dramatically. The COVID‑19 pandemic continues to have a major impact on our economy and society, so we tried to shorten the survey and focus on what happens beyond the traditional office.”

React.js (40.14%) has overtaken jQuery (34.42%) as the most used web front‑end framework. The top five frameworks are Express (23.82%), Angular (22.96%), Vue.js (18.97%) and Svelte (71.47%) which ties with ASP.NET Core as the most popular.

React (25.12%) remains a highly popular web framework, followed by Vue.js (16.69%), Django (9.21%), Angular (8.47%) and Svelte (6.57%). Svelte (71.47%) and ASP.NET Core rank among the highest‑paid frameworks, with Svelte developers earning an average of $62,520, ASP.NET Core $60,744, Gatsby $60,129 and React $58,128.

JavaScript (64.96%) is the most commonly used language, with HTML/CSS (56.07%) a close second, confirming the dominance of web development. Python (48.24%) and SQL (47.08%) rank third overall, though Python falls to fourth among professional developers.

Python remains in the top five most loved languages for the fifth consecutive year. The top five most loved languages are Rust (86.98%), Clojure (81.12%), TypeScript (72.73%), Elixir (72.11%) and Julia (70.69%). Python has just dropped out of the top five most loved languages.

Clojure and Elixir also appear among the highest‑paid languages; Clojure developers earn the highest average salary at $95,000. F# follows at $81,037, Elixir and Erlang at $80,077, Perl and Ruby at $80,000, and Scala at $77,832.

The most used databases are MySQL (50.18%), PostgreSQL (40.42%), SQLite (32.18%), MongoDB (27.70%) and Microsoft SQL Server (26.87%). While no database is overwhelmingly preferred, Redis is the most loved (70.71%) and PostgreSQL also scores highly in developer affection (70.40%).

MongoDB (60.28%) remains popular, with Elasticsearch (56.70%) and Firebase (56.22%) also in the top five.

Developers working with DynamoDB earn the highest average salary ($80,936), followed by Elasticsearch ($67,021) and Cassandra ($64,090). Redis is the most loved database, with an average salary of $64,548, and IBM DB2 rounds out the top five.

AWS remains the dominant cloud platform with 54.22% usage, while Google Cloud (31.05%) and Microsoft Azure (30.77%) have both seen significant growth.

In IDE usage, Visual Studio Code leads with 71.06% adoption, followed by Visual Studio (33.03%), Notepad++ (29.71%), IntelliJ (28.74%) and Vim (24.19%).

For the full results, visit the Stack Overflow Insights page.