We are happy to announce that we completely rebuilt analysis-tools.dev from scratch with more features and a new design!

This is a major milestone for us, as it marks the first time we sat down to reinvision what the project should become in the next few years.

Why A Rewrite?

The old site was built with Gatsby, which served us well, but we have outgrown it and could no longer add new features without major refactoring.

Ever since we started Analysis Tools in August 2020, we have been growing at a rapid pace. We now list over 600 tools, and we have seen a steady increase in traffic.

This growth has been great, but it has also come with some challenges.

• Finding the right tool was tedious because there were no search filters on the website.
• The tool recommendations were not very good. For example, we would recommend a formatter if you were on a page for a linter.
• The website layout looked dated and clearly done by non-designers (Jakub and I are both backend engineers).
• The old site took a long time to build because we rendered assets like screenshots during startup.

We also were not too happy with Gatsby anymore.

The upgrade from Gatsby v3 to v4 wasn't as smooth as we liked and there were quite a few breaking changes and it would have taken a lot of time to fix them.

Why Next.js?

In the meantime new player entered the scene: Next.js.

Initially we were skeptical if we should switch to Next.js. After all we had a working site and we didn't have a lot of time to rewrite it.

On the other hand we heard a lot of good things about Next.js and we were intrigued by the lightweight API and loosely coupled components. On top of that, Next.js has a great community and a lot of documentation. We figured that it might be easier to find help if we ran into problems and to onboard new contributors in the future.

Ghady, Our New Team Member

Speaking of which, we are very happy to announce that we have a new team member!

With Ghady Kalaany we found an amazing co-maintainer who has excellent frontend skills and is very familiar with Next.js. He built the initial design for the new site and wrote most of the frontend code. Welcome to the team, Ghady!

New Features!

The rewrite unlocked a plethora of new features, which we wanted to introduce for a long time, but were blocked by the limitations of the old codebase.

• Many search filters to find the right tool. Filter by language, license, etc.
• Tool rankings based on votes and recent page visits.
• The addition of dynamic analysis tools to the list.
• A new pipeline for assets (screenshots, videos, etc.) that works completely asynchronously.
• A little Github star history panel next to every tool.
• Special icons for our sponsors.

We're a big step closer to our goal of becoming the main platform for code quality.

Thanks

We would like to thank our sponsors for making this possible:

• DeepCode by Snyk
• Bearer
• CodeScene
• Semgrep
• Codiga

They have been incredibly supportive and we are very happy to have them on board. Their loyalty and support is what makes this project possible. Do pay them a visit and check out their tools if you want to support us.

We also thank our previous sponsors DeepSource and PVS-Studio.

If you are interested in sponsoring us, please get in touch. We have a lot of ideas for the future and we would love to have you on board. Let's discuss how we can make your tool more visible to the community.

That's all for now. We hope you like the new site! If a tool is missing or you have any other feedback, please let us know on Github. We'd love to hear from you. If you like to give us some feedback on the new design, please head over to our discussion thread on Github.

Your core team, Jakub Sacha, Ghady Kalaany, and Matthias Endler