Ruby on Rails Development Companies

Even though it powers giants like GitHub and Shopify, the market share and popularity of Ruby development are far from big. Such limited demand goes hand-in-hand with a limited market offer, making the search for good Ruby on Rails development companies a real challenge. Well, not anymore! We have handpicked the top companies specializing in Ruby on Rails and listed them all in the table below. If you’re interested in the detailed description of the criteria used to rank these companies, just scroll past the table. Down there, you will also find a quick guide on how to make the most out of this page.

Filters
Comapny Size

Company Size

Freelancer

2-9

10-24

25-49

50-99

100-249

250+

Undisclosed

Hourly Rate

Hourly Rate

$0-$24

$25-$49

$50-$99

$100-$149

$150-$199

$200+

Undisclosed

Min. Project Size

Min. Project Size

Undisclosed

$1.000

$5.000

$10.000

$25.000

$50.000

$100.000

$500.000

8 Top Ruby on Rails Developers

Invensis Inc

Invensis is a leading business process outsourcing firm, providing an extensive range of services including IT, finance and accounting (F&A), revenue cycle management, transactional management, end to end e-commerce support, back office services, and more. Since 2000, Invensis has been catering to the diverse outsourcing needs of clients for multiple industries and constantly striving to add value to clients’ businesses. See profile
Service focus

Business Services

Outsourcing

Web Development

Non-Voice BPO/Back Office Services

Key features

Undisclosed

Undisclosed

250+

United States, Delaware, Wilmington

Table XI

Table XI is among the leading software development companies in Chicago which invests in clean code and robust design. Additionally, the team fosters a collaborative culture, putting the customer at the heart of every product decision. See profile
Service focus

Mobile App Development

Custom Software Development

UI/UX Design

Key features

$ 100,000

$ 150-199

25-49

United States, Illinois, Chicago

Railsware

Railsware is a premium software development consulting company focused on delivering great web and mobile applications. Combining relevant start-up industry experience with integrated design and engineering practices, this company is uniquely positioned to help you succeed. See profile
Service focus

Web Development

Custom Software Development

Mobile App Development

Key features

$ 50,000

$ 50-99

100-249

Poland, Kraków

Planet Argon

Planet Argon’s specialized Ruby on Rails development services include maintenance and support for tailored applications for established companies. Its team helps clients make the most of their existing software investment by writing maintainable code to support their business for years to come. See profile
Service focus

Web Development

Custom Software Development

Ecommerce Services

Key features

$ 50,000

$ 150-199

25-49

United States, Oregon, Portland

Hashrocket

Hashrocket has rightfully earned a place among the greatest web development agencies in the USA. With a team fluent in Ruby on Rails, React Native, React, and Elixir, Hasrocket delivers world-class, user-centered design and development. See profile
Service focus

Web Development

Mobile App Development

Ecommerce Services

Key features

$ 50,000

$ 150-199

25-49

United States, Florida, Jacksonville Beach

Moove It

Founded in 2002, Moove It has been designing and developing intuitive, reliable software solutions that stay sustainable in the long run. In custom software, as well as the development of mobile and advanced web apps, they retain high product quality as clients scale their growth. See profile
Service focus

Custom Software Development

Web Development

Mobile App Development

Key features

$ 10,000

$ 50-99

100-249

United States, Texas, Austin

Eight

Eight Bit Studios creates award-winning apps and memorable client experiences with its crew of tech experts who specialize in UX, UI, development, testing, and project management. The team has experience in solving pain points for clients, from billion-dollar enterprises to self-funded startups. See profile
Service focus

Product Design

UI/UX Design

Key features

$ 5,000

$ 150-199

25-49

United States, Illinois, Chicago

VT Labs

VT Labs is a full-cycle software development company. Our greatest strengths are Ruby on Rails, React, Headless, and eCommerce development. We're the Top-3 Shopify Developers in Ukraine. We keep scalability a priority with headless architecture and Shopify Plus. Our mission is to eliminate bottlenecks that hold you back from getting things done. If you're looking to PWA, Shopify custom app, marketplace, ERP, migrate, integrate APIs, design, or UX testing, you have come to the right profile. See profile
Service focus

Web Design

Ecommerce Development

Shopify Design & Development

Web Development

Key features

Undisclosed

$ 25-49

10-24

Estonia

Ranking the Top Ruby on Rails Companies

Our aim is to objectively assess the top web development companies working with Ruby on Rails so that you’re able to zero in on the most suitable vendor for your business needs. To achieve this aim, we followed a detailed and comprehensive evaluation methodology. It takes into account important factors like experience in the domain, feedback from past clients, portfolio, project management style, and team’s expertise in the key departments of a given Ruby on Rails development company. Given below is a more detailed description of how we evaluate the companies on our long list to narrow them down to the top 10.

Website Visit

The first step on our journey is to visit Ruby companies’ websites. During this stage, we consider the size of the company and its history with Ruby on Rails development. Since RoR has been around for more than ten years, we favor companies that have a long history of using this open-source framework to build digital products. Moreover, we determine each company’s industry and client focus to get a general idea of its team’s expertise. 

To further examine their capabilities and experience, we check the companies’ project portfolios, as well as their case studies. At this point, we learn about their approach and if they were able to live up to clients’ expectations. We also try to get a preliminary idea of what Ruby on Rails development services they offer before we move on to a more detailed evaluation.

Skills and Services Evaluation

First and foremost, a Ruby on Rails developer needs to be able to write clean, compact, easy-to-understand, and easy-to-scale code. Ruby is an object-oriented programming language (OOP), and in OOP, the only way to achieve a software design that’s understandable, flexible, and easy to maintain is to follow the SOLID principles. 

The Five SOLID Principles

The primary design principles that we expect Ruby experts on our list to adhere to are as follows:

Single Responsibility Principle

This principle states that a class should have only one responsibility — that is, changes made in one part of the software’s specification should be able to affect the class specification. The benefits of having small, well-organized classes include fewer test cases, fewer dependencies, and easier searching.

Open-Closed Principle

According to this principle, classes should be open for extension but closed for modification. This prevents the modification of existing code, which could potentially create new bugs. The exception, of course, is when existing code already has a bug and needs fixing.

Liskov Substitution Principle

This states that objects in a program should be replaceable with instances of their subtypes without altering a program’s correctness. That is, if class B is a subtype of class A, Ruby on Rails developers should be able to replace A with B without disrupting the program’s behavior. 

Interface Segregation Principle

The meaning of this principle is that multiple client-specific interfaces are better than one general-purpose interface. By splitting larger interfaces into smaller ones, we can ensure that implementing classes is only concerned with the methods that are of interest to them. 

Dependency Inversion Principle

This principle refers to the decoupling of software modules, which ensures that instead of high-level modules that depend on low-level modules, both depend on abstractions. Testing individual modules is a lot easier than when they’re coupled together.

Languages and Frameworks

The fundamental thing to understand about RoR is that Ruby is a general-purpose programming language, while Rails is a web application framework. Rails is just one of the frameworks available to developers working with Ruby. We made sure to also list the Ruby on Rails development companies that are experienced with alternative Ruby frameworks. This is because, in certain cases, it’s better to use frameworks other than Rails. Here are some of the most commonly used Ruby frameworks other than Rails:

Sinatra

This domain-specific language (DSL) allows quick and effortless Ruby on Rails web development. It doesn’t support the model-view-controller (MVC) architectural pattern used in many other frameworks, but its very simplicity enables the rapid creation of a variety of Ruby-based web apps.

Grape

This API framework for Ruby runs on Rack (the underlying technology behind nearly all frameworks in the Ruby world) or complementary web application frameworks such as Sinatra by providing a simple DSL.

Padrino

Ruby developers would use this lightweight open-source, Sinatra-based framework to simplify the development of a variety of web applications. One of its greatest advantages is that it doesn’t have default libraries for concerns like JavaScript, testing, and mocking, allowing developers to choose among libraries according to their needs.

Hanami

Previously known as Lotus, this relatively young web framework simplifies custom web application development for an RoR development company by enforcing good code structure and providing ready-to-use libraries. It also uses content delivery networks to deliver responses much faster than other frameworks and consumes almost 60% less memory than other frameworks.

Other prominent frameworks used in Ruby on Rails development include Cuba, Roda, Goliath, Scorched, Trailblazer, Pakyow, Hobbit, Crepe, and Nancy. 

Application Servers

When considering frameworks, we also consider experience with application servers — software frameworks that let the facility create web applications as well as the server environment to run these applications. The factors that decide which app server to choose include the server’s raw speed and its handling of slow clients, slow apps, and slow I/O. The Ruby ecosystem generally uses one of the following four application servers:

Puma

It’s a simple, fast, threaded, and highly concurrent HTTP 1.1 server for Ruby/Rack applications. It has gained popularity among Ruby on Rails programmers because it can tackle a number of the problems seen in Unicorn, which can exacerbate memory leak issues and open a susceptibility to slow user attacks. 

Unicorn

This is an HTTP server for Rack applications designed to serve only fast clients on low-latency, high-bandwidth connections and take advantage of the features in UNIX or UNIX-like kernels. It uses a master/worker architecture, where a master process forks to worker processes and controls them. 

Passenger

It’s an application server for Ruby, Python, and Node.js, optimized for performance, low memory usage, and ease of use. While its open-source version has a multi-process, single-threaded operation mode, its Enterprise version can also be configured to work in multi-threaded mode.

Thin

Another popular choice among Ruby on Rails programmers, Thin claims to be the most secure, stable, fast, and extensible among web servers in the ecosystem. It’s designed to work within any framework implementing the Rack specification by loading Rack configuration files directly. Thin is also capable of handling long-running requests. 

Finally, to deliver a fully functional web solution, companies need to be proficient in languages like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, as well as front-end frameworks such as Angular or React. When assessing these, we follow the evaluation methodology devised for the leading web development companies.

Tools

Along with the above, we test Ruby on Rails development companies’ expertise in a range of other essential tools:

Testing Gems

Gems are software packages or libraries that run like applications and serve specific functions. As the name suggests, these are gems used to test the code. Some important testing gems are as follows:

RSpec

RSpec is a domain-specific language testing tool that describes how the code behaves from the perspective of methods and classes. This is different from describing how the application works.

Minitest

Minitest provides a complete suite of testing facilities for Ruby. It’s part of the Ruby standard library (in Ruby 1.9 and above) and supports behavior-driven development, mocking, and benchmarking.

Capybara

Capybara helps Rails developers test web applications by simulating how a real user would interact with the app. It can receive pages, parse the HTML, and submit forms.

Cucumber

Cucumber is another tool for understanding how a real user would interact with an application, particularly JavaScript-driven user interface elements. It does this by starting a browser in the background, clicking links, filling out forms, etc. 

FactoryBot

FactoryBot provides factory methods to create text fixtures for automated software testing. In Ruby on Rails, it can replace Rails’s built-in fixture mechanism, allowing Ruby on Rails developers to define a different setup for each test and avoid dependencies within the test suite.

VCR

VCR works in combination with another gem called WebMock to record HTTP responses made by the code. These recordings, known as “cassettes,” can help developers get faster responses without having to write long codes since they don’t have to ask the real API.

Version Managers

Different projects might require different versions of Ruby to be installed on the same device. A version manager helps Rails developers switch easily between different versions so they can work on multiple projects at the same time. Version managers also facilitate smooth coordination between distributed teams and can allow developers to revert specific files or the entire project to a previous state. The most popular version managers are these:

RVM

Widely considered the norm by many Ruby on Rails development companies, Ruby Version Manager (RVM) is a command-line tool that allows easy installation and management and makes it easy to work with multiple Ruby environments, from interpreters to sets of gems. It lets developers deploy each project with its own completely self-contained and dedicated environment, including the gems required for each application. 

rbenv

rbenv has a contrasting approach to RVM in that it’s lightweight and keeps things simple. It lets other tools handle a number of aspects of the process and focuses only on Ruby versioning. A Ruby on Rails agency might prefer it over RVM because it doesn’t override the cd shell command to load environment variables, which can cause unexpected behavior. rbenv uses something known as shims to execute commands, which is a simpler way for the system to choose which Ruby version to execute.

Git

Git is a more agnostic version management tool. It’s popular for its superfast speed, efficient performance, cross-platform usage, easy tracking of code changes, and easy maintenance, as well as a GUI that can speed up a number of steps. 

Code Review

Code review tools or code analyzers help Rails developers keep their code clean and organized while developing a large Rails application. Here are some of the common tools in this category:

Rubocop

This is a static code analyzer that can be used to check if the code complies with the Ruby community code guidelines. Its main advantage is its high configurability, achieved partly through four sub-analyzers (called “cops”). The developer can specify which cops to use, which files to include or exclude, and make use of other configuration options.

SimpleCov

SimpleCov provides an efficient way for a Rails development company to assess the effectiveness of code-testing. When this gem is run with a Rails application, it counts the number of times each line of application code is run during the test suite. 

RubyCritic

A relatively new gem, RubyCritic packs the functionality of three older static analysis gems — Reek, Flay, and Flog — and helps with code duplication detection and other types of analysis by creating nicely structured HTML files. This type of output also makes it easy to overview and comment with other team members.

Rails Best Practices

This static code analyzer detects code smells (a source code characteristic that indicates a deeper problem) in Rails-specific coding. Moreover, it offers suggestions like adding database indexes and restricting auto-generated routes to let the developer refactor the code and learn the best practices.

Authorization

Most web applications require an authorization system, which controls what a user is allowed to do. Ruby on Rails programmers have specific gems like the following to help with this:

Devise

Devise is more an authentication gem than an authorization one in that it verifies who users are through a username and password combination.

OmniAuth

OmniAuth is a library that standardizes multi-provider authentication for web applications. The combination of Devise and OmniAuth makes it really simple to set up social media login buttons with less than a dozen lines of code. 

CanCanCan

The authorization scheme generally seen in applications tends to be set up ad hoc and leads to very messy view code, with several “if/then”-type statements littered throughout. CanCanCan makes Ruby on Rails software development much easier because it elegantly defines user access permissions by defining the authorization scheme centrally.

WashOut

SOAP, or Simple Object Access Protocol, is an XML-based protocol for accessing web services over HTTP. The SOAP web services architecture is based on interactions between three components — a service provider, a service requester, and an optional service registry. WashOut is a gem that greatly simplifies the creation of SOAP service providers.

Background Job Processing

In any web application, there are some tasks that are processed outside the usual request-response workflow, mainly because they require more time to complete. These are known as background or asynchronous jobs. The most commonly used tools for this purpose in the Ruby development environment are the following:

Sidekiq

This is an open-source job scheduler that uses Redis, the extremely popular in-memory data store, to process jobs in a “first in/first out” sequence. Sidekiq’s advantages include its high speed and built-in dashboard to view all job queues. 

Resque

Resque is another popular Redis-backed tool for creating background jobs among Ruby on Rails development companies, placing these jobs in multiple queues, and processing them later. These background jobs can be any Ruby class or module that responds to “perform.”

Interactive Shell

An interactive shell is a tool that allows Ruby programs and statements to be run interactively from a command line. A Ruby development company can use it for debugging programs and troubleshooting gems. 

IRB

Interactive Ruby Shell is the default interactive programming environment that comes with Ruby. It provides command history, line editing, and job control — and it can communicate directly as a shell script over the internet and interact with a live server. 

Pry

Pry is a runtime developer console and an alternative to IRB. It tries to bring what’s known as REPL-driven programming (Read, Eval, Print, Loop) to Ruby. The advantages it might offer Ruby on Rails development companies include its flexibility — it allows significant user customization — as well as several other features like syntax highlighting, source code browsing, a live help system, and command shell integration.

IDE

An Integrated Development Environment is a software application for computer programming consisting of three main parts: the source code editor (to write the program code), the build automation tool (to compile the code), and the debugger (to test the code for errors). 

RubyMine

RubyMine is built specifically for a Ruby on Rails programmer to leverage the full power of the ecosystem. It can be used to build complex applications and develop server-side code with Ruby on Rails and client-side code with React and other JavaScript frameworks. The most popular IDE used by Ruby developers, RubyMine even offers seamless integration to other systems such as Git and SQL.

Deployment Automation

A deployment automation tool simplifies the process of making a new version of an application available on one or more web servers while also handling supporting tasks such as changing the databases.

Capistrano

Capistrano, an open-source tool distributed using the RubyGems distribution channel, is by far the most popular option for deployment automation with Ruby on Rails. In the simplest terms, it allows a developer to copy code from the source control repository to the server via SSH (a protocol to operate network services securely over an unsecured network) and perform critical pre- and post-deployment functions.

Databases

Ruby on Rails developers also need to have a strong understanding of database management systems (DBMS). Traditionally, it’s relational DBMS like MySQL or Postgres that are useful in web development. However, in the last decade or so, non-relational DBMSs, which deal with data modeled differently from the tabular relations used in relational databases, have become popular as well. 

Popular non-relational DBMSs include MongoDB, Redis, Amazon DynamoDB, Couchbase, and HBase.  Even though these are rarely used in the Ruby on Rails environment, we’ve included companies that rely on them so you have multiple options to consider.

ORM (Object-Relational Mapping)

Object-relational mapping is a programming technique that converts data between incompatible type systems using OOP languages. In other words, it connects the rich objects of an application to the data in a database management system. The tools available to Ruby on Rails developers for ORM include the following:

Active Record

Active Record is the default ORM layer supplied with Rails. It provides Ruby on Rails company with an interface and binding between the tables in a relational database and the Ruby program code that manipulates the database records. Active Record is generally used with relational databases.

ORM Mongoid

Mongoid is the mapping tool for MongoDB, a popular non-relational database management system written in Ruby. It incorporates the features of Active Record along with MongoDB’s schema-less and performant document-based design. Beyond this, the purpose of the tool is the same as any standard mapper used for Ruby web development.

Management and Communication

One of the final, but no less important, steps in our evaluation of the best Rails developers is the assessment of each developer team’s communication style. Based on industry standards, we rate companies higher if they follow SCRUM, where project managers frequently communicate with product owners and send regular updates on completed tasks and overall progress.

Pricing Models and Value for Money

Working with Ruby isn’t very common, so it isn’t cheap — nor should it be. There are certain industry standards that companies adhere to, and any significant differences (either on the lower or the higher end of the scale) are an indicator that something’s off. In these cases, we skip ranking that company in our table.

How to Find the Best Ruby on Rails Company for You

We’ve taken care to ensure that all the Ruby on Rails developers on our list satisfies a high standard of service. However, we also understand that every project has its own specific requirements, which can’t necessarily be fulfilled by every development company. Therefore, here are a few additional steps you need to take to make sure you hire the right partner.

Have a Clear Outline of What You Need to Have Done

Having a clear understanding of the work you need to have done (including timelines, deliverables, and targets) is the first step toward successfully shortlisting your companies and ultimately finding your best match. You can’t hire the right Rail developers for you if you aren’t sure what you’re hiring them for.

Are You a Match?

The next step is to make sure that the company’s past experience — as gathered from their portfolio and case studies — reflects the kind of work you want to see done. It’s equally important that you check if the company has experience working with companies of your size and from your industry niche.

Budget Definition

Finally, you have to define the resources you can allocate for the project and compare them against the rates of the companies on the list. Once you’re done with all these steps, you should be able to find a good selection of Ruby on Rails development companies that fit your needs to a T.