In this article, I will share with you my list of the top tools to use when building your first web application using the MERN stack What is the MERN stack The MERN stack stands for MongoDB, Express.js, React.js, Node.js which are tools you can use to make complete web applications. The main advantage of using this stack is using only one programming language which is JavaScript in the complete development cycle. Global tools to use on all your app Npm or Yarn which are tools to use to install the different packages of your web application Node.js Some code editor like Visual Studio Code Tools to use on your Frontend stack If you are building a single page application, you can use Create-react-app to generate your frontend code. If you are building a static website, you can try Gatsby For state management, you can use Redux To perform unit testing and end to end testing on your code, you can use and Jest cypress , or some similar hosting platform to deploy your frontend code Vercel Netlify Tools to use on your Backend stack to create your backend endpoints Express to test your backend code Jest An instance of MongoDB on your server to connect to your MongoDB instance from your backend code Mongoose Some hosting service like or to deploy your backend code Firebase Heroku