Who Still Uses Ruby on Rails in 2026? GitHub & More

Ruby on Rails, the open-source web framework built on Ruby, still powers production applications at some of the biggest names in tech, and its adoption is showing fresh signs of life heading into 2026.

GitHub, Shopify, Intercom, and Doximity all run Rails at serious scale. Newer entrants like 1Password have joined the ecosystem in just the past few years. Developer communities back this up too. On forums like Hacker News and Reddit, engineers with decades of experience across multiple frameworks continue to single out Rails for how quickly it lets them ship real, working features and not just prototypes.

With the right team behind it, Rails still lets companies build and ship secure, scalable applications faster than most alternatives. This article breaks down which industries and companies rely on Rails today, why it keeps earning that trust, and what needs to be true for it to work for you too.

Why Ruby on Rails Still Matters in 2026?

Most engineering teams don't pick a framework because it's trendy. They pick it because it gets a product in front of customers faster, with fewer people, and it keeps working once the company scales past its first hundred users.

That's the core driver behind Rails' staying power. Its convention over configuration philosophy removes a long list of decisions developers would otherwise make manually: file structure, naming, and request routing come pre-decided. Fewer decisions early on means less time spent on scaffolding and more time spent on the product itself.

The downstream effect shows up directly in headcount and velocity. Judge.me runs a 500,000-shop platform with just over 10 engineers. Doximity deploys 80+ times a day with a 150-person development team. That ratio of output to team size is the business case in practice: fewer engineers required to hit the same milestones means lower burn rate and faster time to revenue.

How Rails Actually Creates That Value?

Strip away the marketing language, and the mechanism behind Rails' productivity is straightforward. Convention over configuration means a new developer can open an unfamiliar Rails codebase and already know where the models, views, and controllers live. No need to read a style guide first.

That predictability compounds. Faster onboarding turns into faster shipping, since engineers spend their first weeks not learning where things are but writing features. The team isn't blocked untangling custom architecture decisions someone made three years ago. And faster shipping turns into faster iteration on customer feedback. 

Rails 8.1, released in late 2025, pushes this further. The update brought structured event logging, database enums and generated columns, and dozens of quality-of-life fixes, built from more than 500 contributors and 2,500 commits since the prior major release. None of it is flashy. All of it shaves hours off the parts of development that don't touch the product itself, which is exactly where the framework earns its reputation for developer happiness. Teams choose Rails for development not without reason.

Which Industries Use Ruby on Rails?

Rails shows up wherever speed, security, and the ability to scalematter more than chasing the latest JavaScript trend. Five industries account for most of its current use.

Fintech and healthcare lean hardest on Rails' built-in protections against common vulnerabilities like SQL injection and cross-site scripting. After all, both industries carry real regulatory weight if something goes wrong. E-commerce platforms use it to remain agile, secure, and robust enough to scale during peak traffic spikes, incorporate new functionalities with zero friction, and swiftly respond to evolving market trends.

Which Companies Use Ruby on Rails?

Seven companies stand out for how deeply Rails runs through their infrastructure, and for how openly they talk about it. Each one made a deliberate choice to stay on Rails through years of scaling, well past the initial launch decision.

GitHub

GitHub is the world's leading code hosting and collaboration platform, and it has run as a Rails monolith since its earliest days. As the team explains on GitHub's own engineering blog, the codebase has grown to nearly 2 million lines, with more than 1,000 engineers committing to it daily. The platform still ships code up to 20 times a day.

The team keeps this pace through a weekly automated upgrade process. Every Monday, a scheduled workflow opens a pull request that bumps Rails to the latest commit, cutting upgrade timelines from months to under a week. They've matched that speed on Ruby itself, moving from Ruby 3.1 to 3.2 within a month of its release.

GitHub sticks with Rails because it allows rapid iteration while not sacrificing stability at massive scale. Weekly upgrades mean developers get the latest performance improvements immediately, and security patches become routine.

Intercom

Intercom builds AI-powered customer service tools, including its flagship AI agent, Fin, and the Intercom Customer Service Suite. Founded in 2011, the company runs its entire platform on a two-million-line Rails monolith.

At peak load, Intercom serves 150,000 HTTPS requests per second and 50,000 background job requests per second, driving more than two million SQL calls and twenty million cache hits every second. Their deployment pipeline runs 100,000+ tests per pull request with a typical completion time of six minutes, and full deployments finish in under twelve minutes, with rollbacks taking just two.

Rails has been core to Intercom since Rails 3.0.3, and the company follows trunk-based development, merging small pull requests to main throughout the day. Scaling has stayed simple: doubling request volume mostly just means adding more hosts. Intercom became a founding Core member of the Rails Foundation in 2022.

1Password

1Password built its name in password management and has since expanded into Extended Access Management through its acquisition of Kolide, which integrates with SSO providers to keep unsecured devices off company systems. Kolide serves companies including Databricks, Discord, Anduril, Robinhood, Hugging Face, and Asana.

Kolide runs as a Rails application handling thousands of web requests per second and billions of asynchronous jobs monthly, with 99.99% annual uptime. Started as a Rails app in 2019, it currently runs on Rails 8, Rack 3, and Ruby 3.3.

1Password chose Rails for Kolide because of its security-focused defaults, including CSP DSL, attribute-level database encryption, and signed IDs, all of which line up with 1Password's security-first mission. Since the acquisition outperformed expectations, 1Password became a core member of the Rails Foundation and now has leadership on the foundation's board.

Doximity

Doximity is the largest digital platform for U.S. medical professionals, serving over 2 million healthcare workers, including 80% of U.S. doctors. As of early 2024, 17 of the top 20 hospitals used its enterprise platforms, and its Doximity Dialer product alone supported 63 million telehealth visits in a single year.

The company runs a 15-year-old Rails monolith that started on Rails 2.3.5 and now runs on Rails 7, with over 30,000 commits from hundreds of contributors supporting 45+ internal applications. A development team of 150+ engineers deploys 80+ times a day.

Doximity picked Rails for rapid prototyping, and it paid off during the pandemic, when the Dialer team scaled from 3 to 16 engineers in a matter of weeks to meet demand. Tools like the Large Hadron Migrator let the team run zero-downtime migrations on tables with hundreds of millions of rows, avoiding the need for major rewrites.

Shopify

Shopify calls itself the biggest Rails app in the world, and the claim holds up: the platform lets millions of merchants build full online stores. Shopify's own engineering team has written about how Shopify Core, its main Rails monolith, uses a podded architecture for horizontal scaling, splitting the database into subsets where each pod handles a distinct portion of shops independently.

Every table in the podded database ties back to a specific shop, which lets Shopify process HTTP requests, background jobs, and async events at scale while keeping merchant data isolated. This sidesteps the complexity of a full microservices rewrite.

Shopify built custom tooling on top of Rails to support this, including a git-based translation platform and a maintenance task system layered over Active Job. The team enforces foreign keys through ActiveRecord models and uses structure.sql files instead of replaying years of migrations, which keeps deployments fast.

Gusto

Gusto provides HR, payroll, and benefits software, and started life in 2011 as ZenPayroll before rebranding in 2015. The company has grown to roughly 3,000 employees, with hundreds of Rails developers across its engineering org.

Gusto's infrastructure runs on two Rails monoliths, and the team adopted packwerk to modularize gradually, splitting the codebase into domain-based packages without a full architectural rewrite. That approach keeps complexity manageable inside large monolithic applications.

The company backs its Rails commitment publicly. Its Head of Security maintains Brakeman, a widely used static analysis tool for Rails security audits, and Gusto sponsors open-source contributors and Ruby user groups, alongside developer events in Denver, New York, and San Francisco.

Judge.me

Judge.me runs a product reviews platform founded in 2015, helping merchants collect and manage customer feedback. The company now supports more than 500,000 shops across 140+ countries, processing over 70 million orders and 2 million verified reviews every month.

That entire platform runs on a single Rails monolith, maintained by a lean team of just over 10 engineers. It's a clean example of what convention over configuration buys a small team: the ability to keep a rich feature set running at global scale while keeping a relatively small headcount.

Judge.me became a Core member of the Rails Foundation in 2025, a decade after founding, and continues to sponsor London's Rails meetup as part of its investment in the ecosystem that runs its business.

Is Ruby on Rails Still Being Improved?

Rails keeps evolving well past its original 2004 release. Rails 8.1 shipped in late 2025 as the current major release, and it's a genuinely substantial one with over 500 contributors, 2,500 commits, and a set of features aimed squarely at daily developer pain points.

The release added structured event logging through a new Rails.event API, so applications can emit clean, queryable JSON logs. It introduced database enums and generated columns, association deprecation warnings to catch breaking changes early, and Local CI, which lets teams run a full suite of tests and security checks locally through a single command before anything reaches the cloud.

All of this builds on Rails 8's No PaaS Required philosophy, which shipped in 2024 with Kamal 2 for one-command deployment to any server, cloud or otherwise. Together with Solid Queue, Solid Cache, and Solid Cable, teams can now run production Rails applications on SQLite alone, with enterprise-grade performance and none of the third-party infrastructure that used to be mandatory.

The Rails Foundation keeps growing too, with new Core and Contributing members joining regularly. That points to renewed business investment and not a framework coasting on legacy adoption.

What Do You Need for Rails to Benefit You?

Rails isn't a fit for every team or every problem. 

It works best with engineers who already know Ruby, or a team willing to spend a few weeks getting comfortable with its conventions. Teams without that background can still succeed. Shopify and GitHub both did. 

Rails assumes you're building a full-featured web application, and it shows its limits on purely real-time systems or machine-learning-heavy products. That’s where Python's ecosystem has a clearer edge. Most Rails-based companies handle this by running Rails as the core application and reaching for specialized services where Ruby isn't the right tool, keeping one framework at the center.

Finally, Rails 8's Kamal-based deployment model removes a lot of the operational overhead that used to require a dedicated platform team. Teams not using deep DevOps resources can now partner with an experienced Ruby on Rails development company to get a production-ready Rails app running on a single server in minutes, significantly lowering the barrier to operating this framework at scale.

Is Rails a Framework, or Infrastructure?

The companies that stay on Rails treat the framework as infrastructure. GitHub's weekly upgrade discipline, Shopify's podded architecture, and Doximity's zero-downtime migration tooling are all systems-level decisions that compound over years, built for the long run rather than a single sprint.

That's the real lesson for teams evaluating Rails today. The framework rewards organizations that invest in keeping it current, and that build their own tooling on top of it, the same way these seven companies did. Chase the newest framework every two years, and the time goes into migrations and not shipping. Commit to one that keeps improving under you, and the operational alignment pays off well past the first year.

Considering Rails for your next build, or wondering if your existing app should stay on it? Talk to Monterail's Ruby on Rails development team about what it would take to make it work for you.