9 Famous Node JS Apps: Examples

Node.js in action: Nine famous Node.js apps that nailed it

If you're evaluating whether Node.js is a good choice for your project, the best place to start is real-world proof. And that’s exactly what this article offers.

In this article, we’ll break down 9 real-world apps built with Node.js, explore why these companies chose it, and what kind of impact it had on performance, development speed, and user experience.

Let's dive in.

<h2 id="paypal">1. Paypal & Node.js</h2>

Paypal is one of the largest and most well-known fintech software companies worldwide. The platform enables its users to transact with each other online quickly and easily in more than 100 currencies.

According to Paypal, the service has over 305 million active customer accounts (as of 2019). The Company has been using Node.js to build the consumer-facing side of its web applications.

Why did they choose Node.js?

Jeff Harrel, Senior Director of Payments Products and Engineering at PayPal says:

<blockquote><p>Node.js helps us solve this (boundary between the browser and server) by enabling both the browser and server applications to be written in JavaScript. It unifies our engineering specialties into one team which allows us to understand and react to our users’ needs at any level in the technology stack.</p></blockquote>

Results:

The Node.js app was built almost twice as fast with fewer people, in 33% fewer lines of code and 40% fewer files (in comparison with previous Java-based application).

Building an app like Paypal requires solid expertise in both the financial industry and cybersecurity. However, finding such talents isn’t easy; that’s why companies like Paypal often choose to take the help of an external software development company with experience in building similar products (you can find a list of top fintech software development vendors in an article here).

<h2 id="linkedin">2. LinkedIn & Node.js</h2>

LinkedIn is a business-oriented social networking service found in 2002 in Mountain View, California. LinkedIn allows users to invite anyone (whether a site user or not) to become a connection.

It is available in 24 languages and already has more than 706 million members in over 200 countries and territories. LinkedIn uses Node.js to empower the server side of its mobile app.

Why did they choose Node.js?

According to LinkedIn’s Mobile Development Lead, Kiran Prasad:

<blockquote><p>One reason was scale. The second is, if you look at Node, the thing it’s best at doing is talking to other services.</p></blockquote>

Results:

When compared with the previous Ruby on Rails-based version, the new mobile app is up to 20 times faster and uses only a fraction of resources – servers were cut from 30 to 3. The development itself was unusually fast.

<h2 id="yahoo">3. Yahoo & Node.js</h2>

Yahoo is an American multinational technology company, focusing and globally recognized for its web portal, search engine, and related services. Their search engine shares 1.65% of the search engine market which in total counts 4.57 billion users.

<span class="colorbox1" es-test-element="box1"><p>Why so many big companies, from entirely different business branches, choose Node JS as a crucial part of their tech stack? Explore what makes Node JS so great.</p></span>

Why did they choose Node.js?

Eric Ferraiuolo, Principal Software Engineer at Yahoo explains:

<blockquote><p>You can make it scale, and it’s very performant, and every property that we’ve moved over to the Node.js stack has seen an increase in performance.</p></blockquote>

Results:

Node.js has changed and unified the frontend developer culture at Yahoo, it already powers multiple sites, and will soon power most of Yahoo.

<h2 id="mozilla">4. Mozilla & Node.js</h2>

Mozilla is a non-profit organization, mostly well-known for it’s free, open-source web browser (Firefox) available for Windows, OS X, Linux, Android, and Firefox OS, in +90 languages. As of June 2020, Firefox has approximately 8.5% of worldwide usage as a browser, making it the second most popular web browser.

Mozilla uses Node.js as a primary language in many of their web projects. One of them is the Mozilla Persona, a cross-platform sign-in technology.

Why did they choose Node.js?

Mark Mayo, Principal Engineer at Mozilla says:

<blockquote><p>We concretely decided to do Node for two reasons: One was the memory footprint” and “it was advantageous to be able to use the same language on the server side as well as the client side.”,“ It’s super empowering for the whole team.</p></blockquote>

<h2 id="netflix">5. Netflix & Node.js</h2>

Netflix is the world’s biggest global provider of video streaming including movies and television series, available in over 190 countries. As of July 2020, Netflix reported over 192 million subscribers worldwide, with more than 72 million in the U.S itself.

At Netflix, the whole user interface is built with Node. The technology proved so effective, that the company wants to use it also in other layers of the stack.

Why did they choose Node.js?

The team decided to use Node.js to achieve lightweight, modular and fast application. As a result, the startup time of their new app has been reduced by 70%.

<h2 id="uber">6. Uber & Node.js</h2>

Uber is an American multinational online transportation network company offering its services in over 80 countries and 900 cities worldwide (as of September 2020). The app pairs consumers with Uber drivers who use their own cars.

At the end of a ride, the complete fare is automatically billed to the customer’s credit card. As one of the first companies that put Node.js into full production, Uber has built its massive matching system on Node.js.

Why did they choose Node.js?

According to Uber, this technology has three core strengths:

• processes lots of information quickly;
• programs can be inspected and errors can be addressed on the fly – without requiring a restart, so Node.js developers can publish and deploy new code constantly;
• an active open source community continuously optimizes the technology, so it gets better all the time, practically on its own.

<h2 id="groupon">7. Groupon & Node.js</h2>

Groupon is a global e-commerce marketplace that connects subscribers with local merchants by offering activities, travels, goods, and services at special prices. In 2019, Groupon operated in 15 countries worldwide and had over 48 million active customers.

In June 2015, the company reported the finish of migration of the whole Groupon web and mobile traffic from Ruby on Rails application to a new Node.js stack.

Why did they choose Node.js?

Sean McCullough, former Enterprise Node.js Developer at Groupon lists reasons like a vibrant community, NPM, performance, and easy scalability.

Results:

In comparison with the earlier Ruby on Rails platform, web pages got faster by about 50% and are able to serve much higher traffic. Groupon states:

<blockquote><p>We’re serving the same amount of traffic with less hardware compared to the old stack. Teams are able to deploy changes to their applications independently. We’ve been able to make site-wide feature and design changes much more quickly than we would have been able to with our old architecture.</p></blockquote>

<span class="colorbox1" fs-test-element="box1"><p>Did you know, that JavaScript can be even faster? Explore a few tips&tricks about JavaScript performance.</p></span>

<h2 id="godaddy">8. GoDaddy & Node.js</h2>

GoDaddy is a publicly-traded Internet domain registrar and web hosting company. As of the end of 2019, with more than 19 million customers and 61 million domains under management, GoDaddy makes the world’s largest registrar.

In recent years company has revamped its entire backend to a fully open-source Node.js-based infrastructure.

Why did they choose Node.js?

According to Stephen Commisso, Senior Software Developer at GoDaddy, Node enables companies to build quality applications, deploy new features immediately, write unit and integration tests easily, REST easily. Another key feature is NPM access.

Results:

GoDaddy’s Vice President of Engineering, Antonio Silveira states:

<blockquote><p>We are now using about 10x fewer servers to host our customer websites and we reduced the Time To First Byte (TTFB) considerably from ~60ms to something around ~12ms. Performance is a key differentiator when we talk about web applications, including a better position in Google’s search results.</p></blockquote>

GoDaddy is now able to handle the same load with only 10% of the hardware.

<h2 id="ebay">9. eBay & Node.js</h2>

eBay is an American multinational e-commerce company, offering consumer-to-consumer and business-to-consumer internet sales services. It’s free to use for buyers; fees for listing and selling the items are applied only to sellers.

The service operates in 32 countries (as of 2019) and in the second quarter of 2020 reached 182 million active users.

Why did they choose Node.js?

Senthil Padmanabhan, Principal Web Engineer at eBay says:

<blockquote><p>We had two primary requirements for the project. First was to make the application as real time as possible–i.e., maintain live connections with the server. Second was to orchestrate a huge number of eBay-specific services that display information on the page–i.e.</p></blockquote>

Speed and simplicity, performance, scalability, feeling of transparency and control, single-threading, handling I/O-bound operations, not-blocking I/O, are only a few factors to mention that the company considered advantageous.

Why do big players choose Node.js: Solving real tech problems at scale

1. Escape legacy without the rewrite

Modernizing legacy systems is risky, expensive, and slow. Node.js gives enterprises a more agile path forward. Its lightweight, modular architecture makes it easy to decouple monoliths and gradually migrate to microservices - without halting the business.

Real-world example:
Walmart rebuilt parts of its backend with Node.js to improve scalability during peak traffic. The result? Their servers used 40% less CPU during high loads, and they handled 500 million page views on Black Friday without crashing.

2. Rapid development with a massive ecosystem

Speed matters. With over 2 million packages on npm, the Node.js ecosystem offers ready-to-use modules that drastically reduce development time. Your engineers can focus on solving business problems - not boilerplate.

Real-world example:
Netflix slashed startup time for its streaming service from 40 minutes to under a minute by moving from Java to Node.js. The team cited faster build times, unified tooling, and improved performance across their edge services.

3. Built for I/O-heavy and real-time workloads

APIs, chat apps, real-time dashboards - these are I/O-bound tasks that choke traditional stacks. Node.js thrives here thanks to its non-blocking event loop.

Real-world example:
PayPal moved from Java to Node.js for parts of their stack and saw:

• 35% drop in response time
• Double the number of requests per second
• A 60% productivity boost in developer output

4. Full-stack teams, less overhead

With JavaScript across the stack, you can build leaner teams that own features end-to-end. Fewer silos, fewer handoffs, faster iteration - and lower hiring and operational costs.

Real-world trend:
Companies like LinkedIn embraced Node.js to streamline their tech teams and speed up feature delivery. It allowed smaller teams to manage the entire stack efficiently, accelerating product cycles.

5. Optimized for cloud-native and edge deployments

Node.js is cloud-friendly out of the box. It’s lightweight, fast to spin up, and works seamlessly with container-based and serverless environments.

Real-world example:
Capital One leveraged Node.js in their microservices architecture to improve elasticity and reduce cloud costs, especially in their real-time customer interfaces.

6. Enterprise-grade support and stability

Backed by the OpenJS Foundation, Node.js has contributions from companies like Google, Microsoft, and IBM - ensuring long-term support, security patches, and predictable release cycles.

Enterprise assurance:
Node.js LTS (Long-Term Support) releases provide 18 months of active support followed by 12 months of maintenance, making it a safe bet for production environments.

7. Cross-platform development made simple

Need to support apps across Windows, Linux, and macOS? Node.js does it natively. It simplifies builds and makes DevOps smoother, especially for teams managing multi-environment pipelines.

Summary: Famous Node.js apps

There are many popular companies using Node.js on the backend of their applications. It’s performant, it’s JavaScript and it highly improves the development speed. If you want to achieve similar results, consider choosing Node.js for your next project.