By ByteBot
BairesDev just named its first-ever Developer’s Choice Award winners, and the list reveals what elite engineering teams actually depend on when projects go live. GitHub Copilot, Cypress, DBeaver, Jira, and GitLab CI/CD took top honors—not from marketing teams or influencers, but from senior developers who build systems across fintech, healthtech, logistics, and 130+ other industries. These are the tools that survive enterprise scale.
The awards aren’t a popularity contest. BairesDev’s senior developers represent the top 1% of 2.5 million annual applications, with an average of 10+ years experience. They pass through multi-stage vetting—80+ role-specific tests, HR interviews, technical interviews—before working on client projects. When this group agrees on five tools, that’s signal, not noise.
“Our teams build complex systems at scale, and these winners represent the ‘battle-tested’ stack,” said Justice Erolin, Chief Technology Officer at BairesDev. The selection criteria focused on three things: measurable impact on productivity, integration with existing workflows, and relevance to modern engineering challenges like AI-assisted development and CI/CD velocity.
GitHub Copilot: AI Assistance Is Table Stakes
GitHub Copilot won the AI-assisted development category, and the numbers explain why. The tool has reached 15 million users globally, with 90% of Fortune 100 companies using it. Developers code up to 55% faster, and 81.4% install the IDE extension on their first day. That’s not hype—that’s measurable adoption at scale.
AI coding tools were experimental two years ago. Now they’re standard. Copilot’s win signals that enterprise teams have moved past the “should we?” question to “which one works best?” The answer, according to BairesDev’s developers: the one with proven GitHub integration and mass adoption.
Cypress and GitLab CI/CD: Quality and Velocity Matter
Cypress took the test automation award, reflecting a shift in developer priorities. Modern teams don’t just ship fast—they ship reliably. Cypress has been adopted by 6,659+ companies and is built specifically for modern JavaScript frameworks. It’s fast, developer-friendly, and integrates seamlessly into CI/CD pipelines.
GitLab CI/CD won for continuous integration and deployment, bringing enterprise-grade features that GitHub Actions requires manual configuration for. GitLab offers built-in support for canary deployments, blue-green deployments, and rolling updates—all out-of-the-box. For teams managing complex pipelines, that’s the difference between spending a week configuring deploys and spending an hour.
Together, Cypress and GitLab represent the modern DevOps reality: automated testing isn’t optional, and deployment velocity is a competitive advantage.
DBeaver and Jira: Boring Tools That Work
DBeaver won the database management category, and it won’t make headlines. It supports 100+ databases in one tool, with enterprise features like NoSQL support, Git integration, and task scheduling. For teams managing PostgreSQL, MongoDB, MySQL, and three other databases across five projects, DBeaver is the difference between juggling six tools and using one.
Jira took project management, which surprises no one. It’s used by 300,000+ companies globally and 83% of Fortune 500 organizations. Jira is complex, expensive, and often criticized—but when enterprise teams need to track work across distributed developers, integrate with CI/CD, and maintain compliance, the alternatives don’t cut it. That’s why it’s still the standard.
What This Means for Development Teams
These five tools reveal where developer priorities sit in 2025. AI assistance is standard, not experimental. Quality and testing are emphasized, not optional. DevOps velocity matters, and developer experience drives adoption more than feature lists.
The “essential enterprise tech stack” concept matters because it provides a benchmark. These aren’t the sexiest tools—they’re the ones that work when your deploy fails at 2 AM. They survived contact with projects across 130+ industries, multiple tech stacks, and teams building everything from fintech platforms to logistics systems.
Tool selection should be measurement-driven, not trend-driven. When evaluating your own stack, look at real-world usage data, not marketing claims. Prioritize integration over features. Measure impact on productivity, quality, and velocity. And pay attention when the top 1% of developers agree on something—because that’s signal.
The full list of winners and selection criteria is available in BairesDev’s official announcement. For broader context on developer tool trends, the Stack Overflow 2025 Developer Survey provides additional industry benchmarks.
