Websites Built With Ruby on Rails, and What Each One Proves

Updated September 2026

GitHub, Shopify, GitLab, Basecamp, HEY and Doximity are websites built with Ruby on Rails, and every one of them still runs Rails in production. Each is confirmed by a dated first-party source: an engineering blog post, an official Rails Foundation case study, or paid Rails Foundation membership, all read on 4 September 2026. The pattern behind the list is consistent. Rails gets picked for transactional software with a database at the center, several kinds of user, and a long life ahead of it. Some famous names did move off. Twitch began as a Rails monolith and shifted toward Go services, and Coinbase moved a Rails payments service into a Go-first monorepo. Both happened after Rails had already carried the product for years, which is a normal ending for a framework choice.

Every customer app we ship runs on Ruby on Rails, and we operate a fleet of production Rails apps for our customers. Our AI agent, Leonardo, writes Rails code, and the people supervising it ship Rails daily. We also maintain an open-source Ruby on Rails AI framework on GitHub, LlamaBot, with the llama_bot_rails gem. The list below is not copied from a listicle. Every row carries a source I checked on 4 September 2026, and any company I could not confirm was cut.

What websites are built with Ruby on Rails?

The largest confirmed Rails websites are GitHub, Shopify, GitLab, Basecamp, HEY and Doximity. GitHub's engineering blog states that GitHub.com "has been a Ruby on Rails monolith since the beginning." The same post describes roughly a thousand engineers working inside it, and a weekly automated upgrade against the Rails main branch. That post is Building GitHub with Ruby and Rails, published in April 2023.

Shopify runs a whole site about its Rails work at railsatscale.com. Its post Under Deconstruction: The State of Shopify's Monolith describes a core monolith of Ruby and Rails applications running on Puma. Basecamp and HEY belong to 37signals, the company Rails was extracted from. Doximity has an official case study hosted on rubyonrails.org.

There is a second kind of evidence that is easy to miss. The Rails Foundation publishes the companies that pay to support the framework, and it describes them as companies that have been benefiting from Rails over the years. Core members are 1Password, 37signals, Cookpad, Doximity, Fin, Fleetio, GitHub, Judge.me, Procore and Shopify. Contributing members include AppSignal, Cedarcode, Chime, Clio, Fullscript, Gusto, Higher Pixels, makandra, Planet Argon, Planning Center, Renuo, Saeloun, SerpApi and TableCheck. A company writing a cheque to fund a framework in 2026 is a strong sign it still runs on it.

Rails website examples, with the evidence for each

The status column is the honest part. Current means a dated first-party source or live Foundation membership supports Rails use today. Historical means the company started on Rails and has since moved the product elsewhere.

Every source above was fetched on 4 September 2026, and stack facts age. A company can rewrite a service in a quarter without announcing it. If a name you expected is missing here, no dated first-party source confirmed it during that pass. Popular "built with Rails" listicles repeat claims that are ten years old, and several well-known names were cut from this page for that reason.

What do these Rails websites have in common?

Every current example is transactional software with a database at the center. Code hosting, e-commerce, DevOps, healthcare networking, payroll, construction management, legal practice management, banking and helpdesk software. None of them are brochure sites. All of them store records, change those records constantly, and have to be right about who changed what.

Three properties show up again and again. The first is many kinds of user in one system. A payroll product has employees, managers, accountants and administrators, and each one sees a different slice. The second is a long life. GitHub, Shopify and Basecamp have been running the same codebase for well over a decade, and Rails ships an explicit maintenance policy for that reason. The official policy gives each minor release bug fixes for one year and security fixes for two.

The third is a team moving fast on a big surface. Doximity's own case study reports over 150 developers pushing to production more than 80 times a day. Rails is opinionated about where code goes, so a new engineer finds the models, controllers and tests in the same places on every project. That convention is worth more at year five than any benchmark.

Which famous sites have left Rails, and why that is fine

Two departures are confirmed by the companies themselves. Twitch, which began as Justin.tv, published Breaking the Monolith at Twitch in March 2022. It confirms the product started as a Ruby on Rails monolith and that engineering's long-term goal was moving to Go-based services. Coinbase described moving a Rails payments service into a Bazel monorepo in a post dated January 2021.

Neither story is an indictment of Rails. Twitch built a video platform where the hard problem is streaming latency at enormous scale. Coinbase standardised on Go and a monorepo build system across many services. Rails carried both products through the years when the company had no idea what it would become, then a specialised runtime replaced part of it.

That is the normal life cycle for a framework choice. You pick the stack that puts a working product in front of customers fastest, then replace the small part that becomes a bottleneck at a scale you may never reach. A business with 40 staff is choosing between having software and having none. Nobody at that size is losing to Rails performance.

Is Ruby on Rails still used in 2026?

Yes. The current stable version is Rails 8.1.3.1, released on 29 July 2026, per the RubyGems API. Rails 8.1.0 arrived in October 2025 and Rails 8.0 in November 2024. The framework repository was pushed to on 4 September 2026 and carries close to 59,000 stars.

Ruby moved too, and this is the fact most people get wrong. Ruby's current major series is 4.0, not 3.x. Ruby 4.0.0 was released on 25 December 2025 and Ruby 4.0.6 on 14 July 2026, with the 3.4 branch still maintained. The dates are on the official Ruby releases page.

Recent Rails also removed dependencies. Rails 8 ships Solid Queue, Solid Cache and Solid Cable, which take background jobs, caching and websockets off Redis and put them in your database. The Rails 8 announcement reports Solid Queue running 20 million jobs a day for HEY and Solid Cache holding 10 terabytes at Basecamp. New apps also ship with Propshaft, Hotwire, Brakeman, RuboCop, GitHub Actions CI and Kamal deployment. That is a maintained framework getting simpler.

What does a Rails website look like from the inside?

A Rails site is five moving parts, and the same five sit behind GitHub and behind a 40-person contractor's job tracker. Models hold your data and its rules, one per real thing like a customer or an invoice. Controllers receive a request and decide what happens. Views render the HTML a person sees. A database, usually PostgreSQL, stores everything. Background jobs run the slow work, such as sending email, so the page never waits.

Modern Rails adds two pieces to that list. Hotwire updates parts of a page without a separate JavaScript application, so a small team can ship interactive screens. Active Storage handles file uploads. Everything sits in fixed folders, so a stranger can find their way around a Rails app in an hour. Our page on how to create a website with Ruby on Rails walks the build steps in order, from the first command to a live site.

A Rails website and a Rails web application are the same software. People say website when they mean the public pages and application when they mean the logged-in part, and Rails serves both from one codebase.

Rails examples you can actually open and read

Reading production Rails beats reading about it. Discourse, Mastodon and Chatwoot are large, actively maintained Rails applications with public source code, and cloning one shows how a serious Rails app is organised. The full list, with licences, star counts and last-push dates, is on our page about open-source Ruby on Rails apps worth reading. Start there rather than a tutorial repository, because tutorial code never has to survive a second year.

Where Rails is the wrong choice

Rails is a poor fit for a few real cases, and pretending otherwise costs people money. A brochure site with five pages and no logins does not need Rails or any framework. A native mobile app is a different job, though Rails is a fine backend behind one. Video streaming and other latency-bound systems belong on a runtime built for that, which is the Twitch story above. A team with no Ruby experience will be slower in Rails than in the stack it already knows.

Our own offer has limits too. We build custom business applications, so if you need a WordPress blog or a Shopify storefront, buy those instead and keep the money. An existing Rails app that only needs patching and version bumps is maintenance work. It costs far less than a rebuild, and our page on Rails upgrades and maintenance covers it.

What this means if you are choosing a stack for a business app

Two kinds of reader reach the bottom of this page. Some of you want to learn Rails and build the thing yourself. Go and do that. Start with the official Getting Started guide, read one of the open-source apps above, and pick a first project from our list of Rails project ideas worth building.

The rest of you do not want to become Rails developers. You run a company with 10 to 200 staff, the process lives in a spreadsheet, and you want the software every name in the table above already has. Leonardo writes the Rails code, and US-based engineers who ship Rails daily review every change before it reaches you. You get a standard Rails app on PostgreSQL, the same shape as the applications on this page, and the code lives in your own repository.

The fastest way to start is to hand us the spreadsheet you already run on. Leonardo reads the tabs, headers, formulas and dropdowns and builds a first working app from them. To see how the work is structured, read our page on the Ruby on Rails development company where AI writes the code. The piece on building AI features into Rails apps covers the architecture.

Frequently Asked Questions

What websites are built with Ruby on Rails?

GitHub, Shopify, GitLab, Basecamp, HEY and Doximity are the largest confirmed examples, and all of them still run Rails. Cookpad, Gusto, Procore, Chime and Clio pay to support Rails as Rails Foundation members. Twitch and Coinbase started on Rails and have since moved core parts of their products to Go.

Is Ruby on Rails still used in 2026?

Yes. The current stable version is Rails 8.1.3.1, released on 29 July 2026, and the framework repository was pushed to on 4 September 2026. Ruby itself moved to a 4.0 series, with Ruby 4.0.6 released on 14 July 2026. The Rails Foundation lists 24 paying member companies, including GitHub, Shopify and 1Password.

Is GitHub built on Ruby on Rails?

Yes. GitHub's own engineering blog states that GitHub.com has been a Ruby on Rails monolith since the beginning. The same post describes about a thousand engineers working in that codebase and a weekly automated upgrade against the Rails main branch. GitHub is also a core member of the Rails Foundation.

Does Shopify still use Ruby on Rails?

Yes. Shopify's engineering blog describes a core monolith made of Ruby and Rails applications running on Puma, and Shopify publishes ongoing Rails work at railsatscale.com. Shopify is also a core member of the Rails Foundation. Its engineering posts describe splitting parts out of the monolith, which is architecture work rather than a move off Rails.

What is the difference between a Rails website and a Rails web application?

There is no technical difference. Both terms describe the same Rails codebase serving HTTP requests. People usually say website when they mean public pages that anyone can read, and web application when they mean the logged-in part with accounts, records and permissions. Rails serves both from one project, using the same models, controllers and views.

Can Ruby on Rails handle a large website?

Yes. GitHub runs a Rails monolith with roughly a thousand engineers working in it. Doximity reports over 150 developers pushing to production more than 80 times a day. Solid Queue processes 20 million background jobs a day for HEY. Scale problems at that level are database and architecture problems, and they arrive long after most businesses need them.

Where can I see example Rails code?

Clone an open-source Rails application and read it. Discourse, Mastodon and Chatwoot are large, actively maintained Rails codebases with public source. Our page on open-source Ruby on Rails apps lists each one with its licence, star count and last-push date. That lets you avoid the archived projects that still rank well in search results.