Announcing the Top Rated Outstanding Infrastructure & Development Tools for 2019

Today, we awarded 2019 TrustRadius Top Rated badges to a number of outstanding Infrastructure & Development tools. The TrustRadius Top Rated awards are the most trusted in the industry because they are an unbiased reflection of customer sentiment, based solely on user feedback and satisfaction scores. Top Rated awards are the voice of the market and are not influenced by analyst opinion, the vendor’s company size, popularity, or status as a TrustRadius customer.

While many software categories have multiple products that earned a 2019 Top Rated badge (find them all on our blog here), this year five Infrastructure & Development software categories have only one Top Rated winner. These products stand above the rest in each of their respective categories. Here are the five categories and their stand-out products: 

• Application Infrastructure Software – Nginx
• API Management Tools – Postman
• .Net Development Services – Visual Studio IDE
• Virtualization Management Tools – SolarWinds Virtualization Manager
• IT Asset Management Software – ServiceNow

Here’s a closer look at these outstanding Application Infrastructure & Development tools: 

NGINX

Application infrastructure software is purpose-built to support the development, integration and delivery of enterprise applications. NGINX offers an open source web server designed for high performance delivery. Open Source NGINX can be extended to provide a complete application delivery platform. NGINX Application Platform includes NGINX Plus, an application gateway extending NGINX Open Source with load balancing, API Gateway, and content caching. On TrustRadius, nearly half of reviewers are from small companies. NGINX reviewers praise both the open-source and paid editions of NGINX, describing a high performing, stable and scalable web server that “never goes down,” with both reliable load balancing and very low memory usage.

“[NGINX] it has been my web server of choice for a variety of purposes, whether it be creating a versatile development server accommodating a variety of platforms across many different sites, or setting up a high-speed scalable server with integration with a popular content management system for a client. The powerful yet flexible configuration options of Nginx makes it straightforward to configure a server for a multitude of different tasks, and a clear choice for almost any situation.”

Shea Bunge | Web Developer | Internet

Postman

API management tools may provide API discovery, traffic shaping, as well as orchestration and workflow, and monetization of API. Postman is an API management solution focusing on development. Available free, Postman provides a workspace to create, develop, test and monitor an API, with built-in dev tools. Tools include a mock server to simulate endpoints for testing, collection runs (e.g. series of requests) to automate steps in testing, a debugger, and related features. On TrustRadius, half of reviewers are from large enterprises. Postman’s reviewers appreciate Postman Workspaces and the ability to share and collaborate easily, and enjoy features such as Collections for batching frequent requests, mock servers, and an overall API testing experience.

“We use Postman to directly develop and test our APIs. We use it to easily run requests against our own API features in development, run test suites for automated testing, interact and test external web services, and perform maintenance tasks on our APIs where a UI isn’t required… Previous to using Postman, I would either use browser tools directly, or write an in-house tool to send requests. Postman eliminates that need while providing a much better experience and more features… Postman is extremely useful when developing any web-based service, such as RESTful APIs. Particularly when you need to repeat requests, either while iterating overdevelopment, or when doing automated testing.”

Anthony Aziz | Senior Software Engineer | Computer Software

Visual Studio IDE

Microsoft’s Visual Studio is an IDE specializing in supporting .NET development for desktop apps and ASP.NET web development. Visual Studio’s features supporting .NET development include IntelliTrace for recording, tracing and debugging code, IntelliSense code completion, Live Share collaboration, and Live Unit Testing. Visual Studio Reviewers praise IntelliSense code aid, integration with Azure DevOps Server and other third-party tools (e.g. for test automation), and its superior code organization through the solution explorer, code highlighting, and syntax color schemes.

“Visual Studio IDE is the one main IDE application used to develop who build 90% of our web applications. Our applications are based on .Net ASP MVC 4 and 5, and .Net Core 2. We use VS IDE to code, test and build these applications. We also use one of the best plugins in VS that is ReSharper. I personally started my experience with Visual Studio with version 2012, then 2015 and now using 2017… Visual Studio IDE is a go-to application whenever you work on .Net based frameworks.”

Filip Witkowski | Web Developer | Marketing and Advertising

SolarWinds Virtualization Manager

Network and IT Infrastructure monitoring specialist SolarWinds offers the SolarWinds Virtualization Manager, or VMAN. VMAN is a virtual machine monitoring solution allowing IT administrators to optimize performance of their VMs, as well as troubleshoot and optimize VM resource allocation and consumption. SolarWinds VMAN provides guidance through suggestions, performs capacity planning, and alerts administrators various problems (e.g. memory problems, resource misallocation, etc.). On TrustRadius, SolarWinds Virtualization Manager is mostly reviewed by users at enterprises (55%). Reviewers describe it as an excellent solution to wrangle complex VM environments, with fast asset discovery and problem tracking, powerful capacity planning and sprawl management, smart recommendations, and useful automation for shutting down or changing VMs as needed.

“We utilize SolarWinds Virtualization Manager on a daily basis to monitor 2 sites, 3 Clusters. I utilize Virtualization Manager along with other tools to ensure that we are proactive rather than reactive… The tool tells you if you have VM ware tools out of day, attached media to the virtual machine, data store over allocation, host running low on disk space, VMs rebooted, VM Phantom Snapshot Files, … the list goes on and on. You have great visibility into resource allocation across the whole environment… So very well suited when your environment is totally virtualized. The details continue to push my team attend to the environment. I would hate to think about bringing up a virtual environment without SolarWinds Virtualization Manager.”

Jennifer Aguilar | Network Administrator | Public Safety

ServiceNow

ServiceNow’s core ITSM / ITOM suite presents a functional IT Asset Management (ITAM) solution. ServiceNow Asset Management, part of ServiceNow ITSM, is a single source of truth for hardware and devices deployed throughout enterprise IT. ServiceNow’s Asset Management module tracks all maintenance activity and supports regular auditing and enforcement of asset policy, through change to retirement. On TrustRadius, most reviewers of ServiceNow come from large enterprises (63%). While its superior ITSM functionality generally drives ServiceNow’s high ratings, reviewers praise ServiceNow for its expanding feature set, including ITAM, SAM, service mapping and integratable CMDB.

“ServiceNow is being used as the major service management tool at my organization. We are using it as an Incident, Problem & Change Management Tool. Also this is being utilized as an Asset Management tool which is integrated into our deployment cycle for real-time updates on Deployment status. … ServiceNow is not just a standalone tool, it’s a complete suite of powerful tools which provide you a framework to develop your ticketing system and the data stored within the ticketing process can be used to analyze and optimize your production environment.”

Vaibhav Gupta | Manager | Banking

Congratulations to the winners of the Outstanding Infrastructure & Development Tools.

Top Rated Criteria

Products included in the 2019 Top Rated Outstanding Application Infrastructure Tools list must have been in the top tier of their respective category TrustMap as of August 1st, 2019. To qualify for the Outstanding Application Infrastructure & Development Software Top Rated Award, products must have at least 10 reviews written within the past year, a TRScore of at least 7.5 out of 10, and must receive at least 1.5% of the traffic in their category.  Every reviewer is verified and every review is vetted before publication. Products are plotted on the TrustMap based on end-user data, including users’ likelihood to recommend scores as well as buyer research patterns. To learn more about TrustMaps and Top Rated methodology, check out this page.