Big Name Companies Using Ruby on Rails

Woke up this morning to the following email request from the CTO of one of Hashrocket's big, important clients:

Can you give me a list of big name firms that you know are using Ruby on Rails for major projects. Need it by this afternoon for an important meeting with top management.

I scrambled together a response, including some advice from folks that responded to my query on Twitter (thx!) After some reflection, I realized that it would make a good informative blog post.

First of all, lots of people pointed me to http://www.workingwithrails.com/high-profile-organisations, which lists the following firms:

Sing ♫ one of these firms is not like the other ♫ while you're reading :)

• amazon.com
• BBC
• CapGemini
• BPN
• Cisco
• C|Net
• EA (Electronic Arts)
• IBM
• JP Morgan
• NASA
• Oakley
• Oracle
• Siemens
• ♫ ThoughtWorks ♫
• Yahoo!

In addition to the list above, there's a number of companies where I have direct, or reliably indirect knowledge of Rails adoption through my friends and associates:

• John Deere
• New York Times
• NBC
• Barclays
• LA Times
• Chicago Tribune
• Orbitz
• Google
• Turner Media
• Limewire

For good measure, I also mentioned http://rails100.pbwiki.com/, which tracks high-traffic consumer-facing websites that corporate-types won't necessarily recognize by name, but that for sure handle millions and millions of visits per day. The top ten list on that page (and corresponding Alexa rankings):

• twitter.com [642 !!?! I thought it would be higher]


• scribd.com [940]


• blingee.com [1170]


• yellowpages.com [1734]


• penny-arcade.com [2069]


• 43things.com [4190]


• kongregate.com [4488]


• pitchforkmedia.com [4740]


• projectpath.com [5041 One of the Basecamp hostnames]


• funnyordie.com [5089]

What big-name companies do you know about where Ruby on Rails is gaining traction and adoption from the grassroots level on up?

Comments

[wonko]

Don't forget geni.com

[Chris Bailey]

How about Chase Manhattan bank? I believe the Ruby on Rails Podcast had an interview with them a while back. That's a good name to throw at people who care about these kinds of things. And, while I wouldn't say they've "adopted" it, I used to work at Adobe, and there are projects being done in Rails there.

[Russell]

Ministry of Social Development, New Zealand's largest government department.

[Matt Henderson]

Hello, our most recently developed Rails site (launched last October) has (at present) almost 700,000 users.

http://catalogchoice.org

[Martin Sadler]

Hey Obie, that WWR list could certainly do with a refresh.

I also noted a while back that LinkedIn were recruiting for a couple of Rails developers but I'm not sure as to what capacity ROR is used in-house.

Also if you've got time on your hands it's worth scanning the company list alphabetically on WWR:
http://workingwithrails.com/browse/companies/name

Theres bound to be a few more new ones now.

Just found Walt Disney for instance:
http://www.workingwithrails.com/person/8832-irfan-baig

But it's always worth mailing to double check as many developers do Ruby/Rails outside of their day job and just because they are listed on WWR doesn't always mean the company is using it.

[Robert Brook]

Us, for the UK Parliament: http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/

[Brent Sordyl]

I'm using Rails at Score! Educational Centers which is a division of Kaplan.

[Chris Moore]

Add the State of South Carolina to the list!

[Tamer Salama]

Revolution Health - http://www.revolutionhealth.com/

[Florian]

You are right the twitter statistics should be higher, but most people don't use the website but instead use one of the API applications.

[JeffMo]

RosettaStone.

[Dean Cruse]

Some other relatively high profile Rails sites (or companies with Rails projects cooking):
http://www.revolutionhealth.com/
http://www.hulu.com/
http://www.gaia.com/

We also have about 100 customers - all using Rails and our rails application monitoring software. Mostly startups, but all growing quickly.

[Andy]

The 3 big Telcos in Canada all have considerable ROR projects - Rogers, Bell & Telus

[Aron Pilhofer]

We're already mentioned, but I wanted to confirm for a fact that nytimes.com is using Rails for quick-turnaround, news-focused projects. Just released one today, matter of fact, here: http://politics.nytimes.com/clinton-schedules/. Also, another earlier project here: http://2008playoffs.nytimes.com. Both Rails on EC2.

Most of our current Election Guide (http://politics.nytimes.com/election-guide/2008/election/index.html) and all the results tables/charts you'll see on election nights on the home page and inside utilize Rails, through indirectly.

[John Nunemaker]

In what capacity is google using rails? I'm curious as everyone says they are strict on languages. I've heard python is popular there but hadn't heard about ruby.

Also, per linkedin, I think there mobile site they just launched is in rails. It uses the sessions/new idiom on the login page.

[Raphael]

A good friend of mine is a senior DBA at American Express. AmEx is using Rails for several internal projects, and I believe he told me they are using it for a merchant processing app. From what he says, the RoR projects have been so successful, they are moving several programmers off J2EE to full-time rails development.

[Anonymous Coward]

Starbucks is also using Rails-based system for tracking and verifying social and environmental impacts of their coffee sources.

[Glen]

I'm still waiting for the list of what major companies use:

Javascript
Perl
PHP

Get crackin! :)

[ironchef]

"I'm still waiting for the list of what major companies use:

Javascript
Perl
PHP"

I'd have to assume you're joking as probably every one of the fortune 500 uses Javascript and perl. In reality, the "who uses" isn't really helpful imo. If a company is using rails for a simple little app in a 5 person workgroup, that's significantly different than something performing 100 million transactions in a day.

[andy]

https://www.btosupportcenter.com/

we also use Rails for all internal applications - currently that's 3 with about 2-3 in the pipeline

[Anonymous Microsoftie]

Ruby on Rails is used for some internal systems in Microsoft for Live Search as well, specifically in some of our build tracking systems.

There's not a whole lot of it, but it's there if you know where to look :)

[Jacob Stetser]

Gaiam, Inc.
(purveyor of green, organic, yoga/health and conscious living products, among other things; if you shop at Whole Foods or do anything yoga or pilates related you'll know the brand)

We use Ruby on Rails for our social network, Gaia.com - formerly known as Zaadz.com, which we built using Ruby on Rails starting in late 2005.

http://www.gaia.com/

(Dean Cruse: just noticed you already mentioned us - thanks for the link!)

[jay]

espn is hiring rails developers in burbank, ca. Anyone interested can find the job posting on monster

I'm assuming that means they are using rails ;)

[sandofsky]

I'll add a few things about yellowpages.com. While some sites use Rails for mini one-off projects, yellowpages is now Rails top-to-bottom. However, the performance sensitive portions strip Rails so much it's barely different than merb.

Also, yellowpages.com is owned by AT&T, which everyone has heard of.

[subbu]

I was interviewed by latimes.com recently for a Rails position. They are porting their portal from java platform to Rails. One of my close friend who works for TCS (largest IT services company in India) says they are getting (and doing) a lot of Rails projects as well. High-end services companies accepting Rails projects is an indication that Rails is indeed breaking into the enterprisy world.

[josh]

eBay is using Rails for microplace.com

Also, WWR now has a high-profile companies page:

http://www.workingwithrails.com/high-profile-organisations

[Dean Holdren]

Dow Jones (namely WSJ.com) uses Rails (not for the main site though)

[Ericson Smith]

We're using Rails for some pretty big sites:

http://www.medications.com
http://www.funadvice.com

And some smaller ones:
http://www.snapseeker.com
http://www.rekalls.com

And where I spend most of my time, we use rails significantly for back end processes that push out to static sites. That's millions of pageviews per day.

[Ted]

So I work at a BigCo.

And I put my name in "WWR" with my BigCo. name. Does that make my BigCo. uses Rails?

[Karmen Blake]

http://www.genetree.com

[Flinn]

Sports Illustrated (Time Inc.) uses Rails for FanNation.com a high traffic fan community site. Time also uses Rails on a number of other high traffic sites like DanPatrick.com, Entertainment Weekly's TVFan community site and a handful of People.com sites.

[ChandraB]

Vonage and Revolution Health are another company using Rails extensively.

[Premal]

Hey Obie,

it is great to see this post. There has been a lot of debate lately if RoR is going to ever make it to the enterprise. But then, people said the same about Linux :-)

Where do you see RoR going in the next few years? Do you think it will reach the stage where Linux is now?

I am learning RoR out of interest and looking to build a website to try to make a difference in the social sector. Any ideas?

[Michael]

Howcast: http://www.howcast.com - would rank 36th on http://rails100.pbwiki.com/ if it were updated with new alexa ranks..

[pk11]

i do not think google uses rails at all unless you are talking about the javascript port(ala yegge) which is well, not rails and not ruby. the same way you can count any big companies which are using anything rails-like.

(and as far as i know bbc is using perl and they happen to have a port written in perl)

[Fred Lee]

I used to work at the Indianapolis Star which has a number of Rails apps in production.

www.indymoms.com (some of this is Drupal, but a lot of it is Rails)
www.indypaws.com
www.indy.com

The Star is owned by Gannett. I would imagine other Gannett properties will be starting some Rails projects judging by the success of the Star's efforts.

I current work at Vail Systems (www.vailsystems.com). And, we are in the process of porting all of our core services to a Rails application.

[Brian Ketelsen]

And http://www.wellcare.com, which gets very nice traffic on Rails, has been deployed since September of 2007.

[Norbert Crombach]

I have worked on Rails applications for Greenpeace and Prada.

[Kerry Buckley]

While not used for any major projects (that I know of), BT has a few sites built using Rails:

http://web21c.bt.com
http://mojo.bt.com
http://magicnumber.bt.com

[Kevin Lawver]

AOL has several apps running Rails at the moment:

http://ficlets.com
http://circavie.com
http://pixnay.com
http://photos.aim.com

I know of one large back-office system on Rails inside of AOL, and there will probably be a couple more public-facing Rails apps launching in the next year.

[Brian Doyle]

We use RoR for www.guidespot.com at Local Matters Inc.

[Mitchell Blankenship]

It may have already been mentioned but aren't http://www.github.com and http://www.lighthouseapp.com both run on rails?

[Piyush]

How did we miss http://www.slideshare.net ?
Cleartrip(an Indian travel search firm) also uses RoR a lot. http://www.cleartrip.com/smallworld
http://www.cleartrip.com/trains
http://www.cleartrip.com/forums
etc

[Little Birdy]

Apple has a nice Rails following internally, as well as supporting Rails heavily in Mac OS X Server 10.5:

http://developer.apple.com/tools/developonrailsleopard.html
http://developer.apple.com/tools/customizeonrailsleopard.html
http://developer.apple.com/tools/deployonrailsleopard.html

[Jonathan]

WOW! What an awesome list. I know ROR was huge but had no idea what a career booster Rails might offer me. I am going to spend a few more hours in the rails books mostly because it's just fun to learn. Ruby and Rails is a blast! jonathan

[RD]

Adding another company to the list Globallogic. They have around 2500 head count so it is a relatively big company, around 3-4 projects are being developed on ROR.

[DB]

http://www.near-time.com

[pablete]

Do not forget the high traffic site http://www.fotolog.com.ar

[si]

www.streamsend.com - top site for sending official spam!

Not really a posterchild though. The site is so painfully slow I suspect they are running it in dev mode sometimes.

[David Neff]

Hello,
This is David Neff over at the American Cancer Society. I think we sould be on your list for using Ruby on Rails. We just launched a User Generated Web Community for people to tell their story about Cancer. Our entire registration system (including OpenID integration) was done in ROR. We love the language and the time is saved us. Would love to talk to you more about it if your interested. We even talk about ROR in our press release.

http://www.sharinghope.tv/socialmediarelease

Let me know if you would like to interview us or anything else. We want to spread the word!

[Brandon Zylstra]

I was shocked to find a Rails project at Chrysler when I was working there. Up til that point, I'd only seen Struts and Domino (and of course ancient COBOL programs).

I would also mention Oracle.

[Jim Meyer]

Thanks, Obie, for the excellent list. Good stuff there, and a good reminder to many to update their info at WorkingWithRails.

As a couple of previous commenters noted, LinkedIn Mobile is, indeed, a Rails app. We're also using Rails in a number of other places, both internal and external.

Oh, and we're looking for a couple more developers. =D Job posts will go up early next week; in the meantime, if you're a Rails dev looking for a gig, drop me a line.

--j

Site: http://m.linkedin.com/
Blog: http://blog.linkedin.com/blog/2008/03/linkedin-mobile.html

[Norman Timmler]

We here at XING use Rails for some major parts of our plattform. All the internal development team consist of Rails developers. And, of course, we are always looking for people: http://www.xing.com/marketplace/postings/show/255443

If you want to do Rails in Europe, don't hesitate to write me an message. Find me on XING.

[Anonymous]

British Telecom (BT), the largest telecom in Europe, used Rails to build its Web Services portal (http://web21c.bt.com/).

[bondibox]

Zappos.com is working on a RoR implementation.

[Naren]

I've a requirement on ruby on rails for Mysore location on contract basis.
Please refer your friends if they are looking for a change.

Thanks
Naren
JNET Technologies Pvt Ltd
ndevarapalli@jnettechnologies.com
+91-40-2331 6932
+91-99660 22242

[Marcio Castilho]

also www.picanswers.com was developed in Rails and launched Feb 2008

[David Filiatrault]

http://www.CustomInk.com, a site for custom t-shirts and decorated products, uses Rails for it's customer facing web site. We're also hiring RoR developers for our backend applications.

[Brian Burridge]

Miley Cyrus's fan club uses rails: www.mileyworld.com.

[Brad]

Miley Cyrus? Now that's scaling!