Why we ditched Express for Nest?

Not very long ago, we had just crossed the 100 signups mark. That milestone gave us an extra incentive to keep going and work towards achieving our goals.

This article is not a comparison of the advantages of ExpressJS vs. NestJS. That is already quite covered around the web. Instead, I'll be writing about how practical Nest is for startups like Rewindr and why we made the decision to ditch Express for Nest.

What's Rewindr?

Rewindr is a platform for collecting, managing and sharing customer reviews as an engaging social proof. It offers a range of tools and features to help companies looking to drive more deals or sales through a production ready collector that impacts on revenue and conversion.

What drove our changes?

The very first question arises as to whether we should focus on working on useful features or jumping from one framework to another?

When we initially built Rewindr, we used Express to build the backend — As a startup we were racing towards bringing a set of features in no time. Even though Express didn’t completely block us, it slowed us down considerably, and it was clear that is not the ideal path to take if we want to scale quickly.

As we were on the verge of starting Spaces-feature where customers can have their separate projects or workspaces within the same account, each of which have it's own reviews, team and configuration... and that without doubt will likely affect every single file, so we started evaluating Nest as a solution to the challenges.

It sounds like win-win situation, doesn't it? that was actually my expectation too, but that turned out to be less true.

We were hesitant to squeeze Nest migration in the first-place, but we ended up doing it anyway, we are pleased with the change, regardless of whether our customers are interested in the tech-stack we use.

Nest has many features to solve for common problems enabling us to focus on building our app and not fixing the app, on the other hand it offered more built-in features and better third-party integrations, allowing us to move way faster.

Moving the app to Nest allows for faster feature delivery and easier app maintenance.

That was a great decision 👌

What's next?

We took the Spaces-feature as an opportunity to migrate and improve the DX. Our next goal is to make it easier for customers to customize their widgets.