We often times say that tools are a developer’s best friend, and in 2023 that was no different. In a year marked by massive technological innovation, the software engineering industry embraced the change by incorporating technologies like AI into their tools to automate things like code reviews and debugging processes. All in an effort to make developer’s lives that bit easier.

Big companies like Github threw their hat in the ring with Copilot X. Smaller teams also had their say, like one of this year’s runners-up: Warp.

Two engineering themes in 2023 that continued from previous years include making APIs easier and creating tools that help shorten the gap that exists between developers and other teams (often marketing, if we're being honest). Resend exists at the intersection of these two persisting trends: a tool for developers to build, test, and deliver transactional emails at scale.

It’s been a rollercoaster year for design tools. Like many of their counterparts, design tool companies had to adapt to a quickly changing industry with the rise of AI. Coupled with the doomed Adobe-Figma acquisition, it felt like the industry was always in the news.

Design tools launched in plenty last year, but some stood out more than others. Ones that zoned in on collaboration, AI integration, and animation were rewarded by the community for their innovation.

This year's nominations reflect that. Jitter, the winner, makes animation accessible to the masses, and Framer AI allows you to spin up a landing page in minutes.

What is the future of the no-code category now that generative AI is here? That’s the question the finalists had us asking now that plain English can generate a whole website in an instant.

The winner of this category also uniquely reminds us that just because something is quick doesn’t mean it has to be dirty. Bento reimagined personal websites and link-in-bio pages to be rich, beautiful places on the internet that function well, too.

“That's so much better than the boxy buttons and flat grids we see in other link-in-bio tools,” thought the Product Hunt community as it catapulted Bento to the 7th most upvoted product of 2023. Linktree agreed, and it acquired Bento later in the year.

In the past few years, the fields of Data & Data Security have been marked by makers trying to make data easier and more flexible for everyone, not just data analysts and cybersecurity experts.

This year's winner for best tool in data, Equals, started by reinventing the spreadsheet with its first launch in 2022. Following a $16M Series A, Equals went through 2023 consistently shipping new features and improvements to make spreadsheets more capable. That included added AI features and of course, the launch of Dashboards, which offers a way to instantly turn spreadsheets into dashboards powered by live data.

According to Github’s Octoverse report, 2023 saw the largest number of first-time open-source contributors. Open source pulls on the heartstrings of makers everywhere. It’s an industry that prides itself on being collaborative and community-driven.

Open source is everywhere. It's embedded into our way of life, whether you know it or not. Everything from frameworks and databases to dev tools (Novu) to some of the most popular AI models in the world (Stable Diffusion) rely on open-source contributors to keep shipping.

The finalists in this year’s Best AI Products category demonstrate how far generative AI has come in understanding complex prompts, from generating an entire website with 3D animation (Dora AI) to high-quality video (Pika) with plain English.

Just like last year, big tech companies like Google and Microsoft go head to head with innovative newcomers for the title. As access to AI models, AI infrastructure, and AI platforms expand (like OpenAI’s app store for GPTs), we expect to see more varied makers in this space creating the next big thing.

Did it feel like every product in your stack was getting an AI makeover in 2023? It’s not just the Baader–Meinhof phenomenon. We saw so many of our favorite products iterate with new AI features that we had to create an entirely new award category this year.

We were inspired by how quickly makers shipped these products and how teams reimagined new solutions to the problems they had initially set out to solve, this time with the help of AI. In fact, many makers told us some version of “We had always wanted to do this, but the technology finally caught up.”

The nominees in this category are recognized for incorporating AI fluidly into their products. They generate the content that we need exactly when we need it, do heavy lifting that used to take hours, develop artificial personas from thin air, and truly delight us along the way.

OpenAI gave us two of the best AI models this year and packed them into one glorious chatbot. That’s hard to beat.

Don’t miss the forest for the trees, though. Large language models advanced across the board, giving us generative AI capabilities that most of us couldn’t have imagined a year prior. We can generate entire websites, presentation decks, and avatars from a bit of text. We can create an image of whatever we imagine - and “make it more” if we want to.

What will be in this category next year? More generative AI? “Large Action Models”? Generative Spoken Language Models? AGI? (Pst: Follow along and find out.)

As more AI models and products emerge, tools to help build, improve, and monitor them are more important than ever, and so emerges a new category in the Golden Kitty Awards.

The finalists in this category help AI makers choose the right AI API for their products and switch between them (EdenAI), create and deploy LLM plugins (Langdoc) or LLM apps (LLM Spark) quickly, and trace and debug complex LLM applications (Langfuse).

What do you imagine when you think of finance? Even today, a not-so-insignificant amount of people might conjure up images of a Wall Street office with stockbrokers frantically buying and selling stocks. Thanks, Wolf of Wall Street.

While finance can be stuffy, a good FinTech tool can make the space fascinating and even fun. The finalists in this year's category tackle everything from startup funding to personal finance. These tools help ease the anxiety that comes to both businesses and individuals when dealing with banking, investments, or financing.

According to data.ai, mobile users spend 5 hours of their day on average on their mobile phones. How we spend that time and the apps we use are personal. Some may be sweating on their favorite workout app, while others are scheduling their week with their favorite productivity tool. Then it all changes again 5 minutes later with new apps.

With an “app for everything” and for every personality, it's hard to break out from the crowd these days, but the finalists in this category are the ones who are doing it.

Best mobile app winner, Hevy, was originally launched by indie developers in 2019 who wanted to build a better way to log their workouts and a better social experience while doing so. The app has grown to 3 million gym athletes around the world. Hevy is featured as a top training app in articles across the web, and has a 4.9 rating on the App Store and Google Play Store with a collective 71,000 reviews.

It may seem like web3 had its biggest moments back in 2021. Coins were dropping every day, communities were springing up, and, of course, NFTs were the hot topic on everyone’s mind. Fast forward to 2022 and the hype had settled down.

Although web3 may have lived in the shadows of AI this year, many signals indicate that the industry is waiting for its next moment. Bitcoin went back up by 155% in 2023 reaching $45k, the highest since 2022. On Product Hunt, launches were down across categories like blockchain (-25%), crypto (-18%), and NFTs (-30%), but voters were bullish on the launches that did stand out. Four of the top 15 upvoted products of 2023 were web3-related.

The community behind web3 lent their support to products like Clustr, eesee, Anytype, and Galaxe, which all left their mark on the Product Hunt leaderboard by taking their place amongst the top 25 most upvoted products last year. Techies theorized that a "crypto winter" might clear out this space, leaving only the best product standing — we'll have our eyes on the finalists as top contenders.

Productivity is the second most popular topic on Product Hunt, with nearly 37,000 votes on productivity products alone in January 2024.

It’s hard not to love tools that help you do things more efficiently so you can spend your time where it matters. The finalists in this category tackle productivity across the spectrum of your daily life, from your browser to your calendar.

This year’s winner, Heptabase, is a notetaking tool that helps you learn complex topics through visual organization of your workspace. The tool has been growing in popularity as an alternative to fan-favorites Notion and Obsidian.

In the world of team dynamics, productivity isn't just a buzzword—it's the cornerstone of successful collaboration. According to Statista, productivity software is projected to reach $79 billion in revenue in 2024. Work-based solutions are set to make up a huge chunk of that.

These tools are pivotal in transforming individual efforts into a unified force. They excel in orchestrating complex projects, turning each task into a part of a well-coordinated ensemble. It's about forging spaces where creativity thrives, and objectives are met with collective drive and precision.

This year’s winner is FuseBase. Think of it almost like Notion but more tailored for professional services. It rolls project management, knowledge management, and client collaboration into one so you can stop jumping between apps trying to get work done.

The winners and runner-ups of this year’s best marketing & sales tools are as varied as the job description of many marketers who wear every hat. But if there’s one hat that every modern revenue-driver has learned to prioritize, it's that of a content creator.

Many of the marketing tools that we see with the biggest traction are those that make the hardest, most time-consuming content easier, whether it’s an email or support doc. With digital engagement at its height, teams have to do their best to reach customers across multiple social platforms (STORI AI), grab attention in the inbox (Loops), educate customers on the product in seconds (Floik), and provide them a support experience they enjoy (D-ID).

These tools help content-loving professionals breakthrough.

Love it or hate it, we waited all of 2022 for a viable competitor to Elon’s X (formerly Twitter) to breakthrough. Moonshot startups took aim at X, but have yet to reach a tipping point to woo enough of X's 500+ million users.

So the biggest names in social and tech threw themselves back in the ring. Zuckerberg and Meta launched Threads, and despite naysayers, the social network has shown staying power with 160 users and the top spot in The App Store after launching in Europe at the end of the year. Meanwhile, Jack Dorsey conceptualized and backed Bluesky, a hyped decentralized social app that quickly reached 2 million users while in beta.

Meanwhile, makers in this space have fought through the stress of a rapidly changed social landscape as APIs change and users jump from tool to tool. The social tools that were featured in this category as finalists or nominees built the most useful and adaptable social tech that we’ve ever seen.

“Move fast and break things” was initially coined by Mark Zuckerberg as an internal Facebook motto. That saying has taken on new life for startups with small teams and those who have opted for the bootstrapped route.

Bootstrapping evokes a specific type of romanticism, but it comes with its challenges for resource-strapped founders. The idea of forgoing investment and instead opting to change the world all on your own is a powerful thought that drives many makers to keep going. It's also a trend that is growing more influential in the tech community.

The makers in this category have demonstrated an impressive ability to be resourceful, creative, and persistent. They created top-notch products with a small team, by bootstrapping, or both. From no code (Tally 2.0) to AI (Impakt AI), these are the ones that punched well above their weight in 2023.

Every year, makers around the world take the risk and dive head first into building the product of their dreams. Sometimes, it’s a side project for fun. Other times, it’s a company on the fast track to becoming a unicorn.

One thing common amongst all is that it takes passion, dedication, and guts to be a maker and each one makes Product Hunt a better place. That’s why we have the Maker of the Year award, to commemorate those who go out to change the world. This year’s winner is Marc Lou.

Marc launched a whopping 14 products in 2023 across a bunch of different niches. From a tool to protect you from Stripe Disputes to a habit-forming platform that puts cuteness at its core. Marc truly shipped his ideas.

You know PB&J? Sure you do. The quintessential packed school lunch, an iconic sandwich that’s more than the sum of its parts. Two ingredients perfectly matched, and when you’re missing one, it just isn’t the same.

It’s the same on Product Hunt. Makers and the community go hand in hand. The Product Hunt community creates an inviting space for people to showcase their work to the world, and in every launch, you will see community members congratulating founders, giving feedback, and asking questions. Outside of launches, community members share their learnings and ask for advice in discussions. When giving this award, we look for community members who engage authentically and usefully rather than relying on AI to quick manage relationship building.

This year's Community Member of the Year is Elly Cho. Elly is the COO and Co-Founder of Slash Page. When Elly isn’t launching on Product Hunt, she is helping other makers by giving critical feedback, engaging in discussions, and being a valuable voice to the wider community.