There is not one tool I would use/recommend before knowing the actual requirements. In one of our latest projects we decided on following stack: Backend/API:

There is not one tool I would use/recommend before knowing the actual requirements. In one of our latest projects we decided on following stack: Backend/API: PHP, Symfony3, Mysql We choose this because the following reasons: The team is already familiar with symfony/php We had to integrate with existing stack/business logic in php ( or port parts of it ) Frontend: Angular.js We needed a single page app that we could easily port parts of to a mobile app later on We wanted to decouple our frontend from the backend by doing only api calls so we avoid having backend code responsible for generating html/etc Real-time component: Node.js, Redis We needed a component that processes events as they come in, and a lot of them. We decided against PHP so we could lower our memory footprint and also because it is a bit more convenient to deal with state. This component checks each incoming data packet with a set of rules and reports on violations. This component gets it's configuration from the backend api and reports back to the api whenever a violation occurs which needs to be logged.