Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

DEV.to VS ShepherdJS

Compare DEV.to VS ShepherdJS and see what are their differences

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DEV.to logo DEV.to

Where software engineers connect, build their resumes, and grow.

ShepherdJS logo ShepherdJS

Guide your users through a tour of your app.
  • DEV.to Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-05-13
  • ShepherdJS Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-08-29

DEV.to features and specs

  • Community Engagement
    DEV.to offers an active and supportive community of developers where users can share knowledge, seek advice, and collaborate on projects. This fosters a sense of belonging and continuous learning.
  • Ease of Use
    The platform provides a straightforward and user-friendly interface, making it easy for users to publish content, engage with other posts, and navigate through various resources.
  • Content Diversity
    DEV.to features a wide range of topics related to software development, from beginner tutorials to advanced technical articles. This diversity makes it a valuable resource for developers at all skill levels.
  • Open Source and Transparency
    DEV.to is built on open-source software, which promotes transparency and allows users to contribute to the platform’s development. This aligns with the core values of many developers.
  • Cross-Posting Capabilities
    Users can easily cross-post articles from their personal blogs or other platforms, increasing their content’s reach and visibility without significant additional effort.

Possible disadvantages of DEV.to

  • Content Quality Variation
    Given its open nature, the quality of content on DEV.to can be inconsistent. Users may need to sift through a mix of high-quality and less useful posts to find valuable information.
  • Platform-Specific Features
    Some features and optimizations are tailored specifically for the DEV.to platform, which might not translate well if the content is shared elsewhere.
  • Limited Advanced Customization
    While the platform is user-friendly, it offers limited customization options for articles and personal profiles compared to more robust blogging platforms.
  • Visibility Challenges
    With a large user base, it can be challenging for new users or less popular posts to gain traction and visibility unless they are highly engaging or promoted.
  • Distraction Potential
    The platform's social features, such as discussions and notifications, can sometimes be distracting, potentially impacting productivity for users who are easily sidetracked.

ShepherdJS features and specs

  • User Guidance
    ShepherdJS allows for creating guided tours and feature introductions, which can help in onboarding new users or guiding existing users through new features effectively.
  • Customizability
    The library provides a wide range of customization options for the appearance of the tour steps as well as their behavior, allowing developers to tailor the user experience to meet specific application needs.
  • Ease of Integration
    ShepherdJS is designed to be easy to integrate with modern JavaScript applications and supports various JavaScript frameworks such as Angular, React, and Vue.
  • Accessibility
    It includes built-in features to enhance accessibility, ensuring that tours can be experienced by all users, including those with disabilities.
  • Community and Support
    ShepherdJS has an active community and is backed by frequent updates and bug fixes, which can be valuable for developers seeking support and reliability.

Possible disadvantages of ShepherdJS

  • Learning Curve
    Despite its ease of integration, there can still be a learning curve associated with understanding and implementing the full range of features ShepherdJS offers, especially for new developers.
  • Dependencies
    ShepherdJS has dependencies that need to be managed, which can sometimes lead to conflicts or increase the difficulty of the setup process in certain environments.
  • Performance Overhead
    Implementing tours in a web application may introduce additional DOM elements and require JavaScript execution, potentially impacting performance, especially on resource-constrained devices.
  • Limited Offline Capability
    Like many web-based libraries, ShepherdJS requires a browser environment to function, which can limit its effectiveness in offline scenarios or in cases where network connections are unstable.

Analysis of DEV.to

Overall verdict

  • Yes, DEV.to is considered a good platform for developers looking to connect with peers, stay updated with industry trends, and share their knowledge.

Why this product is good

  • DEV.to is a popular online community for software developers where they can share articles, tutorials, and insights related to programming and technology. It's known for its supportive environment, user-friendly interface, and the diversity of content, making it a good resource for learning and networking.

Recommended for

  • Aspiring software developers seeking learning resources and mentorship.
  • Experienced developers looking to share knowledge and contribute to the community.
  • Individuals interested in keeping up with the latest trends and discussions in technology.

DEV.to videos

Ben Halpern founder of Dev.To & The Practical Dev

ShepherdJS videos

No ShepherdJS videos yet. You could help us improve this page by suggesting one.

Add video

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to DEV.to and ShepherdJS)
CMS
100 100%
0% 0
User Engagement
0 0%
100% 100
Blogging
100 100%
0% 0
User Onboarding And Engagement

User comments

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Reviews

These are some of the external sources and on-site user reviews we've used to compare DEV.to and ShepherdJS

DEV.to Reviews

  1. It is a nice mini-blog, it's for free and such but

    As a mini-blog, it is a nice alternative for Medium to publish and share information about programming.

    However, the community and the organization are biased toward social justice (and they are open to it). You can read its Code of Conduct, it is so vague and politically leads (I prefer a term of service because it defines fair rules for everybody). So it alienates developers that we don't care about politics in pro of people that want to talk about any other topic such as sexuality, how women are unprivileged, and such. It even mandates to use inclusive language. Good grief.

    My main complaint is the quality of the community. It is not StackOverflow (so we don't want to ask for an answer here), and most of the top topics are clickbait, such as "how to become a rockstar developer in ... days", "100 tips to become a better programmer" (and it doesn't even talk about programming).

    Technically this "mini blog" site allows us to use markdown, and it is okay. However, the whole experience is really basic. Even the template is ugly.

    Competitors: Medium
    Pros:    Free
    Cons:    Social justice|Basic features|Quality of content

Best Forums for Developers to Join in 2025
The 'dev.to' forum is a great place for developers to find answers, share their knowledge, and learn from others. It's a place for people to talk about their projects, ask questions, and get feedback.
Source: www.notchup.com
Top 10 Developer Communities You Should Explore
One of Dev.to’s unique features is its focus on the human side of coding. Developers often share their personal stories, career journeys, and lessons learned, creating a sense of camaraderie within the community. The platform also encourages content creators by providing a clean and user-friendly interface for writing and sharing articles.
Source: www.qodo.ai

ShepherdJS Reviews

8 Best Usetiful Alternatives and Competitors That Are More Professional
Shepherd.js is not a fully developed 3rd party tool like most of the other alternatives that I listed. It is an open-source library to make it easier to create simple product tours.
Source: userguiding.com

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, DEV.to seems to be a lot more popular than ShepherdJS. While we know about 674 links to DEV.to, we've tracked only 10 mentions of ShepherdJS. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

DEV.to mentions (674)

  • Fixing Delicate Cache Mismatches in a Brownfield SPA: A Pragmatic Solution
    On DEV (powered by the open-source Forem codebase), we have a hybrid architecture that blends Rails server rendering, Fastly edge caching, and lightweight client-side navigation (via InstantClick). This setup delivers sub-100ms page transitions, but partial page swaps combined with aggressive edge caching create delicate deployment challenges. - Source: dev.to / 3 days ago
  • Building the flagship (3): a packaged UI library, i18n, and one-command Docker
    Parts 4 and 5 showed the flagship's auth and its live grid. This one is about reuse: the app is built almost entirely from packaged components, and this is how you'd build yours. - Source: dev.to / 6 days ago
  • Claude Code Attempted 752 /proc/*/environ Reads. 256 Succeeded. Codex: 0.
    Per-syscall interception is the layer that closes this gap. Grith sits between the agent process and the kernel, scoring every operation before it executes - not what the agent claims to be doing, but what it actually does. The process census, the credential file opens, the MCP initialisation, the network connections: all of it is visible, all of it is scored, and any of it can be blocked by policy without... - Source: dev.to / 6 days ago
  • Three model calls, and none of them reads a price
    Plinkie is built by Business Data Solutions, a Dutch consulting and training firm that helps organisations put their data to work. This system was built by one person in ten days, runs in two fully separate Google Cloud projects, and costs under $2 per night to operate. The infrastructure is OpenTofu, the services are Python 3.13, and the site is Next.js. - Source: dev.to / 7 days ago
  • Baklava: Generate API Documentation and Type-Safe Clients from Scala Routing Tests
    Path("/users/{userId}")( supports( GET, pathParameters = pLong, summary = "Get user by ID" )( onRequest(pathParameters = 1L) .respondsWithUser .assert { ctx => ctx.performRequest(routes).body.id shouldBe 1L }, onRequest(pathParameters = 999L) .respondsWithErrorResponse .assert { ctx => ctx.performRequest(routes)... - Source: dev.to / 9 days ago
View more

ShepherdJS mentions (10)

  • 7 best product tour JavaScript libraries for frontend apps
    Shepherd.js is a simple JavaScript library aimed at easing the process of making user tours in web applications. It has a clear, intuitive interface wherein you describe your tour step-by-step, which helps improve the tour UX and enhance user understanding: Shepherd.js offers extensive customization options and seamless integration with your application. It prioritizes accessibility with full keyboard navigation.... - Source: dev.to / about 2 years ago
  • Using React Shepherd to build a site tour
    In this tutorial, I will show you how to use React Shepherd to easily implement a site tour on your website. React Shepherd is a lightweight wrapper library for Shepherd.js that allows us to create a walkthrough of a website — either parts of the site or the whole application — by using dialogs that represent steps that you create. At the end of this article, we will have a functioning site tour as shown in this... - Source: dev.to / over 2 years ago
  • Guided Tours Solution for Your Web Application
    Shepherd is a powerful and customizable open source JavaScript library for creating interactive tours and onboarding experiences in web applications. It uses another open source library Floating UI to render the dialog tours. It offers a simple setup process, dynamic content support, the ability to create custom actions and events, and theming and styling too. More importantly, it is responsive too and never goes... - Source: dev.to / over 2 years ago
  • Reddit: Help us design more content to onboard users
    Using/building something like this would go a long way (https://shepherdjs.dev/) and could also have the benefit of keeping the tours in parity with the current L2 UI. Source: over 3 years ago
  • What is the UX term for those pop-up boxes which helps users with their first few tasks after finishing onboarding?
    We’ve called them Product Tours https://shepherdjs.dev is good. Source: over 3 years ago
View more

What are some alternatives?

When comparing DEV.to and ShepherdJS, you can also consider the following products

WordPress - WordPress is web software you can use to create a beautiful website or blog. We like to say that WordPress is both free and priceless at the same time.

Intro.js - Simple Javascript framework for adding screen tips

Medium - Welcome to Medium, a place to read, write, and interact with the stories that matter most to you.

Flows.sh - Build product adoption your way

Hashnode - A friendly and inclusive Q&A network for coders

UserGuiding - Create in-app experiences with the most straightforward product adoption platform — quick implementation, lasting user engagement.