What CTOs and Tech leaders Should Know Before Migrating to Ruby on Rails

As a technical leader, evaluating a migration to Ruby on Rails is not just about code, it's a critical decision. Rails offers huge productivity wins, but only if your team, processes, and long-term vision align with its trade-offs.

At RailsFactory, we’ve spent 19+ years in software development, working with 250+ global companies on everything from Rails upgrades services and migrations to full-scale legacy app modernization. Those experiences have given us a clear view of what makes a Rails migration succeed and where teams typically struggle.

Drawing from that perspective, we’ve put together a realistic, up-to-date framework to help you understand the world of Ruby on Rails in 2025 and why smart CTOs still choose it for sustainable, long-term engineering velocity. This article also outlines when and how to migrate to Rails, and how to set your teams up for success.

Why Rails Still Matters in 2025

Rails isn’t a niche relic. It powers serious, high-velocity platforms. Recent usage stats show:

• 3.8+ million websites have used Rails (BuiltWith, 2025).

• 500,000+ active live websites currently use Rails (BuiltWith, 2025).

• Ruby still powers approximately 6.4% of known server-side websites (W3Techs, 2025).

• GitHub reports Rails contributors remain consistently active, with thousands of commits annually.

These are not hobby projects. They include major SaaS companies, marketplaces, developer tools, and financial platforms.

Rails remains compelling because it optimizes for developer happiness and rapid delivery, making it an all-time favorite, especially for teams that care about velocity, maintainability, and a mature ecosystem.

A Strategic Perspective: Rails in Your Technology Portfolio

Productivity Wins Outweigh Performance Costs

One of Rails’s biggest advantages is how fast you can iterate. Because Rails is opinionated and convention-driven, teams deliver features in weeks not months. This speed means lower engineering costs and faster time-to-market, which usually matters far more to the business than micro-optimizing raw performance.

Yes, Rails may not match Go or Java on raw throughput for certain high-frequency or real-time systems. But for business applications, the trade-off is often very favorable. You're paying a little more in infrastructure but gaining far more in team velocity.

Monolith-First Isn’t a Liability, It’s a Strength

Rails was built with a monolithic architecture in mind, and many high-scale Rails companies (like GitHub, Shopify) still run large monoliths very effectively. This is why Ruby on Rails for enterprise apps continues to be a reliable and future-ready choice for scaling teams.

And, Rails doesn’t default to microservices; it favors a clean monolith first and only recommends extracting services once you have tangible performance or scaling signals.

If your culture leans into fragmentation from day one, Rails may feel foreign. But if you’re pragmatic, you’ll appreciate how a monolith can reduce cognitive load, simplify deployments, and enable your team to move with shared context and minimal coordination overhead.

The People Factor: Teams, Hiring & Productivity

High-Maturity, High-Velocity Teams

Rails’ structured nature help teams maintain consistent code, allowing developers (experienced or new), to work efficiently without misalignment. That means faster onboarding, predictable code reviews, and fewer architectural debates. For CTOs, this translates into a very efficient and reliable engineering engine.

Global & Distributed Friendly

Because Rails enforces structure (convention over configuration), it’s especially well-suited for distributed or offshore teams. Shared conventions reduce misunderstandings, keep code consistent, and make it much easier to hire experienced Rails engineers who can get up to speed quickly without a long ramp-up.

Empowering Internal Teams

If you already have engineers in other ecosystems (Node, Python, Java), they can learn Rails relatively quickly, especially if they embrace the “Rails way” rather than re-invent it. This cultural shift can pay dividends in productivity and maintainability.

Architectural Considerations Before Migration

Lean Into Rails Conventions

Rails makes hundreds of architectural decisions for you such as folder structure, naming, testing strategies, database layers, and more. By accepting these conventions, you unlock massive productivity. Fighting them costs time and negates one of Rails’s biggest benefits.

ActiveRecord: Powerful, But Not Magic

ActiveRecord is a delight for its simplicity, but it can lead to hidden performance pitfalls:

• N+1 queries

• Lazy loading that surprises you

• Inefficient scopes

To mitigate risk, plan from the start. Use tools like Bullet (for N+1 detection), strong_migrations, and ensure your team has SQL expertise or at least a solid understanding of how ActiveRecord translates to real queries. Treat ActiveRecord as a convenience layer, not an abstraction you blindly trust.

Decide the Frontend Strategy Upfront

This is a critical decision:

• Rails + Hotwire / Turbo / Stimulus: Opt for minimal JS, server-rendered UI, and super-fast productivity.
• Rails as a JSON API: Use React, Vue, or other SPA frameworks.

Changing course mid-project is expensive. Thus, make this decision early and align engineering, product, and design teams around it.

Preparing for Migration: A Tactical Checklist for CTOs

A well-defined Rails migration strategy ensures smoother transitions, reduces deployment risks and sets the foundation for long-term stability

Audit Your Existing System

Before migration begins, conduct a clean-up:

• Identify deprecated or dead code

• Remove unused dependencies

• Refactor brittle sections

A thorough audit is the key to reduce unwanted risks down the road. To make this process even faster and more reliable, use Railsup, our free gems compatibility checker. It helps you evaluate the gems and dependencies against your target Rails version and ensure a smoother migration.

Dependency Mapping

List all external libraries, plugins, and APIs and evaluate their Rails compatibility. Some gems may no longer be maintained, and APIs may not map cleanly, so plan replacements as needed.

Reliable Backups & Rollback Strategy

Set up a thorough backup strategy for your databases, application state, and assets. At the same time, design and practice rollback plans so you can quickly revert changes if needed, using feature flags or canary releases to reduce risk during migration.

Testing & Staging Environments

Create a staging environment that mirrors production as closely as possible. Build a robust test suite that covers unit tests, integration tests, and end-to-end scenarios. Use parallel test runners, selective test runs, and other optimizations so your CI remains fast as the suite grows.

Infrastructure & Deployment Realities

Deployment Landscape

Rails has a mature deployment ecosystem. Capistrano and Kamal are reliable, and containerization (Docker) is very feasible. That said, Rails apps typically require more deployment ceremony than microservices in Go, due to native gem extensions, asset compilation, and boot time.

If your infra team is heavily invested in Kubernetes, there may be some friction, but it’s a well-traveled path. Alternatively, managed Rails hosting (e.g., Render, Heroku) can significantly reduce operational overhead, though you’ll need to evaluate lock-in risks.

Scaling Rails

Rails scales well when built right. Key levers:

• Connection pooling: tune database connections carefully.

• Caching: full-page, fragment, or low-level caching depending on your use case.

• Background jobs: Sidekiq (or similar) to process tasks. Design job retries and monitoring from the start.

Managing Job and Test Debt

Rails makes it easy to spawn background jobs and write tests. But without discipline, this can become your biggest technical debt. Thus, make sure to set up:

• Monitoring (e.g., Sidekiq metrics)

• Job dashboards / observability

• Test suite maintenance practices (parallel runs, splitting, pruning)

Security, Compliance & Data Integrity

Rails ships with many security best-practices enabled (CSRF protection, parameter filtering, etc.), but migrating is not just a coding exercise:

• Ensure new environments meet compliance standards (GDPR, PCI-DSS, HIPAA, depending on your business)

• Validate data migration thoroughly. Check for data loss, mismatch, and edge-cases.

• Maintain audit trails and logging as part of the migration strategy to support regulatory needs

After Migration: Operational Excellence & Long-Term Strategy

Continuous Upgrades Are Non-Negotiable

Rails releases major versions every 2–3 years. Falling behind can cost you months of effort later. Plan and budget for upgrades as part of normal operating expense and not a one-time project.

Leverage the Mature Rails Ecosystem

Rails has built-in or well-supported libraries for most needs like authentication (Devise), authorization (Pundit), payments (Stripe), file uploads (ActiveStorage), full-text search (Searchkick), and more. Using these frees you from reinventing core functionality.

That said, Rails might not always be the first choice for cutting-edge distributed systems. For example, federated GraphQL, gRPC, or real-time ML serving might be better supported in other ecosystems. But for the vast majority of business applications from SaaS and internal tools to marketplaces, and workflow-heavy products, Rails’ ecosystem remains deep and battle-tested.

Reflect, Learn, and Improve

Run a post-migration retrospective with engineering, product, and ops. Document what worked, what didn’t, and where the biggest challenges were. Use these lessons to tighten processes before the next upgrade or feature extraction.

And if you’re already planning for an upgrade, don’t miss our free pre-upgrade checklist . It is designed to help teams avoid common pitfalls and prepare with confidence.

Final Thoughts

Migrating to Ruby on Rails is a strategic bet on higher velocity, cleaner execution, and long-term architectural confidence. Rails gives engineering leaders the edge from faster shipping cycles and clearer hiring paths to opinionated consistency, and fewer challenges in production.

But the teams that truly win with Rails do four things exceptionally well:

• Make the monolith trade-off consciously

• Commit fully to Rails’ conventions instead of fighting them

• Invest in monitoring, testing, and deployment discipline

• Treat upgrades as part of your normal roadmap

If you align on these dimensions, Rails can be more than a framework. It becomes a competitive advantage, and as you scale, you’ll see that productivity wins compound far more than any raw performance optimization ever could.

If you’re looking for expert guidance or support for your Rails project or any software needs, contact our team. We are ready to help.