A database of 35 of the most successful web apps, the software millions of people open in a browser every day. Each entry covers who built it, how it makes money, how it grew and the numbers that prove it worked, and every number links to its source. Last audited 1 November 2026.
Howie Liu, Andrew Ofstad and Emmett Nicholas launched Airtable in early 2015: it looked like a spreadsheet, but there was a proper relational database underneath. It went on to raise more than $1.4 billion and hit an $11 billion valuation in a December 2021 round. In August 2026 Bending Spoons agreed to buy it at an enterprise value of $1.285 billion, with ARR around $480 million and still growing over 20% a year, and the deal closed that September.
Why it won
It looked friendly like a spreadsheet but could do far more than one. That let non technical teams build their own tools without waiting on engineers.
Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz and Justin Rosenstein had built a task tool for Facebook's own staff, then left in 2008 to start Asana. The app came out of beta in November 2011 and started charging in April 2012. Asana went public on the NYSE through a direct listing in September 2020, and it now brings in more than $200 million a quarter.
Why it won
It gives a team one shared place to see every task, owner and deadline, and a free plan for one or two people makes it easy to start small.
Tope Awotona founded Calendly in Atlanta in 2013, emptying his personal savings to do it, after getting fed up with how hard it was to book sales calls. It had raised just $550,000 before January 2021, when it took a $350 million investment that valued it at over $3 billion. Today Calendly says over 50 million people across 240+ countries use it.
Why it won
It fixed one annoying problem really well: send a link and let the other person pick a slot. Every booking link also showed the tool to someone new.
Melanie Perkins, Cliff Obrecht and Cameron Adams launched Canva out of Australia in 2013. It runs on a freemium model, so you can start designing without paying, and over the years it piled on extras like video editing and print. By the end of 2025 it had more than 265 million monthly active users, over 31 million of them paying, and $4 billion in annual recurring revenue.
Why it won
It made design feel doable for people who would never open pro software. A big free tier pulled people in, and enough of them upgraded to build a $4 billion ARR business.
OpenAI started as a nonprofit lab in San Francisco in 2015, and when it released ChatGPT in November 2022 it sped up the whole AI boom. In March 2026 OpenAI said its consumer AI products had more than 900 million weekly active users and over 50 million subscribers, and it closed a $122 billion round at an $852 billion valuation. By late September 2026 the company was telling reporters ChatGPT had 1.2 billion weekly users.
Why it won
It made talking to a capable AI as easy as sending a message, and a free tier meant anyone could try it. Plenty of people tried it once and then kept coming back every week.
Drew Houston and Arash Ferdowsi, both MIT students, started the company in 2007 and launched Dropbox at TechCrunch Disrupt in 2008. It listed on Nasdaq in March 2018, and the shares jumped 42% on the first day. Today it counts more than 700 million registered users across about 180 countries.
Why it won
The free 2 GB Basic plan brings people in, and even a small paying slice adds up: 18.19 million paying users and $2.566 billion in ARR.
Dylan Field and Evan Wallace started Figma in 2012 and released it in 2016 as a design tool that lives entirely in the browser. It went public on the New York Stock Exchange in July 2025 under the ticker FIG. In the second quarter of 2026 it brought in $370.1 million, up 48% on a year earlier, and 1,635 customers were each paying it more than $100,000 a year.
Why it won
Putting design in the browser meant no installs and no passing files around, just one link everyone could open. That made it easy to spread from designers to the whole product team.
Tom Preston-Werner, Chris Wanstrath, P. J. Hyett and Scott Chacon launched GitHub in April 2008 as a home for code stored in Git. Ten years later Microsoft agreed to buy it for $7.5 billion in stock, back when more than 28 million developers used it. In its 2026 Octoverse report, GitHub said it now serves more than 225 million developers.
Why it won
A free plan kept developers pouring in for years, and its Copilot AI assistant has grown on top of that to 50 million users, according to Microsoft.
Owner
MicrosoftBought by Microsoft in 2018
Founders
Tom Preston-Werner, Chris Wanstrath, P. J. Hyett, Scott Chacon
GitLab began in 2011 as an open source side project by Dmytro Zaporozhets in Ukraine. He and Sytse Sijbrandij turned it into a company in 2014, and it became known as one of the largest all-remote companies in the world. It listed on Nasdaq in October 2021, and in the quarter ending July 2026 it made $286.3 million in revenue.
Why it won
It bundles the whole DevSecOps workflow into one platform, and teams can use it on GitLab.com or run it on their own servers.
Gmail was Paul Buchheit's idea at Google, and the company announced it on April 1, 2004 as a limited beta. It kept the beta label all the way until July 2009. Google now says 3 billion users rely on it, and in January 2026 it started adding Gemini powered features like AI Overviews to the inbox.
Why it won
A no cost account with up to 15 GB of storage made it an easy default for almost everyone. It also comes tied to a Google account, so one login covers the rest of Google's apps.
Google Docs grew out of Writely, a web word processor from a small company called Upstartle that launched in August 2005. Google bought Upstartle in March 2006 and turned it into Docs. Today it sits inside Google Workspace, which Google says more than 4 billion users rely on across apps like Gmail, Docs and Drive, with more than 13 million customers on the business side.
Why it won
Anyone with a Google account can create a doc and share a link, with nothing to install. Editing together in real time made emailing drafts back and forth feel old very quickly.
Owner
Google (Alphabet)Grew out of Writely, which Google got when it bought Upstartle in 2006
Max Lytvyn, Alex Shevchenko and Dmytro Lider started Grammarly in 2009, and it grew into a writing helper that plugs into over a million apps and websites. In May 2025 it had more than 40 million daily users and annual revenue above $700 million, and it closed $1 billion in financing from General Catalyst. Later that year the company brought Grammarly, Coda and Superhuman Mail under one roof and renamed itself Superhuman.
Why it won
It shows up where people already write, in email, docs and the browser, instead of asking them to open yet another app. A free plan made it a no brainer to try.
Owner
Superhuman Platform Inc.The company behind Grammarly renamed itself Superhuman in 2025
Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah started HubSpot in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 2006, betting that customers should find you instead of being chased by cold calls. They even co-wrote the book on it, Inbound Marketing, in 2010. A free plan lets small teams start without paying, and by the end of June 2026 HubSpot counted 306,446 customers.
Why it won
It puts marketing, sales and the CRM in one place with a free way in, so a team can start tiny and pay more only as it grows.
Eoghan McCabe, Des Traynor, Ciaran Lee and David Barrett founded Intercom in 2011 to build messaging tools for customer service. In 2023 it launched Fin, an AI agent built on large language models, and the bet paid off so well that the company renamed itself Fin in May 2026. Salesforce agreed to buy it for about $3.6 billion that June and closed the deal in September, picking up more than 30,000 customer companies.
Why it won
It moved early and fast on AI support agents while still offering a full help desk, so teams could hand routine questions to Fin and keep humans for the tricky ones.
Owner
Salesforce, Inc.Bought by Salesforce in 2026. The company behind it, formerly Intercom, is now called Fin.
Founders
Eoghan McCabe, Des Traynor, Ciaran Lee, David Barrett
Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar founded Atlassian in Sydney in 2002, and Jira, their flagship product, launched that same year as a bug tracker for software developers. The name is a nod to Gojira, the Japanese name for Godzilla, by way of a nickname for Bugzilla. Atlassian is now listed on Nasdaq and made $6,572 million in revenue in fiscal 2026.
Why it won
It started narrow, just tracking issues for developers, and kept growing with its users: in 2026 Atlassian said strong seat growth in core Jira and Confluence was pushing cloud revenue up 31%.
Anton Osika first built GPT Engineer, an open source coding tool, and then he and Fabian Hedin turned it into a commercial app in Stockholm. They renamed it Lovable in December 2024 and opened it up to everyone. By August 2026 people had made more than 60 million projects on it, and it raised $400 million at a $13.3 billion valuation. A month later Hedin said annual run-rate revenue had passed $600 million.
Why it won
It rode the vibe coding wave at exactly the right time, and a free plan with 5 build credits a day lets anyone try it before paying.
Mailchimp launched in Atlanta in 2001 as a side project of a small web design agency, and it was named after one of the agency's popular e-greeting card characters. It never took outside investment, which made it one of the best known bootstrapped software companies around. In 2021 Intuit bought it in a deal worth about $12 billion, and since August 2026 Intuit runs it as its own business segment.
Why it won
It made email marketing feel friendly and cheap enough for tiny businesses, with a free plan to start, and it got huge without ever needing investors.
Andrey Khusid and Oleg Shardin started it in 2011 as RealtimeBoard, a simple whiteboarding tool, and renamed it Miro in 2019. Then the pandemic pushed everyone into remote work, and it went from 5 million to about 30 million users in roughly two years, earning a $17.5 billion price tag in late 2021. By 2026 it had about 100 million users and around $600 million in ARR, and Bending Spoons bought it at an enterprise value of $1.355 billion, closing the deal in October 2026.
Why it won
When teams could not stand around a physical whiteboard anymore, Miro gave them one in the browser that felt close to the real thing. That made it the go to room for remote workshops and planning.
Roy Mann and Eran Zinman started the company in Tel Aviv in 2012 under the name DaPulse. The product launched commercially in 2014, and the company renamed itself monday.com in 2017. It listed on Nasdaq in June 2021, and in the second quarter of 2026 it made $364.6 million in revenue, up 22% from a year earlier.
Why it won
It began as one flexible work board and grew into a family of products for CRM, service and dev teams, with a free plan for up to 2 seats to get people in the door.
Notion started as a San Francisco startup in 2013 and first shipped in 2016, and tech enthusiasts picked it up quickly. In August 2024 it passed 100 million users. It has gone big on AI since then: by the end of 2025 more than half of its ARR came from AI-enabled customers, and a January 2026 employee tender valued the company at $11 billion.
Why it won
It let people build their own setup for notes, docs and projects instead of juggling a bunch of separate apps. That flexibility helped it spread from individuals to whole teams.
Owner
Notion Labs, Inc.
Founders
Ivan Zhao, Akshay Kothari, Chris Prucha, Jessica Lam, Simon Last, Toby Schachman
Every number comes from the linked source and shows the date it refers to. Many are reported by the companies themselves, so treat them as their claims, not audited results, and open the source before you rely on one. We recheck entries every day, but prices, plans, owners and numbers can change between checks. Users, revenue and valuation figures are not directly comparable across apps, so this database is not a ranking. This is general information, not investment advice. Product and company names belong to their owners, and we are not affiliated with them.
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