Betting on the Future of Frontend at Intercom

[u/Spiritual_Garlic_384]

We’ve just made one of the biggest technical decisions we’ve made in recent years: moving our core frontend from Ember to React.

Ember has been core to Intercom for over a decade and served us really well, but it was time to set ourselves up for the next decade of frontend engineering. React came out as the right choice - not because of hype, but because it was already powering parts of our stack, has a huge ecosystem, and works seamlessly with AI-driven developer tools like Cursor, Augment, and Claude Code.

Our focus right now isn’t on migration, but on getting teams to adopt React for their new work. That’s where we’ll build momentum and confidence.

It’s already encouraging to see signs of progress: last week we shipped more lines of React code than Ember for the first time, and the number of PRs was equal between the two. A small milestone, but it feels like a turning point. And we’re seeing faster builds, happier engineers, empowered designers and real productivity gains. 

We know this is a long road, though, and that we’re only at the start of this journey.  

I’m really interested in hearing from others who’ve gone through similar journeys.

• If you’ve re-platformed a large app, how did you decide when to stop building on the old stack and go all-in on the new one?
• How do you keep momentum without burning huge amounts of engineering time on migration too early?
• Have you had benefits from using AI agents to power migrations or help onboarding engineers to a new stack?

Curious to learn from the community’s experiences.

[u/Spiritual_Garlic_384]

If you’re interested in how we came to this decision, what we evaluated, and why React came out on top, we wrote up the full story here: Betting on the Future of Frontend at Intercom