I recently built two SaaS starter templates, one in Rails, one in Go. Same feature set, same goal, two very different experiences getting there. This isn't a "Rails vs Go, which is better" hot take. It's a practical rundown of where each stack's philosophy showed up in the code, and what it cost or saved me building a real backend with each.
Quick summary: Rails wins on batteries-included tooling (auth, admin panels) and removes decision fatigue (one ORM, one obvious answer). Go wins on resource footprint, compile-time safety, and deployment simplicity, and lets you skip infrastructure you don't need yet, like a job queue for one background email. Details below.
Rails vs Go for authentication and admin panels
Auth. Devise gave me registration, login, session handling, password reset, and account confirmation almost for free. On the Go side, there's no equivalent default: I ended up rolling my own JWT exchange, issuing tokens, handling expiry, thinking through revocation. None of it was hard, exactly, but it was all surface area I had to design, implement, and test myself instead of configuring.
Admin. ActiveAdmin (or RailsAdmin) gets you a working, auth-gated CRUD interface in minutes. Go has nothing comparable baked into the ecosystem. Want an admin panel? You're building one, or bolting on a separate tool.
In both cases the pattern is the same. Rails had already made an opinionated call, tested by thousands of production apps, and I just had to opt in.
Rails ORM vs Go: Active Record vs sqlc and the decision fatigue problem
The auth and admin gaps are really instances of a bigger thing. Rails is an MVC framework with a specific, narrow purpose, and its community has spent two decades converging on "the" way to do things. Go doesn't have that. It's used across CLIs, infra tooling, backend services, all sorts of shapes, so there's no single obvious answer to a lot of questions a Rails dev doesn't even think of as questions.
The clearest example: how do you talk to the database?
- Rails: Active Record. That's it. That's the answer. Migrations, validations, associations, all designed to work together.
- Go: open question. Do you reach for an ORM (GORM, ent) that's trying to approximate Active Record but isn't nearly as battle-tested in this pattern? Or do you go with something like sqlc, a completely different philosophy: write raw SQL, generate typed Go from it?
That's not a "Go is missing an ORM" problem. It's a "you now have to survey an ecosystem, pick a paradigm, and live with it" problem: a real cost, separate from any individual feature gap, and one Rails just doesn't impose on you.
Background jobs in Rails vs Go: Sidekiq/Solid Queue vs a goroutine
Here's where it flips, though. My registration flow needed to send a confirmation email. In Rails, that meant I needed a queueing system, full stop. Any background job in Rails means picking one: Sidekiq (+ Redis), Solid Queue (+ Postgres), something else. For a single "send this email" job, that's real infrastructure to stand up before you've shipped anything.
In Go, I spun up an additional goroutine. That's it. No new dependency, no new infra, nothing to configure. For a simple fire-and-forget case, it was the right amount of solution for the problem size.
To be fair to Rails here: a goroutine isn't a queue. It doesn't survive a process crash, it doesn't retry with backoff, and it doesn't give you a dashboard to see what's stuck or failed. If your job needs are more than "send one email and move on," anything with real failure modes, you'll eventually want the durability Solid Queue gives you out of the box. But for the simple case, Rails made me pay an infra decision I didn't need yet, and Go let me not pay it until I did.
Why choose Go over Rails: resource footprint, safety, and deployment
It would be easy to read all of the above as "Rails wins, Go just has less." That's not the full picture. Go has advantages that have nothing to do with what it's missing:
- Resource footprint. My Go template runs comfortably on a fraction of the RAM the Rails template needs. That's not theoretical, it's the reason I sized my hosting the way I did. For a solo dev watching hosting costs, this is a real, measurable win.
- Compile-time safety. Type errors, nil checks, interface mismatches: caught at build time. Rails' dynamic typing is flexible, but a typo'd method call surfaces at runtime, sometimes in production.
- Deployment simplicity. A single static binary. No gem/bundler/version-manager juggling, no runtime dependency drift between your machine and the server.
- Concurrency as a first-class primitive. Goroutines are cheap and built into the language, which is exactly what made the "just spin up a goroutine" queueing story possible in the first place. Ruby's threading is GIL-bound in MRI, so real concurrency usually means extra processes or infra.
- Explicitness. No callback chains or metaprogramming to trace through to understand what a line of code actually does. Some people find Rails' implicit, convention-driven behavior harder to debug than Go's "what you see is what executes."
FAQ: Rails vs Go for a SaaS backend
Is Rails or Go better for a SaaS MVP? Rails typically gets you to a working MVP faster because auth, admin, and background jobs are already decided for you. Go takes longer to assemble but gives you a lighter, cheaper-to-run result once it's built.
Does Go have an equivalent to Devise for authentication? Not a direct one. There's no single dominant auth library in Go the way Devise dominates Rails, so most teams roll a custom solution (session-based or JWT) or assemble one from smaller packages.
Do I need Redis or Postgres for background jobs in Go? Not necessarily. For simple, non-durable background work (like sending a single email), a goroutine is often enough. You only need a persistent queue once you need retries, durability across restarts, or observability.
Is an ORM necessary in Go? No, it's a genuine choice. Some teams use a Rails-like ORM (GORM, ent); others prefer sqlc, which generates typed Go code from raw SQL. Rails doesn't offer this choice: Active Record is the default.
Takeaway
There's no universal winner between Rails and Go for a SaaS backend. It's a real tradeoff, and which side you land on depends on what you're optimizing for. If you want a decision made for you so you can move fast, Rails' opinions are worth a lot. If you want a lighter footprint and don't mind making (and living with) your own calls, Go rewards that.
I ended up building starter templates in both, precisely because I didn't want to make either of these tradeoffs more than once. You can check them out at rdooley.dev.
