10 JSON Tools Every Developer Needs

If you write software, you deal with JSON. It's in your API responses, your config files, your logs, your package.json, your test fixtures — everywhere. And yet most developers are still bouncing between five browser tabs just to format a blob, diff two payloads, or figure out why JSON.parse is throwing a tantrum.

Here are 10 tools that actually earn a place in your workflow, from quick browser utilities to CLI powerhouses.

1. jq — the command-line JSON Swiss Army knife

If you touch JSON in a terminal, jq is non-negotiable. It lets you filter, map, and transform JSON the way grep/sed/awk handle plain text.

curl -s https://api.github.com/repos/stedolan/jq | jq '.stargazers_count'