Is Xano Good Enough for Production? What I Learned Using It

Yes. I used Xano as the backend of a recruitment ATS/CRM in production for about two years. The platform had around 150K person records, roughly 35K candidates, thousands of jobs and projects, and dozens of people using it every day. Xano handled the APIs, permissions, background jobs, AI workflows and most of the business logic.

So this comes from real use, not a side project. But there are a few things you should know before you rely on it.

What Xano gives you

You get pretty much everything a production backend needs:

What’s included

• Database: tables and relations, add or remove fields
• Indexes: add them on the columns you filter on
• APIs: REST endpoints with auth and permissions
• Request history: what each call received, returned and how long it took
• Background tasks: scheduled jobs and work outside the request
• External APIs: call OpenAI, Google, email tools and others

On that project Xano called OpenAI for CV extraction and candidate matching, Google Vision for OCR, Google Places for locations and Brevo for emails. If a service has an API, you can call it from Xano.

You can see what your backend is doing

This is the main reason I recommend it to people who aren’t very technical yet.

Your data is right there in tables, and you can see how the tables are related. When you open an API you see every step it runs, in order, and the request history shows what came in, what went out and how long it took.

In a regular backend most of this lives in files, logs and the terminal. Having it on screen makes it a lot easier to understand what’s going on, and to find the problem when something is wrong.

Using it with Claude Code

Xano now has XanoScript, which lets you write backend logic as code, and an MCP server you can connect to Claude Code.

I’ve used the Xano MCP with Claude Code myself. You can build a full backend in a few hours, or refactor a whole app in minutes. And if you can’t read walls of code, you can open Xano and see visually what Claude did.

I like that combination a lot: you get the speed of AI, and you can still check the backend yourself.

What you still need to know

Xano makes building the backend easier, but the usual backend problems are still there.

At one point some APIs on that app took 5–40+ seconds under load. That wasn’t Xano’s fault. We had missing indexes, heavy joins, too many database calls in one request, and work running inside the request that should have been in the background.

We fixed it with PostgreSQL indexes (including GIN and geospatial ones), better queries, fewer repeated calls, pagination and background tasks. I wrote the details in what slowed down our Xano/PostgreSQL backend.

What I’d check before going live on Xano:

• [x] indexes on the columns you filter and sort by
• [x] pagination on every list endpoint
• [x] no database calls inside big loops
• [x] heavy work (AI, emails, imports) in background tasks
• [x] permissions on every endpoint, not only in the frontend

You’d have to do the same things in Node.js or any other backend.

Is it good enough?

For most business apps, like CRMs, dashboards, internal tools and SaaS products, yes. Xano is more than enough. And if you’re not very technical, it helps a lot that you can see what’s going on.

I wouldn’t use it for every project. Some fit a full-code backend better, and I explain when in low-code vs full-code. Whether Xano can run in production isn’t really the question anymore. What matters more is that you understand what you’re building on it. (More on my Xano work.)

I first posted this on my blog, where it’s also in French and Arabic. What did you start with, and would you pick the same again?