There’s really only one thing about seeking out the best technology stocks that stays the same year in and year out:
It’s difficult.
The technology sector is constantly in a state of flux. And is there any wonder why? A group of businesses that make their money by innovating … well, their innovations have a tendency to upend their own industries again and again and again. Not to mention, not every technological innovation is a winner. For every iPhone, there’s a hoverboard. For every artificial intelligence, there’s a 3D TV.
How, then, do you separate the best tech stocks to buy now from the fad stocks trading on short-lived news trends? And how do today’s small technology stocks become tomorrow’s tech giants? Read on, and I’ll discuss that, and give you an overview of the best tech stocks for 2025.
Disclaimer: This article does not constitute individualized investment advice. These securities appear for your consideration and not as investment recommendations. Act at your own discretion.
Why Invest in the Tech Sector?
Many investors are interested in top tech stocks for good reason. Disruptive technologies can sometimes lead to dramatic revenue growth, and dramatic gains in a firm’s stock price as a result.
In fact, technology companies sometimes chase that revenue growth for years without ever focusing on bottom-line profits. Some of the best-performing tech (and “tech-esque”) stocks in history include Amazon.com (AMZN) and Meta Platforms (META), which both prioritized ramping up their long-term scale over short-term profitability.
And look where they are now. Both are among the biggest companies on the planet, outperforming the market by wide margins over the last several years.
This is why many investors look for growth stocks within the tech sector and tech-adjacent companies. It’s not for the short-term profits or dividends, but rather the hopes of a “moonshot” stock that grows exponential revenue growth in short order, delivering life-changing profits to its investors in the process.
The Best Tech Stocks to Invest In
Some of the best-performing tech stocks are very recognizable names. But before you buy any of them, don’t forget that investing is fundamentally about the future. That means learning about the product pipeline and R&D beyond what’s on the surface.
Leading tech firms are often the parent company of lesser-known products or services that could be just as interesting. Particularly when it comes to entrenched mega-cap tech stocks, their future potential depends on revenue streams that have yet to be fully realized yet—not the big-name products consumers currently use.
The tech stocks here are listed in reverse order of market capitalization (so, from smallest to largest).
Best Tech Stock #9: Synopsys
- Market capitalization: $79.7 billion
- Dividend yield: N/A
- Industry: Semiconductor software
Synopsys (SNPS), like a couple other stocks on this list, deals in semiconductors, though in a different way than your typical chip stock. Synopsis is the market share leader in electronic design automation (EDA), which helps silicon firms design and manufacture semiconductors. Its solutions include design, verification, intellectual property, and more, as well as programs and services that improve the security, quality, and compliance of various software.
In short, though, as the semiconductor industry goes, so goes Synopsys—which has largely been a positive trait.
“Innovation in the EDA industry began more than 30 years ago and in that time, the top two vendors have amassed broad technology portfolios through organic investment and M&A,” say Stifel analysts, who rate Synopsys’ shares at Buy. “While we view both of the large EDA companies as likely beneficiaries of secular growth drivers, we prefer SNPS at this time given what we view as a more attractive relative valuation.”
More recently, the U.S. backing down on China tariffs has helped fuel more optimism in the semiconductor industry generally, which has helped to lift SNPS shares. The company also recently announced several of its plans around artificial intelligence, which included the release of AgentEngineer—an accelerated compute-driven design tool that uses AI agents to tackle workload-intensive design tasks.
Do you want to get serious about saving and planning for retirement? Sign up for Retire With Riley, Young and the Invested’s free retirement planning newsletter.
Best Tech Stock #8: Palo Alto Networks
- Market capitalization: $126.0 billion
- Dividend yield: N/A
- Industry: Cybersecurity
In an age of persistent cybersecurity and hacking concerns, Palo Alto Networks (PANW) stands out as a company with both a reliable customer base as well as the near certainty of increased revenue coming its way across the coming years.
But investors will have to deal with short-term turbulence as the cybersecurity darling makes a massive change to the way it does business.
Palo Alto is migrating to a security platform approach, and it’s banking on comped services to attract customers to it. That, as well as a slowdown in business with the federal government, led the company to lower full-year billings and revenue guidance at the start of last year, which tanked shares, shaking out at least a few bulls in the process. But PANW recovered throughout the rest of 2024, and is sitting on gains in 2025 despite an up-and-down year. And by and large, pros remain bullish on PANW’s longer-term prospects.
“While not an inflection point in its platformization strategy, the seeds of growth are falling into place as PANW is in the driver’s seat to gain market and mind share in the cyber security landscape, especially with more companies heading down the AI path over the coming years,” Wedbush analyst Daniel Ives (Outperform, equivalent of Buy) wrote in February following Palo Alto’s Street-beating (but not Street-clobbering) report for the second quarter of its 2025 fiscal year.
To that point, a couple months later, Palo Alto announced it would acquire privately held Protect AI, an AI security solutions provider, for an undisclosed price.
“Protect AI’s focus on governance fits in with what Palo Alto Networks already does around AI access, runtime, inline and posture management,” says Truist Managing Director Joel P. Fishbein Jr., who rates PANW at Buy.
Related: The 15 Best ETFs for a Prosperous 2025
Best Tech Stock #7: Shopify
- Market capitalization: $143.1 billion
- Dividend yield: N/A
- Industry: E-commerce
Shopify (SHOP) is an e-commerce infrastructure company that helps small and mid-sized businesses market and sell products through various digital sales channels. The basics include web and mobile storefronts, but SHOP also supports “omnichannel” integration with brick-and-mortar locations to manage inventory, as well as analytics and reporting to maximize profitability and customer loyalty.
We all know the potential of e-commerce thanks to the success of Amazon. But SHOP is concerned with every other merchant out there that also has the potential to reach new customers in a digital age.
This tech stock delivered a 37% gain in 2024 thanks in large part to a blowout third-quarter earnings report announced in November that saw revenues climb 26% year-over-year and earnings almost double.
Analysts believe SHOP will grow its top line by more than 20% in each of the next two years. And while earnings growth is expected to moderate significantly to about 12% in 2025, it’s projected to accelerate again next year, to nearly 30%.
This year, Shopify dropped like a rock in February, which followed the company’s light guidance but also aligned with the broader market’s decline. At the time, William Blair analysts (Outperform) called the post-earnings selloff a “buying opportunity.”
“Importantly, the company is making progress on key growth initiatives such as enterprise, international, POS, and B2B, which should all bode well for long-term growth,” they wrote. “In addition, despite the lower-than-expected first-quarter FCF guidance, we expect the company to end 2024 with a higher FCF margin than 2023, with further improvement in 2025. Although the stock could take a pause in the near term, we expect shares to move higher once investors get more visibility into the company’s growth and FCF trajectory.”
After dropping to 25%-plus losses by early April, SHOP has rebounded considerably and now is in the black year-to-date.
Related: The 13 Best Mutual Funds You Can Buy
Best Tech Stock #6: Adobe
- Market capitalization: $169.6 billion
- Dividend yield: N/A
- Industry: Enterprise software
Creative software and services firm Adobe (ADBE) is the go-to platform for photographers, marketing directors, educators, publishers, and just about anyone who uses visuals to tell a story.
With loyal customers and long-term certainty thanks to subscription-based revenue rather than one-off product sales, ADBE is a growth-oriented tech stock to consider for 2025 and beyond. As proof of the fact Adobe is looking to the future, it has invested heavily in “Firefly” artificial intelligence tools that continue to cause a buzz about the potential for computer assisted design in the 21st century.
To be fair, ADBE stock itself hasn’t been a great story over the past few months. Shares were bucking the broader market’s bull trend even before the market peaked, then decided to join its peers for the tariff-triggered spiral.
Still, most pros remain convinced that ADBE will right the ship.
“We think that Adobe has positioned itself at the center of the exploding market for digital video content and advertising creation and management,” says Argus Research analyst Joseph Bonner (Buy). The company has an admirable track record of innovation and a unique collection of software assets centered on its Creative Cloud tools, which enable enterprise, professional and amateur users to create and manage digital content.
“We think that Adobe will continue to ramp up investment in new product extensions, particularly around generative AI, as it pursues a rapidly expanding total addressable market.”
Best Tech Stock #5: Accenture
- Market capitalization: $201.1 billion
- Dividend yield: 1.8%
- Industry: IT services and consulting
Professional services specialist Accenture (ACN) has made a name for itself by providing “DevOps” blueprints to top companies around the world. This unique approach involves high technological improvements such as custom software development, systems upgrades, and data migration to ultimately provide improved service and efficiencies across complex organizations.
Whether it’s helping a firm get smarter about its customers through data analytics and artificial intelligence or simply consulting on how to trim the IT fat after a complex acquisition, Accenture is a firm that the biggest brands in the world turn to to solve their tech problems. And with a recently announced team-up with Amazon to provide generative AI solutions to clients, Accenture is working hard to ensure it has the right tools for the future as well as for today.
“We believe Accenture remains a market leader in developing and investing in next-generation capabilities, and the company’s global presence and scale remain strategic differentiators that are not easily replicated,” say William Blair analysts, who rate the stock at Outperform. “We remain positive on Accenture’s story and the intrinsic value, given a structurally strong business, stable balance sheet, and positive free cash flows that are supplemented by a comprehensive capital return program that includes share repurchases and dividends.”
Do you want to get serious about saving and planning for retirement? Sign up for Retire With Riley, Young and the Invested’s free retirement planning newsletter.
Best Tech Stock #4: Broadcom
- Market capitalization: $1.1 trillion
- Dividend yield: 1.0%
- Industry: Semiconductors
Broadcom (AVGO) is one of the world’s largest semiconductor companies. It designs, develops, manufactures, and supplies semiconductor and infrastructure software products for a wide variety of uses, including (but hardly limited to) artificial intelligence (AI), data centers, networking, wireless, storage, and industrial automation.
The company has been an innovator in its own right, but you can also chalk up much of its scale to a history of aggressive merger-and-acquisition (M&A) activity. The company—itself the product of a 2016 merger between Broadcom Corporation and Avago Technologies (hence the AVGO ticker)—has swallowed up the likes of LSI Corporation, Brocade, CA Technologies, VMware, and Symantec’s enterprise security business.
Regardless of how it got there, the resulting entity is one of Wall Street’s most beloved chip stocks.
“We believe AVGO has one of the most strategically and financially attractive business models in semiconductors,” say Oppenheimer analysts, who rate the stock at Outperform. Among the reasons they love Broadcom are a “sustained competitive advantage in the high-end filter market, a “sticky” non-mobile business, efficiently managed manufactury, and substantial earnings and free cash flow growth.
That last point is the main driver behind the company’s rapidly growing dividend, which has exploded by 80% in just the past five years alone. That puts AVGO not just among our favorite tech stocks, but also the best dividend stocks for beginners.
Related: 7 Best Schwab Index Funds for Thrifty Investors
Best Tech Stock #3: Amazon
- Market capitalization: $2.2 trillion
- Dividend yield: N/A
- Industry: Online retail/cloud
Amazon (AMZN) dominates the retail world. It is a one-stop shop for nearly anything you could want. And it has redefined customer expectations—they were a pioneer in two-day, one-day and even same-day shipping.
And yet, it’s also so much more than that.
Amazon is also the world’s biggest cloud provider through AWS, it’s an entertainment company through its Amazon Prime service, and it’s one of the biggest advertising companies, behind only giants Google and Facebook. AMZN makes for such an attractive stock because it’s supported by a diversified business with ample opportunities to enter new markets and disrupt well-seated industry incumbents.
That said, the optimism about future growth is mostly centered around AWS, cloud, and the potential growth AI could deliver.
“While AI on AWS is already a multibillion-dollar business, we are still in the very early phases. An increasing number of applications are likely to become AI centric or agentic over time, which we believe bodes well for long-term AWS growth.” William Blair’s equity analysis team, which rates the stock at Outperform, said after the company’s fourth-quarter earnings report. “Further, lower cost of inferencing, which is implied by DeepSeek, is very likely to proliferate AI applications, which is once again a positive for AWS. And we believe Amazon’s full stack AI offering positions the company well to be a primary partner for businesses looking to deploy AI.”
Wedbush analysts, who also rate the stock at Outperform, add that investors should moderate their near-term expectations.
“While we are optimistic on the long-term margin trajectory of the business, we acknowledge that the magnitude of operating income beats in the coming quarters are likely to be more modest as the company makes incremental investments to support AI initiatives and longer-term bets including Project Kuiper,” a Wedbush analyst team says.
Related: The 10 Best Vanguard Index Funds You Can Buy
Best Tech Stock #2: Nvidia
- Market capitalization: $3.3 trillion
- Dividend yield: < 0.1%
- Industry: Semiconductors
Nvidia (NVDA) is the world’s top chip stock thanks to its dominance in semiconductors that are used in cutting-edge technologies. Applications for this firm’s hardware include self-driving cars, cryptocurrency mining, and other in-demand and growth-oriented areas of the 21st century economy.
But No. 1 with a bullet is the artificial intelligence market.
“NVDA remains *the* AI company owing to its culture of innovation, ecosystem of incumbency, and massive investment in software, pre-trained models, and services,” says Truist analyst William Stein (Buy). “We see NVDA’s leadership as driven less by the raw performance of its chips, and more by its culture of innovation, ecosystem of incumbency, and massive investment in software, AI models, and services, that we believe makes its chips a default choice for most engineers building AI systems.”
This specialization has resulted in red-hot growth at Nvidia—a fire that’s only expected to continue burning. Analysts see revenue growth averaging 40% annually over the next two years, and long-term earnings growth at a clip of 33%. Indeed, NVDA sits on our list of the market’s best growth stocks right now, too.
Related: 9 Best Fidelity Index Funds to Buy
Best Tech Stock #1: Microsoft
- Market capitalization: $3.4 trillion
- Dividend yield: 0.7%
- Industry: Enterprise software
Microsoft (MSFT) is a dominant tech stock that has seen amazing growth over the past few decades. But despite that, as well as a more than $3 trillion market cap, MSFT still shows no signs of slowing down.
The average person knows Microsoft for its iconic Windows and Office productivity software for personal computers, as well as its Xbox gaming console and related software, which is only getting more dominant after a nearly $70 billion deal to acquire game studio Activision Blizzard (ATVI).
But Microsoft also is a major player in cloud computing, via its still-growing Azure cloud services, and an emerging titan in artificial intelligence—for better or worse.
“CEO Satya Nadella sees [generative AI] as a rare change to a fundamental computing paradigm, and Microsoft is moving to exploit the opportunities opened up by Gen AI as quickly as possible, as demand currently outstrips the supply of its cloud services,” says Argus Research analyst Joseph Bonner (Buy). “However, the market, fickle as ever, may be concerned about the ramping costs and investments in Microsoft’s GenAI infrastructure as it races against competitors Alphabet and Meta, as well as a host of smaller AI startups, to develop the new GenAI models/applications that may drive the emerging GenAI market as a whole.”
Revenue and profit projections for the current fiscal year are currently in the low double digits, with pros believing the stock can indeed keep getting bigger and delivering profits for its shareholders.
“Management remains laser-focused on optimizing margins across all business segments to help offset AI investment needs,” say William Blair analysts, who rate the stock at Outperform. “For full year fiscal 2025, despite capital expenditures expected to be up in comparison to fiscal 2024, operating margin is expected to increase slightly year-over-year while operating income is expected to grow double digits.”
Tech Stocks: Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
Is technology the best sector in the stock market?
Technology stocks regularly are among the best-performing stocks on Wall Street, and they historically beat the broader S&P 500 index. But that should not be misunderstood to mean that the tech sector is a sure thing. For instance, according to Pensions & Investments, the technology sector slumped by 28.2% in 2022—more than 10 percentage points worse than the broader market.
In other words, there are lots of reasons to like technology stocks and the tech sector. But there’s no such thing as a sure thing when it comes to investing.
Are there any downsides to investing in tech companies?
Many tech companies can be quite volatile as they pursue their long-term potential, often at the cost of short-term profits—or even short-term stock performance. One of the most common downsides of investing in tech stocks is that they can move up and down much more dramatically than sleepy sectors such as utility stocks or consumer staples.
That’s also what makes them popular stocks to buy, however. Those big moves are great when they are in an investor’s favor. Just be aware that the big downside of investing in tech companies is … well, the potential for bigger downsides.
Related:
