Hardhat and Truffle are the two biggest Ethereum development network tools recommended by blockchain communities and experts to develop, test, and deploy contracts correctly and securely.

Development networks are essentially Ethereum clients (implementations of Ethereum) designed specifically for local development.

Both of them are Javascript-based environments that require you to have node installed.

Hardhat is an environment developers use to automate commons tasks such as testing, compiling, deploying and debugging dApps. Some of the most important features of Hardhat is that it includes Solidity debugging, error messages for failed transactions, and explicit stack traces.

Truffle is one of the oldest development tools for Ethereum developers that uses a testing framework and asset pipeline for blockchains using the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), aiming to make life as a developer easier without using heavy client side programming.