How rankings work

Inclusion rules, ranking formulas, data refresh frequency and known limitations.

Last updated: 2026-11-06

What gets listed

Only public, non-fork repositories qualify. The site lists:

Repositories with 5,000 or more stars, regardless of activity;
Repositories with 500 to 5,000 stars and a push in the last 6 months;
Repositories with 100 or more stars that appeared on GitHub's official daily or weekly Trending;
Projects listed earlier, which stay listed and show "inactive" after 6 months without a push.

Archived repositories and confirmed duplicates are not listed. Stars do not measure quality, and being listed is not a recommendation.

Rankings

Stars: sorted by current star count.
Growth: sorted by net star change over the selected window, counting decreases. It uses UTC daily snapshots and excludes the current day. Projects with too little history or missing records are left out rather than estimated.
New: sorted by repository creation date, newest first, not by when we added it.

Stars and install counts are different metrics and are never ranked together. Neither equals the number of actual users.

Data freshness

Project data is collected once a day from GitHub's public APIs, so figures can differ from live GitHub numbers. Some early history is backfilled and is labelled separately from daily measurements.

GitHub Trending page

The GitHub Trending page shows GitHub's official daily, weekly and monthly lists with the source labelled. It is not mixed into our growth ranking.

Known limitations

GitHub search results change over time, so we do not claim to cover every open source project.
Stars can be inflated, and can reflect short-term attention rather than lasting value.
AI-written descriptions can be wrong. Check the project's own documentation.