The best GitHub repo rankings, and what each one measures

There is no single official ranking of GitHub repositories. GitHub shows you Trending and star counts, and a handful of independent sites rank repos their own way. Which one is best depends on the question: what is popular of all time, what is rising this week, or what a repo’s history looks like. Here is what each one measures, so you can pick the right list.

1. GitHub Trending

Measures: repos getting unusual attention right now, over a day, a week or a month, filterable by language. Best for: seeing what developers are excited about today. Limits: the formula is unpublished and the list turns over in days. More in how GitHub Trending works.

2. EvanLi/Github-Ranking

Measures: all-time stars and forks. This GitHub repo publishes top-100 lists of the most-starred and most-forked repositories, overall and per language, updated automatically every day. Best for: the all-time leaderboard. Limits: all-time totals favor old, famous projects, and tutorial and list repos rank alongside software.

3. Gitstar Ranking

Measures: stars, for users, organizations and repositories. Gitstar Ranking lets you see where a person or an org stands, not just a repo. Best for: looking up who owns the most starred work. Limits: stars only, so it measures popularity rather than activity.

4. OSS Insight

Measures: community activity across billions of public GitHub events. OSS Insight publishes daily, weekly and monthly trending repos ranked on more than stars, plus analytics pages for individual repos. Best for: trending with more signals than stars, and comparing two repos in depth. Limits: more analytics tool than quick list.

5. Trendshift

Measures: trending momentum, daily, weekly, monthly and yearly. Trendshift aims to catch repositories as they rise rather than after they peak, and keeps the history. Best for: an alternative view of what is trending, with a record of past days. Limits: like any trending list, it measures momentum, not quality.

6. Star History

Measures: one repo’s star count over time. Star History isn’t a ranking: it charts star growth and lets you overlay several repos. Best for: checking whether a repo is growing, flat, or had one suspicious spike. Limits: you need to know which repos to look up.

7. RepoRanker

Measures: money, at the top, and says so. On RepoRanker, every paid row shows what it cost and paid rows rank by cumulative spend. Rows nobody has bought are ordered by stars gained since the repo was listed and recent pushes. There are boards for each language and topic. Best for: maintainers who want a visible spot at a published price, and readers who want to see exactly what was paid. Limits: it ranks listed repos only, and the top of the board is a price, not a quality verdict.

Which ranking should you use?

• All-time most popular: EvanLi’s lists or Gitstar Ranking.
• What’s hot this week: GitHub Trending, Trendshift or OSS Insight.
• Is this repo really growing? Star History.
• Getting your own repo seen: concentrate a launch for Trending, then keep it somewhere that doesn’t reset. See how to promote your GitHub repo.

Every ranking is a choice about what to count

Stars measure attention, and attention can be bought, traded or faked (the fake-star problem). Activity measures busyness. Spend measures who paid. None of them measures whether a project is good, which is why the useful habit is knowing what a list counts before trusting its order (GitHub stars don’t measure quality).

List your repo on RepoRanker for free.

Related: RepoRanker vs Product Hunt vs GitHub Trending vs Show HN vs Awesome Lists · Leaderboard ranking rules · How RepoRanker works.