𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗠𝗼𝘀𝘁-𝗜𝗻𝘀𝘁𝗮𝗹𝗹𝗲𝗱 𝗝𝗦 𝗙𝗿𝗮𝗺𝗲𝘄𝗼𝗿𝗸𝘀 𝗔𝗿𝗲𝗻'𝘁 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗠𝗼𝘀𝘁-𝗦𝘁𝗮𝗿𝗿𝗲𝗱
GitHub stars show who watches a project. They do not show who uses it.
I compared GitHub stars against weekly npm downloads for 14 JavaScript frameworks. I wanted to find the gap between attention and actual usage.
The difference is huge.
Look at these three examples:
• Hono: 31k stars and 44.8M weekly installs. • TanStack Query: 49.8k stars and 58.5M weekly installs. • Next.js: 140k stars and 37.9M weekly installs.
Hono and TanStack Query have fewer stars than Next.js. Yet they have more weekly installs.
Here is the ratio of downloads per star:
• Hono: 1,445x • TanStack Query: 1,175x • Next.js: 271x • Vue: 255x • Svelte: 55x • Remix: 24x
The spread goes from 24x to 1,445x. Stars and usage do not match at the top.
Note that npm numbers are noisy. CI pipelines and coding agents increase total counts. This inflates the data.
The downloads per star ratio is a better signal. Small libraries get added to projects without users clicking the star button. Big frameworks collect stars from people who never deploy them.
You star what you admire. You install what you ship.
Source: https://dev.to/sigmondev/the-most-installed-js-frameworks-arent-the-most-starred-i-checked-14-2pdl