Comparison
How to check a GitHub repo before you depend on it
Five checks before you depend on a GitHub repo, with typical numbers for 2,500 popular repos: 212 have no license and the median is 11.1 forks per 100 stars.
$ guides --sort=newest
Guides.
Short, sourced explanations of how star rankings work and what the numbers show. Every figure says where it came from and which day we measured it.
All guides
Explainer
Stars per year: comparing old and new GitHub repos
Total stars favor old repos. Dividing by age changes the top 100: 44 of the 88 repos over a year old stay in it. Counts for 2,500 repos on Oct 23, 2026.
Comparison
Daily, weekly or monthly: which window to watch?
Pick Today for what is new since yesterday, This week for a weekly check, This month for what keeps gaining. No window has a measured gain on Oct 23, 2026.
Comparison
Find Claude Code repos worth trying (Oct 2026)
81 repos sit behind the claude-code topic on Oct 23, 2026, and 50 were created this year. Here is a checklist to tell steady repos from spikes.
Comparison
GitHub trending alternatives: what each one counts
Compare GitHub Trending, OSS Insight, Star History, Trendshift and GitTrend by what each counts and whether it says how. Read on Oct 23, 2026.
Explainer
How does GitHub decide what is trending?
GitHub doesn't publish how its trending list is ranked. We will rank by stars gained over 24 hours, 7 days or 30 days, from daily snapshots of 12,468 repos.
Explainer
Open source licenses on popular GitHub repos
Among the 2,500 repos with a page on Oct 23, 2026, MIT leads with 953 repos and 212 have no license. Counts by license, plus what the sample hides.
Comparison
Stars gained vs total stars: which says more?
Total stars show what has lasted; stars gained show what is moving. 135 of 2,500 repos with a page have over 100,000 stars. Gains start Oct 24.
How-to
Trending badge for your README, and what it says
Copy the Markdown for a repo/trending badge. It shows your best rank, or your star count until ranks exist. 2,500 repos have one, 2 files each.
Explainer
What 12,468 GitHub repos look like
On Oct 23, 2026 we tracked 12,468 GitHub repos. Here are the language, age and topic counts for the 2,500 most starred of them, and what those counts hide.