Explore Open Source Projects with GitTrends

By Jake Rocheleau. in Toolkit. Updated on August 11, 2022.

Update: GitTrends is no longer in service.

Dozens of new open source projects get posted to GitHub every day. Over the years, this created a huge library of projects and it can be tough sifting through everything.

But the new free web app, GitTrends makes searching for projects easy and fun!

You can search for terms related to libraries such as jQuery, React, or anything similar. GitTrends will autosuggest related libraries with links to each one.

You can also explore the newest libraries manually through the “Explore” page.

By default, GitTrends organizes projects by rank. This seems to be an average of many factors including stars, watchers, contributions, and other metrics pulled from GitHub’s API.

If you have a specific sorting preference, you can change these results by limiting the total stars, the programming language, or by the domain of six very specific topics:

Application software
Documentation
Non-web libraries and frameworks
Software tools
System software
Web libraries and frameworks

For some reason, GitTrends does not have a “recency” search which would be phenomenal. Maybe in future updates, we’ll see this functionality.

This site isn’t just about finding cool libraries & projects, though. It’s also great for browsing repo stats, metrics and graphing visuals such as “total stars over time”. You can check these metrics for any GitHub project, from newer JS libraries to Bootstrap.

Each page includes raw numbers for total contributors, forks, stars/unstars, and two important dates: when the project was created and when it was last updated.

This little web app should be a solid bookmark for any professional developer. It can help you search through literally millions of repos to find the vital information you need.