The most-installed JS frameworks aren't the most-starred — I checked 14

GitHub stars are the number everyone quotes, but they measure admiration, not
usage. So I pulled two public signals for the 14 most-tracked JS framework tools
— GitHub stars (mindshare) and npm weekly downloads (actual usage) — and
lined them up. The gap is bigger than I expected, and it flips the leaderboard.

Every number here is a live public signal captured on 2026-06-15. No private
data, no scraping behind logins.

The leaderboard (ranked by GitHub stars)

The part that surprised me

Two tools out-install Next.js while carrying a fraction of its stars:

• TanStack Query — 49.8k stars, but 58.5M installs/week
• Hono — 31.0k stars, but 44.8M installs/week
• Next.js — 140.0k stars, 37.9M installs/week

Both are drop-in libraries you add to a project and ship — you rarely stop to
star them. The big frameworks, meanwhile, rack up stars from people who admire
them but never deploy with them.

You can see it clearly in downloads-per-star (a rough "how much do people
actually use this per unit of hype"):

• Hono — 1,445x
• TanStack Query — 1,175x
• Next.js — 271x
• Vue — 255x
• Svelte — 55x
• Remix — 24x

A ~60x spread. Installs also concentrate hard at the top: the three biggest
(TanStack Query, Hono, Next.js) are about 72% of all weekly downloads in this
set, while Qwik barely registers at ~30k/week.

The takeaway

Stars are a lagging, vanity-adjacent indicator. If you're picking a tool — or
sizing up a competitor — weekly installs, release cadence and who's hiring tell
you far more about real momentum than a star count that took five years to
accumulate.

I put this together while building Sigmon, a tool that
tracks dev-tool competitors across public signals (GitHub, npm, releases,
hiring, funding) and sends a weekly brief of what changed. The full interactive
leaderboard with head-to-head comparisons is
here.