Top 100 Projects on GitHub (2026)

Back in 2020, we posted about the top 50 projects on GitHub . In 2018, we did the top 20 . Six years on, the GitHub landscape has been transformed — largely by the AI wave. The number of repos with 50K+ stars has ballooned from 69 in 2020 to 461 in 2026. Here are the top 100, ranked by star count as of July 2026.

build-your-own-x (529K)

Master programming by recreating your favorite technologies from scratch. In 2020 this was lurking at #30 with ~77K stars. Now it's #1 with 529K. The "learn by building" philosophy clearly resonates — nothing beats understanding something by actually writing it yourself. If you've never browsed this repo, stop reading this article and go do that instead.

Awesome (487K)

The original curated list of awesome lists. Still going strong. What started as a meta-list has become the gold standard for structured knowledge on GitHub. From 137K in 2020 to 487K in 2026 — a clean 3.5x.

freeCodeCamp (452K)

Held the #1 spot in 2020 with 312K stars. It's been unseated but not outrun — it grew to 452K, adding 140K stars in six years. The curriculum now includes math and data science alongside its famous programming tracks. Team freeCodeCamp continues to make quality education free. More power to them.

Public APIs (452K)

A collective list of free APIs for software and web development. From 89K to 452K — one of the biggest growth stories of the decade. Every developer bookmark list has this. Every project starter googles it.

Free Programming Books (393K)

More books than you can read in a lifetime. Now available in dozens of languages. A timeless resource that keeps growing because good books keep being written — and the community keeps cataloguing them.

OpenClaw (384K)

Your own personal AI assistant. Any OS. Any platform. The lobster way. OpenClaw exploded onto the scene post-2023 as the go-to open-source personal AI that runs anywhere and actually remembers who you are. The agent-first approach to personal computing clearly struck a nerve.

developer-roadmap (362K)

Interactive roadmaps, guides and educational content to help developers grow in their careers. The spiritual successor to the kamranahmedse original — now fully interactive, with community-curated paths for 2026's tech landscape. Was 114K in 2020.

System Design Primer (358K)

Learn how to design large-scale systems. Prep for the system design interview. Includes Anki flashcards. A classic that refuses to age. Still the go-to resource for engineers preparing for the big tech interview gauntlet.

Coding Interview University (357K)

A complete computer science study plan to become a software engineer. Another 2020 veteran that just keeps compounding. From 124K to 357K — proof that structured, quality learning resources have a very long shelf life.

Awesome Python (309K)

An opinionated list of Python frameworks, libraries, tools, and resources. Python's dominance in AI/ML has made this more relevant than ever. From 84K to 309K.

From 11 - 20

Awesome Selfhosted (307K)

A list of Free Software network services and web applications you can host on your own servers. Self-hosting went from niche hobby to mainstream movement between 2020 and 2026, and this repo rode that wave hard. If you care about data sovereignty, this is your bible.

996.ICU (276K)

Repo for counting stars and contributing. "Work by 996, sick in ICU." The name refers to the grueling 9am–9pm, 6 days a week schedule common at some tech companies. A rallying point for developer welfare globally. Was 250K in 2020 — still growing, which says something.

project-based-learning (274K)

A curated list of project-based tutorials — covering everything from building your own Redis to writing a compiler. Pairs beautifully with build-your-own-x. Learn by doing is clearly the dominant philosophy of this era.

Superpowers (258K)

An agentic skills framework and software development methodology that works. One of the breakout repos of the 2024–2026 AI coding wave. Documents hard-won lessons for working effectively with AI coding agents. Required reading if you're building with LLMs.

React (247K)

The library for web and native user interfaces. Meta's gift to the web. React's dominance has only deepened — its model has influenced virtually every other UI framework. Was 152K in 2020, now 247K.

Linux (240K)

Not all heroes wear capes. Linus Torvalds built the kernel that runs the internet, your phone, and probably your fridge. He created Git too, back in 2005. The man continues to be one of the most consequential engineers in history. From 93K in 2020 to 240K — the Linux story never ends.

The Book of Secret Knowledge (234K)

A collection of inspiring lists, manuals, cheatsheets, blogs, hacks, one-liners, cli/web tools and more. A treasure chest for sysadmins, security folks, and developers who live in the terminal.

ECC (231K)

The agent harness performance optimization system. Skills, instincts, memory, security, and research-first development for AI coding agents. Part of the new generation of repos born from the AI engineering explosion of 2024–2025.

Python Algorithms (223K)

All algorithms implemented in Python. From sorting to ML. A living textbook. From 79K in 2020 to 223K — Python's AI dominance brought a lot of new eyes to this.

Hermes Agent (218K)

The agent that grows with you. NousResearch's open-source agent framework is one of the most starred newcomers to the top 20. It embodies the shift from chatbots to agents that actually do things.

From 21 - 30

Vue (210K)

Vue 2 lives here; Vue 3 has its own repo. The framework that proved you don't need Google or Facebook backing to build something world-class. Was 168K in 2020. Still the progressive JS framework of choice for millions.

Open Source Society University (207K)

Path to a free self-taught education in Computer Science. A complete curriculum using online materials — the kind of thing that makes you wonder why you paid tuition.

n8n (197K)

Fair-code workflow automation platform with native AI capabilities. Combine visual building with custom code, self-host or cloud, 400+ integrations. n8n barely existed in 2020 and is now one of the biggest repos on GitHub. The automation + AI wave carried it here.

TensorFlow (196K)

Google's open-source ML framework. Was 146K in 2020. PyTorch has taken the research crown, but TensorFlow's production footprint is enormous. The ML infra wars are still being fought.

JavaScript Algorithms (196K)

Algorithms and data structures implemented in JavaScript, with explanations and links to further readings. A great learning resource that bridges the gap between CS theory and day-to-day dev work.

claw-code (195K)

An agent-managed museum exhibit, built in Rust with Gajae-Code / LazyCodex — developed and maintained with no human intervention. A fascinating experiment: can AI agents build and maintain a real open-source project entirely autonomously? This repo is the answer.

andrej-karpathy-skills (195K)

A single CLAUDE.md file to improve Claude Code behavior, derived from Andrej Karpathy's observations on LLM coding pitfalls. Small repo, massive impact. Sometimes the simplest things get the most stars.

Oh My Zsh (189K)

The community-driven framework for managing your zsh configuration. 2,500+ contributors, 300+ plugins. Was 113K in 2020. "Oh My Zsh will not make you a 10x developer... but you might feel like one." Still holds up.

opencode (188K)

The open-source coding agent. As AI coding tools proliferated post-2023, the community wanted something it could inspect, modify, and self-host. opencode filled that gap.

VS Code (188K)

Microsoft's free, extensible code editor. Was 99.5K in 2020. VS Code didn't just win the editor wars — it ended them. Its architecture influenced everything from browser-based IDEs to embedded coding assistants.

From 31 - 40

FreeDomain (187K)

Free domains for everyone from DigitalPlat. Hit the top 100 because of one simple promise: free. The internet's favourite price point.

AutoGPT (186K)

The vision of accessible AI for everyone, to use and to build on. One of the first repos to seriously explore autonomous AI agents. Lit the imagination of developers worldwide when it launched in 2023, and the stars just kept coming.

CS Notes (185K)

Non-English. Technical interview essentials: Leetcode, OS, networking, system design — all in Chinese. A cornerstone resource for Chinese-speaking developers.

You Don't Know JS (185K)

A book series diving deep into the core mechanisms of JavaScript. Two published editions, free to read online. Was 125K in 2020. JavaScript's ubiquity means this never stops being relevant.

Python 100 Days (184K)

Non-English. 100 days from beginner to master in Python. Chinese-language resource. Was 89K in 2020.

Microsoft Activation Scripts (184K)

Open-source Windows and Office activator. One of the more... pragmatic entries on this list. Its presence here says a lot about what developers around the world actually use GitHub for.

yt-dlp (179K)

A feature-rich command-line audio/video downloader — the actively maintained fork and successor to youtube-dl. More formats, more sites, faster. The community migrated and never looked back.

Awesome Go (179K)

A curated list of awesome Go frameworks, libraries, and software. Was 55.8K in 2020. Go's adoption in cloud infrastructure and AI tooling has turbocharged interest in its ecosystem.

skills (mattpocock) (179K)

Skills for real engineers — straight from the .agents directory. Another representative of the agent-skills genre: reusable, declarative playbooks for AI-assisted engineering work.

Flutter (178K)

Google's SDK for building beautiful, fast experiences for mobile, web, and desktop from a single codebase. Was 95.8K in 2020. Flutter's bet on cross-platform everything has largely paid off.

From 41 - 50

Ollama (177K)

Get up and running with Kimi-K2.6, GLM-5.2, MiniMax, DeepSeek, GPT-OSS, Qwen, Gemma, and other local models. Ollama made running local LLMs as simple as ollama run llama3 . Didn't exist in 2020. Now it's the default on-ramp for local AI.

gitignore (175K)

The canonical collection of useful .gitignore templates maintained by GitHub itself. From 105K to 175K. Every developer needs it. Every developer has forgotten to add it.

Bootstrap (174K)

The most popular HTML, CSS, and JavaScript framework for responsive, mobile-first web projects. Was 142K in 2020. Reports of Bootstrap's death have been greatly exaggerated.

MarkItDown (168K)

Python tool for converting files and office documents to Markdown. A new Microsoft open-source entry that exploded after AI toolchains needed clean Markdown ingestion pipelines. Born from necessity.

HelloGitHub (166K)

Non-English. Monthly curation of interesting, entry-level open-source projects on GitHub. Entirely in Chinese but universally referenced.

prompts.chat (166K)

Community-curated prompt library (formerly Awesome ChatGPT Prompts). As LLM interfaces became mainstream, the art of the prompt became genuinely valuable. This is where much of it lives.

Stable Diffusion WebUI (164K)

AUTOMATIC1111's browser-based UI for Stable Diffusion. When image generation became accessible to everyone in 2022–2023, this was the interface. Defines the era.

Anthropic Skills (163K)

Public repository for Agent Skills from Anthropic. Reusable, declarative skills for building with Claude and other AI systems. The open-source counterpart to the growing agent ecosystem.

Transformers (163K)

🤗 Hugging Face's model framework for state-of-the-art ML. Text, vision, audio, multimodal — all in one place. The de facto standard library for working with large models. If you've done any serious ML in the last four years, you've used this.

The Art of Command Line (162K)

Master the command line, in one page. A timeless piece. Was 78K in 2020. Still essential reading for anyone spending serious time in a terminal.

From 51 - 60

JavaGuide (157K)

Non-English. Java interview and backend engineering guide covering CS fundamentals, databases, distributed systems, and AI applications.

Firecrawl (153K)

The API to search, scrape, and interact with the web at scale. AI pipelines need data; Firecrawl feeds them. One of the fastest-growing new entrants on this list.

Langflow (152K)

A powerful tool for building and deploying AI-powered agents and workflows. Visual, composable, and fast. Part of the no-code/low-code AI wave.

Dify (149K)

Build agentic workflows and RAG pipelines with rich AI model support on a single collaborative workspace. Deploy anywhere — cloud, VPC, or self-hosted. Dify became the go-to for teams who want Notion-meets-AI-platform.

JavaScript Style Guide (Airbnb) (148K)

Airbnb's JavaScript style guide. Was 97.8K in 2020. Opinionated, widely adopted, and still the benchmark for JS code style in most organisations.

Open WebUI (146K)

User-friendly AI interface supporting Ollama, OpenAI API, and more. The self-hosted ChatGPT alternative. Clean, fast, and the first thing you install after Ollama.

scrcpy (146K)

Display and control your Android device from your desktop via USB or wirelessly. No root required. An incredibly useful tool that keeps climbing the charts.

LangChain (142K)

The agent engineering platform. LangChain's journey from "quick LLM glue" to "serious agent orchestration framework" is one of the defining software stories of the 2020s. Complex, powerful, and everywhere.

System Prompts Collection (142K)

Full system prompts and model info for Augment Code, Claude Code, Cursor, Devin, Manus, and many more. Community-sourced AI transparency at its finest (or most controversial, depending on who you ask).

Tech Interview Handbook (141K)

Curated coding interview preparation for busy software engineers. Grind-ready, practical, and regularly updated. A 2020 alumni that aged like fine wine.

From 61 - 70

Next.js (141K)

The React Framework. Was 50.6K in 2020. Next.js won the React meta-framework wars. Server components, app router, edge runtime — it defines how production React apps are built in 2026.

youtube-dl (141K)

The original command-line video downloader. Slower to update than its fork yt-dlp, but the repo lives on and the stars keep coming. A symbol of internet freedom for many.

Claude Code (138K)

Anthropic's agentic coding tool that lives in your terminal, understands your codebase, and helps you code faster by executing routine tasks. The tool that kicked off the "AI in your terminal" era and inspired a generation of coding agents.

PowerToys (137K)

Microsoft's collection of power-user utilities for Windows — FancyZones, PowerRename, Run, and more. Microsoft open-sourcing this was the right call. It's become essential for Windows developers.

Go (135K)

The Go programming language. Simple, fast, practical. Go's quiet march through the infrastructure, DevOps, and AI tooling world has made it one of the most important languages of the decade.

Fucking Algorithm (135K)

Non-English. Crack LeetCode — not just how, but why. The Chinese-language algorithm bible with explanations that actually make you understand.

agency-agents (134K)

A complete AI agency at your fingertips — from frontend wizards to research agents, each modelled on a specific role. Part of the wave of repos making multi-agent workflows accessible to everyone.

iptv-org/iptv (134K)

A collection of publicly available IPTV channels from around the world. One of those repos that transcends developer culture and speaks to everyone.

clash-verge-rev (133K)

A modern Tauri-based GUI client for proxy tools. Running on Windows, macOS, and Linux. Widely used across Asia for network privacy and access.

free-for-dev (130K)

A list of SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS offerings with free tiers of interest to developers and devops teams. Bookmarked by every startup founder. Was not in the 2020 top 50 but absolutely deserved to be.

From 71 - 80

Hello Algo (129K)

Animated, runnable data structures and algorithms tutorial. Available in Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, English, and Japanese, with code in Python, Java, C++, Go, Rust, Swift, Kotlin, and more. One of the most beautifully produced technical learning repos on GitHub.

30 Seconds of Code (128K)

Short JavaScript code snippets for all your development needs. Was 57.8K in 2020. Quick, copy-paste-friendly wisdom that's stood the test of time.

Excalidraw (128K)

A virtual whiteboard for sketching hand-drawn-like diagrams. Excalidraw became the tool of choice for architecture diagrams, quick sketches, and async communication in distributed teams. Clean, fast, and charmingly lo-fi.

React Native (126K)

A framework for building native applications using React. The bet on write-once/run-everywhere for mobile has matured considerably. Was 88.6K in 2020.

Awesome LLM Apps (125K)

100+ AI agent and RAG apps you can actually run — clone, customize, ship. The "copy and deploy" era of AI application development in one repo.

Kubernetes (124K)

Production-grade container scheduling and management. Was 68K in 2020. K8s won the container orchestration wars and became the infrastructure layer of the cloud-native world. Unsexy but indispensable.

gstack (123K)

Garry Tan's exact Claude Code setup — 23 opinionated tools covering CEO, Designer, Eng Manager, Release Manager, and QA roles. The "founder's agent stack" distilled into a repo. Highly imitated.

spec-kit (123K)

GitHub's toolkit for Spec-Driven Development. As AI started generating code, the industry rediscovered the value of writing precise specs first. This repo puts that philosophy into practice.

Electron (122K)

Build cross-platform desktop apps with JavaScript, HTML, and CSS. Was 84.4K in 2020. Electron's dominance in desktop app development continues — VS Code, Slack, and dozens of others run on it.

ComfyUI (122K)

The most powerful and modular diffusion model GUI with a node-based interface. Where power users do their image generation. Infinitely extensible and wildly popular in the creative AI community.

From 81 - 90

llama.cpp (121K)

LLM inference in C/C++. Georgi Gerganov's masterwork. Runs large language models on consumer hardware. The engine under Ollama, many local apps, and a thousand derivative projects. Foundational to the local AI movement.

shadcn/ui (119K)

Beautifully designed, accessible UI components that you copy into your project rather than install as a package. shadcn/ui changed how developers think about component libraries. The philosophy of ownership over dependency struck a chord.

cc-switch (119K)

A cross-platform desktop All-in-One assistant for Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode, OpenClaw, Gemini CLI, and Hermes Agent. The AI tool management layer that nobody planned for but everyone needed.

RustDesk (119K)

An open-source remote desktop application designed for self-hosting, as an alternative to TeamViewer. Written in Rust. Fast, secure, and free. Privacy-conscious orgs have been migrating to this for years.

Node.js (118K)

Node.js JavaScript runtime. Was 71.5K in 2020. The backbone of JavaScript server-side development. Still powering more backends than any other single runtime.

free-programming-books-zh_CN (118K)

Non-English. Free computer programming books in Chinese. Was 68.2K in 2020.

Awesome Hacking (117K)

A collection of awesome lists for hackers, pentesters, and security researchers. One of the most useful starting points for anyone in the security space.

Rust (115K)

Empowering everyone to build reliable and efficient software. Rust's rise over 2020–2026 is one of the great programming language success stories. Memory safety without garbage collection — an idea whose time came.

Godot Engine (114K)

Multi-platform 2D and 3D game engine. Open source, MIT licensed. As Unity's pricing decisions alienated its community in 2023, Godot became the obvious alternative. The stars reflect a community migration that became a genuine renaissance.

Three.js (114K)

The 3D JavaScript library. Create beautiful WebGL scenes with a clean, intuitive API. Was 62K in 2020. The web keeps getting more immersive, and Three.js is why.

From 91 - 100

Generative AI for Beginners (113K)

21 lessons from Microsoft to get you building with Generative AI. The structured on-ramp into the AI era that millions of developers have used since 2023.

D3 (113K)

Bring data to life with SVG, Canvas and HTML. Was 92.4K in 2020. D3 is still the gold standard for bespoke data visualisation on the web. If you want it to look exactly how you want it to look, you use D3.

v2rayN (112K)

Non-English. GUI client for Windows, Linux and macOS supporting Xray and sing-box. Widely used in regions with internet access restrictions.

TypeScript (110K)

TypeScript is a superset of JavaScript that compiles to clean JavaScript output. Was 62K in 2020. TypeScript won. Not "gained adoption" — actually won. New JavaScript projects that don't use TypeScript need a good reason not to.

Tauri (109K)

Build smaller, faster, and more secure desktop and mobile applications with a web frontend. The Rust-powered answer to Electron — same concept, dramatically smaller binaries and better security. A genuine contender.

Axios (109K)

Promise-based HTTP client for the browser and Node.js. Was 75K in 2020. One of the most downloaded npm packages in history. Still the default HTTP client for millions of JS developers.

Awesome Mac (108K)

A curated, categorised collection of high-quality macOS software. Every Mac user eventually finds this list. Then installs half of it.

Immich (108K)

High-performance self-hosted photo and video management. Immich is what happens when you combine Google Photos-quality UX with complete data ownership. One of the standout self-hosting success stories of the decade.

frp (108K)

A fast reverse proxy to expose a local server behind a NAT or firewall to the internet. Simple, fast, and incredibly useful. The developer's tunnel tool of choice.

ui-ux-pro-max-skill (108K)

An AI skill providing design intelligence for building professional UI/UX across multiple platforms. Part of the growing "agentic skills" genre — reusable playbooks that give AI systems specialised capabilities.

Some Observations

AI ate the top 100. In 2020, you could count AI-related repos in the top 50 on one hand. In 2026, roughly a quarter of the top 100 are directly about LLMs, agents, AI workflows, or AI tooling. The shift is not subtle.
The ecosystem is 6× bigger. Repos with 50K+ stars: 69 in 2020, 461 in 2026. GitHub is not just growing — it is accelerating.
build-your-own-x dethroned freeCodeCamp. The most starred repo on the internet used to be a curriculum. Now it's a philosophy: understand things by building them yourself. This feels meaningful.
Self-hosting had its moment. Immich, Open WebUI, RustDesk, awesome-selfhosted — the privacy-conscious, data-sovereign cohort punched well above their weight in this list. The cloud-only era is over for many use cases.
Rust is everywhere. In 2020 Rust barely appeared in this list. In 2026: Rust, RustDesk, Tauri, llama.cpp, claw-code, cc-switch. The language's time has come.
JavaScript/TypeScript still dominates. But the composition has shifted — TypeScript has largely replaced vanilla JavaScript in new projects, and most of the frontend ecosystem has upgraded accordingly.
Local AI is real. Ollama, llama.cpp, Open WebUI — running models on your own hardware went from a research curiosity to a mainstream workflow between 2020 and 2026. Consumer hardware caught up to model sizes. This changes everything.
The "agentic skills" genre is new. A dozen repos in this top 100 are essentially playbooks, CLAUDE.md files, or skill frameworks for AI coding agents. This genre didn't exist in 2020. It's one of the fastest-growing categories on GitHub.