100 million repos

There are a ton of GitHub Repos out there, over 100 million actually.

So how do you know which ones are worth checking out?

Well, just like with anything we’re curious about, we usually turn to our peers to find out what they value.

Hey, friend,

• Listening to any good new music lately?
• What are your favorite restaurants in town? I need to try out someplace new.
• I’m going on a hiking trip soon and I need some good shoe recommendations!

So when trying to rank the top growing GitHub repos, it would make sense to look at which ones developers are most excited about. And that’s exactly what the ROSS index is. It’s a comprehensive list of the past year’s fastest growing open-source startups!

Let’s dive into it below.

Who Makes the List?

The ROSS Index uses a few criteria when adding a repo to their fancy list:

• It started the year with >1k stars
• It wasn’t created >10 years ago
• The company behind it is still a startup (not Microsoft or somebody big)

The reason for this criteria is because they’re looking for exciting new developments and trends, as well as investment opportunities, in the developer world.

The cool thing is, this also gives us developers a great look at how our landscape and tools are changing, and what new trends are beginning to really gain momentum.

We’ve gone ahead and gone through the list and picked out the top JavaScript/TypeScript repos, and learned a a bit about what they are and how they work, so you don’t have to.

BTW, all these JS/TS repos below grew over at least 400% last year based on GitHub Star counts. That’s huge and means that developers are really enjoying them!

1. LangChain — build a beefy AI chatbot

The big winner on the list this past year was LangChain. You might have already tried out using OpenAI’s API to get ChatGPT’s answers in your own apps, but if you want to start creating really complex apps on top of LLMs (Large Language Models) like ChatGPT, then you should check out LangChain!

LangChain is entire library and framework for working with LLMs in more efficient ways. Let’s say you want to give ChatGPT access to Wikipedia articles, the current weather, and your Gmail account so that you can have it write and send out emails for you based on all this information. Well, LangChain has all the components necessary to build exactly this!

BTW. If you’re curious about learning how to use LLMs in your own apps, then check out CoverLetterGPT, a great open-source repo that shows you how to turn a job description and a PDF of your resumé into an instantly customizable cover letter!

2. Wasp — the fastest way to build full-stack web apps with React & Node.js

Wasp (hey, that’s us!) has been making full-stack web app development easier, faster, and more fun for tons of developers.

Wasp saves developers from having to write tons of boilerplate by allowing them instead to just define certain features in a config file. Once that’s done, Wasp takes care the rest.

This means Wasp users get all this and more for free:

• 🔐  Email verified, Google, or GitHub Auth with UI components
• 🧷 Full-stack type safety,
• 📧 E-mail sending,
• ⛏ Async (cron) jobs,
• 📝 React Query powered data fetching,
• 🚨 Security best practices,
• 🧭 Client and server routes

If you’re looking for a cool way to start using Wasp, check out Open SaaS, a totally free, open-source SaaS starter built with Wasp. Or, you can try out MAGE, an AI app generator that uses the power of Wasp to build full-stack web app codebases from a simple prompt!

3. Resend — rethinking developer emailing

Resend is a really slick developer emailing API and Dashboard that allows users to manage transaction and marketing emails, which means they can do cool things like check if an email they sent has been opened by the recipient, or moved to spam!

Resend is also behind the very popular React Email repo, which has over 12k stars, and is a client component library to make styling and sending nice emails easier.

Now you don’t have to send emails from your app that look like they were coded in 1995!

4. Nebuly — user experience info for your AI chatbots

With the rise of LLMs and AI chatbots comes a bunch of interesting tools related to them. Nebuly is one such tool and it allows developers and teams to monitor how users interact with their chatbots.

As an open-source project, it can be self-deployed and integrated into your app (that you created with LangChain perhaps) so that you can see:

• what your users ask about the most
• deep dive into conversation topics
• create experiments and A/B tests
• see what isn’t working for your users

The potential for such a tool to help businesses and SaaS apps gain insight into their customers needs is huge, so it’s no wonder this is another one of the fastest growing repos!

5. Formbricks — get feedback from your users easily

Formbricks markets itself as an open-source Typeform alternative which allows you to easily create and embed forms in your apps.

As an open-source product, you get a generous free tier that allows you to create professional forms that match the style of your apps, allow you to monitor your survey data, and even integrate it into other tools you might be using like Notion, Zapier, or google sheets.

This is great if you want to collect user experience info and are looking for an open-source solution!

Growing Fast, Growing Strong

The world of open-source startups and solutions is growing fast, and with more and more interest in open-source solutions, the ecosystem is getting stronger and stronger.

We hope you enjoyed this little run down of the top 5 growing open-source JavaScript/TypeScript repos from 2023. If there’s an open-source solution that you know and love that wasn’t mentioned here, let us know about it! Who knows, maybe devs will love it too and it will make it on next years list 🙂