The 1000 most popular* Django packages

Django’s package ecosystem is one of its biggest strengths as a web framework, and a key strength of Wagtail as well. Our users value the CMS user experience just as much as the Python / Django foundations that make it super flexible. But it’s hard to convey that ecosystem strength! We’ve made many attempts at quantifying it in the past, in addition to showcasing our Wagtail-specific package ecosystem. Here’s another attempt, with a format that supports a more ecosystem-wide quantitative assessment of packages’ popularity.

Defining popularity

For the purpose of this analysis, we’re using two imperfect metrics that have the benefit of being widely available: PyPI download counts as a proxy for "usage" of a package, and GitHub stars as a proxy for the "mindshare" or "attention" the package receives. We can use those two metrics to then rank packages into four quadrants:

• High visibility: the buzz-heavy packages, with relatively high stars and low downloads
• Popular: for packages with high stars and downloads
• Under the radar: low stars and downloads
• Infrastructure: the unsung heroes; high downloads and low attention.

Since we only want the top 1000 or so packages, we’ll also filter to only show packages above a certain downloads threshold. Here’s what the data looks like in practice, after processing:

We can see a rough correlation between high downloads and high star counts, those there are plenty of outliers. Check it out in interactive mode on ObservableHQ with all packages plotted, as well as more info about the methodology.

Main caveats: it’s GitHub only (90+% of packages), and it’s pretty arbitrary how you divide into quadrants and order within those quadrants, depending on weight given to stars vs. downloads.

Packages by quadrant

Unpacking the results a bit, here are the top results per quadrant.

High visibility

Ordered by star count, those packages that proportionally have very high GitHub Stars for low download counts - they’ve captured developers’ attention / mindshare, but that’s not (yet?) translated into high downloads:

1. django-unicorn (2611 stars)
2. django-material (2541 stars)
3. django-tenant-schemas (1508 stars)
4. django-ledger (1297 stars)
5. django-payments (1184 stars)
6. django-admin-honeypot (1074 stars)
7. django-rest-framework-social-oauth2 (1068 stars)
8. django-controlcenter (1002 stars)
9. django-baton (979 stars)
10. django-cities (945 stars)
11. django-cache-machine (885 stars)
12. django-bolt (823 stars)
13. coderedcms (752 stars)
14. django-mongoengine (751 stars)
15. django-adminactions (697 stars)
16. django-photologue (676 stars)
17. django-request (659 stars)
18. django-rest-framework-mongoengine (620 stars)
19. django-comments-xtd (617 stars)
20. django-machina (600 stars)

Popular options

Now looking into packages that are in the top 50% by both downloads and star count. This time ordered by geometric mean, to factor in both metrics. Those packages are safe bets if you’re considering dependencies that are in heavy use across the Django ecosystem.

1. djangorestframework
2. django-cors-headers
3. django-extensions
4. django-debug-toolbar
5. django-filter
6. wagtail (wuhuu!)
7. djangorestframework-simplejwt
8. django-ninja
9. django-redis
10. django-storages
11. drf-spectacular
12. django-silk
13. django-crispy-forms
14. django-environ
15. drf-yasg
16. django-oauth-toolkit
17. django-model-utils
18. django-import-export
19. django-stubs-ext
20. django-stubs
21. django-celery-beat
22. django-simple-history
23. django-taggit
24. django-compressor
25. django-reversion
26. django-mptt
27. django-phonenumber-field
28. django-guardian
29. django-prometheus
30. django-anymail
31. django-widget-tweaks
32. django-cms
33. django-polymorphic
34. django-webpack-loader
35. django-unfold
36. django-health-check
37. django-axes
38. drf-nested-routers
39. django-tables2
40. django-two-factor-auth
41. django-countries
42. django-grappelli
43. django-ckeditor
44. django-hijack
45. django-ratelimit
46. django-ipware
47. django-constance
48. djangorestframework-jwt
49. django-fsm
50. django-htmx

Under the radar

There are many interesting packages in this category but they don’t necessarily come through in the data-driven quantitative assessment, as they’re just not there yet in download numbers nor stars!

Infrastructure packages

Last but certainly not least, we can take a look at packages that score in the top 50% on downloads but not so high on star counts. Those are the "unsung heroes" of the ecosystem, possibly getting usage as transitive dependencies in other packages rather than directly chosen by developers for their specific sites or apps:

1. django-js-asset
2. drf-spectacular-sidecar
3. django-pgactivity
4. django-pglock
5. django-scim2
6. django-fernet-fields-v2
7. django-pgmigrate
8. django-statsd
9. drf-exceptions-hog
10. django-allow-cidr
11. django-fake-model
12. djangorestframework-role-filters
13. django-deprecation
14. django-permissionedforms
15. djangorestframework-xml
16. django-crum
17. drf-orjson-renderer
18. django-permissions-policy
19. django-templated-mail
20. djangorestframework-types
21. django-datadog-logger
22. django-statici18n
23. dj-inmemorystorage
24. dj-email-url
25. django-clone
26. django-cache-url
27. django-filter-stubs
28. django-fernet-encrypted-fields
29. django-session-timeout
30. django-channels

Navigating the ecosystem

This kind of data-driven representation definitely helps in navigating so many options, so you can understand which ones are seeing real-world use. Other directories of the ecosystem like Django Packages or Awesome Django can become unwieldy as the number of options adds up over the years.

It’s a tricky problem to convey this in marketing material when pitching the Django ecosystem - and perhaps a long-term web app could help here? To visualize "currently-maintained, popular packages" as well as trends in usage, mindshare, and maintenance over the years.