The best free software, mapped like a night sky
GitHubAstrolab
2,585 software projects, hand-picked one by one, and laid out like stars.
Each point of light is a real project that anyone can use for free. Projects that do similar things drift together into constellations, so you can see whole families of tools at a glance, and tell which ones are thriving and which are quietly fading.
Four words, and the sky makes sense
You don't need to be a programmer to read this map. You only need these.
- GitHub
- The website where most of the world's free software is written and shared, in public, by people everywhere.
- Repository REPO
- One software project's home on GitHub: its code, its full history, and the people building it. Think of one book in an enormous public library.
- Star
- A public vote of trust. When a developer stars a project, they are saying this is good, I want to keep it. Every dot here is a project that earned one.
- Open source
- Software whose code is open for anyone to read, use and build on, for free. Almost every app you use is built partly from it.
Map
Every project, as a star
Each dot is one software project. Related projects pull together into constellations: the voice tools in one corner, the 3D-printing tools in another. The bigger and brighter a star, the more other projects lean on it.
Topics
What the stars are about
Projects carry subject tags, like speech or robotics. This view joins the subjects that keep turning up together, so you see the shape of a whole field rather than a list of its parts.
Quick answers
Questions, already asked
Ready-made answers to the questions people ask first. Where are the most people working right now? Which projects are the classics? Which depend on a single person? Which are fading and worth replacing? Every list can be downloaded.
Health
What is quietly fading
Two projects can have the same number of stars while one is thriving and the other was abandoned a year ago. This view shows the difference: how recently people worked on it, how healthy it looks, and what happens if its one key person walks away.
Browse
Every project, searchable
A plain table of all 2,585 projects. Search by name, sort by popularity, or filter by programming language and by how active a project is. The quiet view that answers most questions.
Compare
Two projects, and what joins them
Pick any two projects and see them side by side. Astrolab also traces the chain that links them, through a shared subject, a shared author or a project in between, the way you might find out how two strangers know each other.
Guides
29 guides, one field at a time
Readable guides to a single area, such as voice assistants, reading documents, or 3D printing. Each ranks the leading projects for every task and flags the risky ones. They are built from the data itself, not written by an AI, so they come out the same way every time the data is refreshed.
Ask AI
Ask in your own words
Type a question like what should I use to transcribe meetings? and get an answer drawn from this map, not from a model’s memory. It is optional: everything else on this site works without it.
Why this exists
Most new software is built from free parts. Knowing which parts are good, alive and trusted can save weeks. Astrolab is one developer's collection of the best of them, mapped so anyone can find the right building block, and see what is worth building next.
For developers: layout, clustering and ranking all run ahead of time, so the
page only draws. Refresh with npm run refresh, rebuild every report with
npm run reports.
Astrolab is free and open source (MIT). Point it at your own stars. If you like it, give it a star. Now you know what that means.
Star the repogithub-stars-analyzer · MIT · data from 2026-11-01