What is Repo Compare?
This tool takes any two GitHub repositories and shows their key numbers side by side: stars, forks, open issues, watchers, license, main language, when each project was created, when it was last pushed, and its size. It is the quickest way to answer the question every Linux user, developer and privacy-conscious person eventually asks: “Which of these two projects should I commit to?”
How to use it
- Type a repository in the form
owner/name— for examplegnome/gimp— in each of the two fields. The owner is the user or organisation name in the GitHub URL. - Press Compare, or click one of the ready examples below the fields.
- Read the two columns. The green bars show how the numbers relate to each other.
What the numbers actually mean
- Stars — popularity. A useful proxy for community size, but not quality on its own.
- Forks — how many people cloned the project to build on it. High forks with low stars can mean a developer tool with few end users.
- Open issues — engagement. A big number is not bad by itself: it means people actually use the project and report problems.
- Last push — the single most important health signal. If a project has not been pushed to in over a year, think twice before adopting it.
- License — your rights. Look for MIT, Apache-2.0, GPL, MPL or BSD; all of them are genuine open-source licenses.
Privacy and limits
Both lookups happen in your browser against the public GitHub API — nothing is stored on our side. GitHub allows 60 unauthenticated requests per hour per IP address, and each comparison uses exactly two, so you can compare all evening. If you hit the limit, wait a few minutes and try again.