Package ecosystem: which JavaScript tools are gaining and losing developers
Weekly npm download data for 33 widely used packages, Mar 2025–Mar 2026. Which frameworks are accelerating, which are fading, and what that says about where developers are heading.
Download counts include CI builds and transitive dependencies, so they measure how widely a package is installed, not how many developers choose it.
Biggest movers
Quarter-on-quarter change in downloads: the latest 13 weeks against the 13 before.
Fastest growing (last quarter)
Losing downloads (last quarter) Lifecycle →
The “request” HTTP client was formally deprecated in 2020 and still pulls millions of downloads a week through old dependencies.
Hono is the standout, up 399% in a quarter to 11.5M downloads a week. AI SDKs are climbing fast: Anthropic SDK +72% and OpenAI SDK +34%. The losers are mostly tools with clear successors: Gulp and Grunt (to Vite and esbuild), Moment.js and the deprecated request client.
For a team choosing a stack, a falling download count is a reason to check the project’s maintenance status and hiring pool, not a reason to rewrite. See technology lifecycle for what declining actually means in practice.
Most downloaded packages
Average weekly downloads over the latest 13 weeks, in millions.
Download trends: top 8 packages
A year of weekly downloads for the most-installed packages.
Weekly downloads, complete weeks only (Mar 2025 to Mar 2026; the first and last collected weeks were partial and are left out). Each chart has its own scale. The dip at the end of December is the holiday lull.
All packages
| Package | Registry | Weekly avg | Total (Mar 2025–Mar 2026) | Last quarter | vs spring 2025 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| TypeScript | npm | 101.9M | 5.0B | +2.4% | +23.1% |
| esbuild | npm | 91.2M | 3.8B | +27.3% | +59.5% |
| React | npm | 65.1M | 2.6B | +29.5% | +69.3% |
| Express | npm | 57.4M | 2.6B | +12.4% | +40.8% |
| Vite | npm | 48.5M | 2.3B | +26.2% | +79.3% |
| Webpack | npm | 31.4M | 1.7B | -3.9% | +2.5% |
| Moment.js | npm | 23.2M | 1.3B | -6.1% | +0.3% |
| Next.js | npm | 22.9M | 817.3M | +52.7% | +112.3% |
| jQuery | npm | 15.5M | 812.5M | -3.0% | +11.7% |
| node-postgres | npm | 14.5M | 584.4M | +27.1% | +71.9% |
| AWS SDK v3 | npm | 14.0M | 616.6M | +14.4% | +45.2% |
| request | npm | 11.8M | 756.5M | -15.9% | -22.9% |
| Hono | npm | 11.5M | 194.1M | +398.8% | +2656.4% |
| OpenAI SDK | npm | 10.1M | 364.7M | +33.7% | +146.7% |
| Vue.js | npm | 7.4M | 374.2M | +2.2% | +16.6% |
| Turborepo | npm | 7.2M | 294.4M | +23.2% | +66.5% |
| GCP SDK | npm | 6.8M | 300.8M | +10.0% | +52.4% |
| Prisma | npm | 6.8M | 278.4M | +9.0% | +95.2% |
| Azure SDK | npm | 5.9M | 266.4M | +5.0% | +59.8% |
| Anthropic SDK | npm | 4.7M | 144.3M | +72.2% | +237.6% |
| Fastify | npm | 4.0M | 162.7M | +27.3% | +60.5% |
| Drizzle | npm | 3.9M | 124.5M | +52.3% | +219.3% |
| Angular | npm | 3.8M | 210.1M | -7.5% | -2.2% |
| Mongoose | npm | 3.4M | 179.9M | -5.5% | +9.3% |
| Svelte | npm | 2.4M | 109.9M | +19.9% | +32.6% |
| Gulp | npm | 1.5M | 87.3M | -11.3% | -9.7% |
| Solid | npm | 1.3M | 46.9M | +19.6% | +151.3% |
| Astro | npm | 1.1M | 41.2M | +30.4% | +102.2% |
| Grunt | npm | 771K | 41.8M | -4.8% | +1.4% |
| Bun | npm | 719K | 24.1M | +37.1% | +172.8% |
| NestJS | npm | 11K | 584K | -1.6% | -0.2% |
“Weekly avg” is the latest 13 weeks. “Last quarter” compares the latest 13 weeks with the 13 before. “vs spring 2025” compares the latest 13 complete weeks (2025-W51–2026-W10) with the first 13 (2025-W12–2025-W24). Click a column to sort.