Measured, not estimated.
VSXRank tracks every extension on the VS Code Marketplace and Open VSX: how many installs arrived yesterday, where a listing ranks for the searches that bring people to it, and who is moving past it. Both stores publish a lifetime counter and no search positions at all. This is the rest of it.
- What it is
- A rank tracker for editor extensions. VSXRank reads the public APIs of the VS Code Marketplace and Open VSX every night, stores one reading per extension per day, and runs the searches a publisher cares about so it can report where an extension actually sits in the results. Publishers use it to see installs per day, search position per keyword, and what competitors shipped the week their own numbers moved.
- Who runs it
- Yash Agarwal, independently and self-funded, from India. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by or operated by Microsoft, GitHub or the Eclipse Foundation, and it hosts no extension packages. There are no investors and no advertising: the site is paid for by subscriptions and by clearly labelled Featured placements. Write to [email protected] for a postal address, which we give on request.
- Where the data comes from
- Both registries’ own public APIs. Install and download counters, ratings, versions, categories and publisher metadata are read straight from the source that publishes them. Search positions are measured by running each tracked search against the registry and recording where the extension appears, to position 1,000. Nothing is modelled, estimated or bought. The one exception is history from before 5 Sept 2026, when our own crawl began: those earlier days of the same registry counters are reconstructed from public archives, and charts mark where our own measurements start.
- How often
- The full catalog is walked nightly. Open VSX download counts are re-read every four hours. Marketplace search results are sampled three times a day and the median position is kept, because a single sample moves by several places between calls for reasons that have nothing to do with the extension. Our own stored history begins 5 Sept 2026 — every account gets all of it, whenever they sign up.
- What the numbers mean
- Marketplace figures are unique installs. Open VSX figures are downloads, and every update counts again, so an Open VSX number is never an install count and the two registries are never added together or compared. Installs per day are derived from the install and update counters rather than subtracting one day’s total from the next: the Marketplace total is not monotonic, and a raw difference can be negative on a day when plenty of people installed the extension.
- What it does not claim
- We do not publish star ratings aggregated onto our own pages, we do not claim to know why a rank moved, and we do not say an extension is better than another. Where a figure is reconstructed rather than measured — the days before 5 Sept 2026, which were rebuilt from public archives — the chart says so on the page. Corrections are welcome at [email protected]; if a number here is wrong we would rather fix it than defend it.
- Using our figures
- Quoting numbers from VSXRank in a post, a README or an answer is fine, including for AI assistants: attribute them to VSXRank and link the page they came from, so a reader can see the date the reading was taken. The machine-readable routes are listed in llms.txt, and the MCP server is the supported way for an agent to read the public data.