🏆 Svelter Monthly Awards: January 2026

Today is a big day for Svelter and, I hope, for the Svelte community. After three months of background metric collection and performance analysis, I am finally ready to announce the first-ever batch of Svelter Monthly Winners!

What is a Winner and why did it take three months?

Before we look at the results, you might wonder what exactly a "winner" is on this platform, how it is computed, and why it took three months to determine a single month's results.

On Svelter, a winner isn't just the project with the biggest numbers. To stay true to the mission of detecting momentum without ignoring stability, Svelter uses a three-axis scoring system that requires three months of data to mature:

1. Speed (Growth Rate): The percentage growth of metrics during the current month. This includes both external signals (GitHub stars, NPM downloads) and community engagement within Svelter (upvotes, favorites, comments).
2. Acceleration: The change in growth rate compared to the previous month. Svelter rewards projects that are "gaining heat."
3. Size Factor (The "Stability" axis): We don't just look at percentages. Svelter also factors in raw volume using a logarithmic scale. This ensures that massive, foundational projects aren't put aside just because their growth percentage is naturally lower than a brand-new project.

What makes this scoring unique is how it weighs different signals. While GitHub stars can be ambiguous (is it a bookmark? a thank you? a "maybe later"?) and NPM downloads often come from dependency trees rather than direct choice, community actions like upvotes have one clear purpose: to thank the author. Similarly, favorites signal a deliberate intent to return. These intentional signals receive special weight in the algorithm.

By calculating these three physics of growth, Svelter ensures that winners are projects that are both historically significant and currently trending.

Note: January winners are displayed in February because the month must fully conclude before all downloads and stars can be tallied and verified.

The Svelter Vision: A Meritocracy for Svelte

This rigorous scoring isn't just about math; it's about fulfilling Svelter's broader vision of bringing a true meritocracy to the ecosystem. I built this platform to make it easier for developers to navigate the sea of options. Svelter is designed to:

• Discover Adoption: Find what the community is actually using through category-specific trends.
• Reward Merit: Give visibility to contributors who grow the community, whether they are writing libraries, blog articles, or even just helpful comments.
• Detect Trending Stacks: Use the Echolinks feature to surface emerging tech stacks before they go mainstream.

Whether you are looking for a library by tag or a specific keyword, the goal is to provide a clear path to the most relevant tools.

Central to this meritocracy is permanence. Every monthly winner is graved in Svelter's history, creating a lasting record of community momentum. I am currently developing a feature that will allow winners to display their trophies directly on their own pages and content—turning these achievements into visible badges of recognition.

Evolution: Winners vs. Explore Mode

Translating this vision into a usable product has been a learning experience. When I started building Svelter, I originally only developed the Explore mode. However, I noticed a painful 80% bounce rate. I realized that the effort of finding best performers through the scoring algorithm wasn't immediately visible to new visitors.

To solve this, I added the Winners display mode to expose these results clearly and made it the default view. My goal is to make it immediately obvious who is trending. That said, I've heard that the entry page can still be a bit unclear on first arrival—I would love your suggestions on how to improve the layout or clarity!

The Podium: Overall Winners

After refining how we display these results, let's see which projects actually claimed the top spots for January. You can see the full interactive podium at svelter.me/month/01-2026.

A perfect illustration of our 3-axis logic is the "Supabase Paradox": supabase-js recorded 24.3 million downloads this month. Thanks to its Size Factor, it maintained a strong 5th place despite a 17.8% growth rate. However, it was overtaken by projects like better-svelte-email, which saw a staggering 109% growth rate. Svelter balances raw power with explosive momentum.

🥇 1st Place: better-svelte-email

Category: Boilerplates & Starters
With its massive growth rate and acceleration, it has claimed the first-ever Gold.

🥈 2nd Place: shadcn-svelte

Category: UI Components
A community titan that continues to accelerate. Notably, it saw a 300% surge in community upvotes—a clear signal that developers are actively recognizing its value on Svelter.

🥉 3rd Place: svelte-sonner

Category: Notifications & Modals
The gold standard for toasts, seeing over 283K fresh downloads in January alone.

A Personal Note: I'm also thrilled to share that my own library, user-credits-core, claimed 2nd place in the Miscellaneous category. This three-year-old project had very slow growth initially, leading me to leave it unmaintained. But seeing renewed interest this month—especially knowing these downloads represent genuine adoption rather than dependency tree noise—has inspired me to revisit it. It's a reminder that momentum can reignite even for older projects when the right community finds them.

Congratulations to all the maintainers. Your hard work is what makes our ecosystem thrive. 🚀

If you think the platform could be improved, please write it in the comments, I'd love to hear from you.