Openbase scores $3.6M to help developers find open-source components
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
I'm Lior, one of the makers of Openbase (https://openbase.com). We help developers choose the right open-source packages with user reviews and insights about packages' popularity, maintenance, and more.
I started Openbase to solve my own problem - in a world with over a million open-source packages, finding the right package is hard! Whether I was looking for an NLP, charting, or math libraries, I was spending a lot of time researching and evaluating various libraries, trying to find the most maintained and popular one to fit my needs.
I first launched Openbase in May 2019, and it quickly grew from 0 to 500,000 visitors/mo. We were part of the Y Combinator Summer 2020 program, have recently raised funding, and today we were fortunate enough be featured on VentureBeat and TechCrunch, so we are very excited!
The starting point of building Openbase was gathering data from npm and GitHub - from versions and dependencies, to commits, pull requests, maintainers and tried to figure out what insights we could surface that could help developers choose the right package. We ended up adding automated insights like star count over time, commit frequency, time between major/minor versions, average time to resolve issues and PRs, percent of commits by the community, dependency insights, and more. Here's what the insights page looks like: https://openbase.com/js/react
We decided not to stop there, and allow our users to discover the best packages for performing each task and compare them side-by-side. We've already manually curated several hundreds categories, such as CSS frameworks, OAuth packages, and HTTP request libraries: https://openbase.com/categories/js/best-javascript-frontend-...
Lastly, we've built a reviews platform that allows developers to share their experience working with various libraries with other developers. To throw in even more fun to the mix, we added badges like "Great documentation", "Performant", and "Hard to use" (check it out: https://openbase.com/js/vue). To date, you can already enjoy tens of thousands of ratings and reviews on Openbase.
The product is 100% free of course. In the future, we want to allow for paid promotion of packages - limiting it to a single, clearly-marked promoted package for each category. We would surface the promoted package, but the package ratings, reviews, insights, and metrics are obviously untouched. We believe this kind of balanced approach could make Openbase a sustainable company, while not impairing the user experience.
The team and I would really love to hear your thoughts about Openbase and how we can improve it!
Absolutely.
First, we are working on surfacing open-source security advisories over the next couple of months in Openbase.
Second, we're still figuring out ways to flag other security concerns, such as 2FA, newly appointed maintainers, suspicious activity, etc. (this is to be expected in the longer term)