15Five vs 37signals

15Five and 37signals (HEY! It's in Basecamp!) both appear on the Smoower Developer Ecosystem Index.

37signals (rank #122) holds a meaningful lead over 15Five (rank #693) on the overall Smoower ecosystem score (54 vs 31). The gap of 23 points reflects composite signals across code, docs, community and reach.

On code quality (the state of repositories, tests, releases and polish), 37signals is ahead of 15Five. On education (docs, guides and learning material for developers), 37signals is slightly ahead of 15Five. On community (issue response, PR reviews and discussion health), 37signals is clearly ahead of 15Five. On reach (how visible the ecosystem is beyond its own repos), 37signals is clearly ahead of 15Five. On momentum (release cadence and how fast the ecosystem moves), 37signals is ahead of 15Five.

15Five carries 141 GitHub stars across 29 public repos, with 2 repositories active in the last 90 days and 5 external contributors on record. 37signals shows 113,857 stars across 236 public repos, 48 active in the last 90 days and 298 external contributors. The star gap on its own does not decide the comparison, but 37signals's footprint is roughly 807.5x larger, which usually shows up in downstream signals like inbound issues and third party integrations.

15Five is worth a look for teams already invested in its stack. 37signals looks better where reach is the deciding factor. The table below breaks the scores down pillar by pillar; the linked profiles cover the underlying repos, docs and community signals in full.