Chroma vs Vercel Labs

Chroma and Vercel Labs (Develop. Preview. Ship. Creators of Next.js.) both appear on the Smoower Developer Ecosystem Index.

Vercel Labs (rank #14) holds a modest lead over Chroma (rank #209) on the overall Smoower ecosystem score (67 vs 49). The gap of 18 points reflects composite signals across code, docs, community and reach.

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

Chroma carries 30,602 GitHub stars across 29 public repos, with 6 repositories active in the last 90 days and 94 external contributors on record. Vercel Labs shows 177,353 stars across 318 public repos, 72 active in the last 90 days and 520 external contributors. The star gap on its own does not decide the comparison, but Vercel Labs's footprint is roughly 5.8x larger, which usually shows up in downstream signals like inbound issues and third party integrations.

Chroma is the stronger read for anyone weighting education. Vercel Labs looks better where momentum 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.