Open edX vs Recurly

Open edX (The community-driven, open-source project powering edX.org and thousands of other online education sites around the world.) and Recurly both appear on the Smoower Developer Ecosystem Index.

Recurly (rank #317) holds a narrow lead over Open edX (rank #372) on the overall Smoower ecosystem score (44 vs 42). The gap of 2 points reflects composite signals across code, docs, community and reach.

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

Open edX carries 10,654 GitHub stars across 186 public repos, with 100 repositories active in the last 90 days and 91 external contributors on record. Recurly shows 1,564 stars across 53 public repos, 26 active in the last 90 days and 5 external contributors. The star gap on its own does not decide the comparison, but Open edX's footprint is roughly 6.8x larger, which usually shows up in downstream signals like inbound issues and third party integrations.

Open edX is the stronger read for anyone weighting community. Recurly looks better where education 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.