Rippling vs SolarWinds

Rippling (We make it unbelievably easy to manage your team's payroll, benefits, computers, and apps.) and SolarWinds both appear on the Smoower Developer Ecosystem Index.

Rippling (rank #455) holds a narrow lead over SolarWinds (rank #569) on the overall Smoower ecosystem score (39 vs 35). The gap of 4 points reflects composite signals across code, docs, community and reach.

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

Rippling carries 156 GitHub stars across 11 public repos, with 1 repositories active in the last 90 days and 11 external contributors on record. SolarWinds shows 1,101 stars across 104 public repos, 35 active in the last 90 days and 18 external contributors. The star gap on its own does not decide the comparison, but SolarWinds's footprint is roughly 7.1x larger, which usually shows up in downstream signals like inbound issues and third party integrations.

Rippling is the stronger read for anyone weighting reach. SolarWinds 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.