I wanted a number for a question everyone argues about: which agent frameworks are people actually installing? So I built a small crawler that runs once a month and publishes the result as open data.

Sources

  • npm: the public downloads API (api.npmjs.org/downloads/range), daily counts per package.

  • PyPI: ClickHouse's public PyPI dataset, which goes back to 2023. pypistats.org only keeps 180 days.

  • GitHub: stars, forks and open issues from the REST API, one snapshot a day.

What it showed

In October the MCP SDK was downloaded 574 million times, LangChain 178 million. A year earlier it was the other way round. MCP passed LangChain in March 2026. The Claude Agent SDK went from 1.4 million to 88 million.

The gotchas

Downloads count installs, including CI runs, not people. npm and PyPI count differently, and mirrors inflate PyPI unless you exclude them.

How it runs

One Python script, one systemd timer and a CSV in a public repo.

Repo: https://github.com/customermates/data-agent-index

What would you add to the list?

(Drafted with AI assistance.)