Ruff vs Black vs Pylint
A side-by-side look at how actively Ruff, Black and Pylint are developed on GitHub — popularity, contributor base, commit activity and how quickly issues and pull requests move.
What the numbers say
- Ruff is the most-starred of the 3, with 50k stars — about 8.7× Pylint's 5.7k.
- Over the 52 weeks to the snapshot, Ruff recorded the most commits (5.1k), against 315 for Black.
- Ruff has closed or merged the most pull requests in its lifetime: 19k.
- Relative to its popularity, Black carries the lightest open-issue load: 6.0 open issues per 1,000 stars, versus 161.4 for Pylint.
Head-to-head
Snapshot taken 30 September 2026.
| Metric | Ruff Active | Black Active | Pylint Slowing |
|---|---|---|---|
| Stars | 50k | 42k | 5.7k |
| Forks | 2.5k | 2.9k | 1.4k |
| Contributors | 982 | 572 | 696 |
| Commits, last 52 weeks | 5.1k | 315 | 565 |
| Open issues | 1.7k | 253 | 924 |
| Open pull requests | 479 | 42 | 100 |
| Closed / merged PRs | 19k | 2.4k | 5.4k |
| Watchers | 138 | 225 | 73 |
| Last push | 30 Sep 2026 | 30 Sep 2026 | 30 Sep 2026 |
| Latest release | 0.16.9 (Sep 2026) | 26.5.1 (May 2026) | v4.1.1 (Sep 2026) |
| Main language | Rust | Python | Python |
| Licence | MIT | MIT | GPL-2.0 |
| Created | Aug 2022 | Mar 2018 | Dec 2015 |
Bold marks the highest value in a row. “Active / Slowing / Dormant” is a simple heuristic from how recently code was pushed and open issues per star — a starting point, not a verdict. Stars measure popularity, not quality.
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