Open-Source AI Model Ranking 2026: Top 20 by Real GitHub Stars

The top 20 open-source AI models ranked by real GitHub stars from the 2026-07-31 snapshot.

💡 What You Will Learn

The top 20 open-source AI models ranked by real GitHub stars from the 2026-07-31 snapshot.

📜 Table of Contents

• Open-Source AI Model Ranking 2026
• The top 20
• How to use this ranking
• FAQ

Open-Source AI Model Ranking 2026

Star counts below come from the ainomam GitHub star tracker snapshot dated 2026-07-31. Stars measure ecosystem momentum, not just model quality.

The top 20

1. DeepSeek-V3 - 104,067 stars. Frontier-class open weights.
2. DeepSeek-R1 - 91,984 stars. Reasoning model, OpenAI-o1 rival.
3. grok-1 - 52,087 stars. xAI open release.
4. Qwen2.5 - 27,455 stars. Alibaba's flagship open series.
5. ChatGLM-6B - 41,012 stars. Historic Chinese open model.
6. Qwen2.5-Coder - 16,752 stars. Code-specialized.
7. DeepSeek-Coder - 23,991 stars. Code model pioneer.
8. meta-llama/llama-models - 7,664 stars. The Llama reference.
9. mistralai/mistral-inference - 10,836 stars. Mistral's inference stack.
10. google/gemma_pytorch - 5,721 stars. Google's open small models.
11. internlm/internlm - 7,255 stars. Shanghai AI Lab.
12. 01-ai/Yi - 7,822 stars. 01.AI series.
13. microsoft/Phi-4 - reference repo. Microsoft's small-model line.
14. NousResearch/Hermes - community fine-tunes.
15. togethercomputer/OpenChat - 8,985 stars. OpenChat 3.5.
16. Hugging Face leaderboard models - community entries.
17. nomic-ai/gpt4all - 77,402 stars. Local model ecosystem.
18. lm-sys/FastChat - 39,507 stars. Vicuna and serving.
19. oobabooga/text-generation-webui - 47,507 stars. Local model hub.
20. ollama library models - 177,426 stars. The distribution layer.

How to use this ranking

Stars tell you which ecosystem is healthy, not which model is best for your task. Cross-reference with the Hugging Face Open LLM Leaderboard for quality.

FAQ

Which open model is best right now? For general tasks DeepSeek-V3 leads open weights; for reasoning DeepSeek-R1; for small local use Qwen3/Qwen2.5. Are stars a quality signal? Momentum signal - great for picking an ecosystem, not a benchmark.

❓ FAQ

Which open model is best right now?

For general tasks DeepSeek-V3 leads open weights; for reasoning DeepSeek-R1; for small local use Qwen3/Qwen2.5.

Are stars a quality signal?

Momentum signal - great for picking an ecosystem, not a benchmark.