What is Scarf?

Learn how this open source analytics tool can provide improved project visibility.

Scarf is a platform that gives open source maintainers visibility into how their software is being used by providing usage analytics to open source projects, while preserving end-user privacy. 

Scarf was created to solve a common problem: Open source projects are often widely adopted by large companies, but maintainers rarely have insight into that usage. By providing privacy-conscious usage analytics, Scarf helps developers understand adoption trends, improve their projects, and better support their communities.

Read more: The missing metric in open source: Who’s using your code?

Get started

Track your open source software downloads, understand user behavior, and gain valuable insights into your open source community.


• about.scarf.sh
• The missing metric in open source

Video transcript

My name is Avi Press, I’m an open source maintainer and software engineer by background, but these days I’m the founder and CEO of Scarf, which is a company that provides usage analytics to open source projects.

Perfect. Tell us more about Scarf.

Yeah so back when I was maintaining a lot of open source in my spare time, I found myself in the situation where big companies were using my projects, but I didn’t really have a good sense of how they were doing that. Turns out a lot of other open source projects have similar issues, where they have very little visibility into how the software actually gets used. And so Scarf exists to solve that problem and give maintainers more visibility into how their software gets used in a way that preserves the privacy of the end user.

More from We Love Open Source

• The missing metric in open source: Who’s using your code?
• Measuring open source community health with Savannah
• How attackers manipulate AI models: Practical lessons in AI security
• Why AI won’t replace developers
• What is OpenTelemetry?