Directus Statistics 2026: GitHub Stars, Downloads, Funding, License Change, Pricing

Directus is a data platform that puts an admin app and instant REST and GraphQL APIs on top of an existing SQL database.

Unlike most headless CMS products, it does not force you to model content in its own storage, so teams use it for content, internal tools and general data access. It is source-available (the code is public, but the license is not standard open source), and it competes with Strapi, Payload, Sanity and Storyblok.

The Directus story in 2026 is as much about licensing as about growth. The company changed its license twice in three years, and each change shaped who can use it for free.

Directus Statistics

Directus GitHub and open-source activity

• Stars and forks: The directus/directus repository showed 37.5k stars and 4.9k forks on October 20, 2026. Directus’s own April 2026 post lists “37K” for GitHub, which is consistent.
• License: GitHub labels the repository Monospace Sustainable Core License (MSCL) 1.0, a source-available license derived from the Fair Core License. It is not an OSI-approved open-source license.
• Contributors, releases and dependents: GitHub’s page showed no contributor count, release history or dependents count when I loaded it, so I have no figure for them.
• Star history: I found no dated earlier star count I could trust. Directus’s blog pages show the same “37K” header on posts from 2023 and 2024, so that label is not a time series, and I did not calculate growth.

The license changes (the biggest Directus story)

Directus has changed its license twice, and both changes affect who pays.

Why Directus says it changed the license in 2023: Revenue from GitHub Sponsors covered only about 1% of the cost of maintaining the repository, and the company wanted large corporations and governments in production to contribute (Directus blog, April 26, 2023).

What stays free under the 2026 terms, per the announcement:

• Full platform access for Innovation Grant qualifiers (under $5M revenue and under 50 employees).
• A Core tier for exploring and prototyping, regardless of size, with no registration.
• Hosting Directus, building products on it and offering services around it.
• The SDKs and some other projects remain under MIT.
• Paid tiers gate enterprise features such as SCIM and offline mode.

The “under 1%” and “ARR grew 200%” figures are Directus’s own statements, with no ARR dollar amount given. I did not confirm the exact v12 release date. The GitHub page showed the MSCL label today, which suggests the change has taken effect.

Directus Downloads and adoption

I pulled these from npm’s public downloads API on October 20, 2026, using the same 30-day window in both years.

I calculated the changes from the two counts.

• Which package to use: The SDK is installed in front-end projects that talk to Directus, so its count mostly reflects developers building on top of it. The directus package is the core server, so its count is a better proxy for new installs. It is much smaller.
• Docker caveat: Many teams run Directus from container images, which npm does not count, so npm likely understates server installs. I did not check Docker Hub.
• General caveat: npm counts include automated installs and CI builds, so they overstate human users.
• Earlier company claim: In its November 2022 funding release, Directus said the project had been downloaded over 20 million times in less than a year. The release does not say which channel (npm, Docker or both) that count covers, so it is not comparable to the npm figures above.

Directus Customers and community

• Named at the 2022 Series A: Bose, Adobe and Tripadvisor. The press release boilerplate also lists AT&T and the U.S. Navy.
• Community: The 2022 release said Directus had a community of over 50,000 developers and enterprise customers. I found no newer count.
• Current customer total: Not published anywhere I read.

Customer logos show who has used the product in some form. They do not show the depth of use.

Directus Funding and company

• Series A: $7 million, announced November 10, 2022, led by True Ventures, with seed investor Handshake Ventures taking part. Total raised to date: $8.5 million (Directus press release).
• Team at the time: More than 20 people, up from two a year earlier, plus hundreds of contributors.
• Later rounds: CB Insights and other databases appeared in my search results, but I did not open them, and I found no announcement of a later round.
• Revenue: Directus gives no dollar figure. The only stated figure is the 200% ARR growth in 2023.

Directus Pricing

Directus’s own pricing page would not load for me, so I could not read current plan prices from the vendor. What I found is secondhand, so treat all of it as unconfirmed.

These two sources disagree on plan names and do not agree on a Professional price, and Directus has changed its licensing since. Check Directus’s pricing page before you quote any figure.

Self-hosting avoids a subscription, but you still pay for the server, the database and the developer hours. For a sense of what those hours cost in one market, see our website development cost in India guide.

Directus Market share

I tried to read W3Techs’ Directus page, and it failed to load, so I have no verified market-share figure. W3Techs also lists CMS products by detection, and headless platforms leave fewer signals, so it would likely undercount Directus. For comparison, W3Techs listed Sanity, Storyblok and Strapi each at under 0.1% of known-CMS sites in October 2026.

Directus Ratings

• G2: 4.8 out of 5 from 53 reviews (page last modified October 17, 2026; I could not see individual review dates).
• Directus’s own post: Its April 2026 license announcement cites a 4.9 G2 rating, which differs from the 4.8 on G2’s page. G2’s page is the better source, and it was newer.
• Sample size: 53 reviews is small, so a score near 5 swings easily. Sanity has 926 reviews, Storyblok 596 and Strapi 206 on G2.

How Directus compares on the numbers?

Stars measure interest in a code repository, not customers, and hosted products such as Sanity keep most of their code private, so stars compare poorly across them.

I did not compare npm downloads across brands because each company ships different packages.

For the wider market picture, see our headless CMS statistics article. If you are weighing a data-first stack like this one, our custom web application development service covers that kind of project.

What the Directus numbers suggest?

• Directus is mid-sized on interest. About 37,500 stars place it behind Strapi and Payload in this set, and ahead of the others.
• Developer activity is growing fast. Both npm packages I checked rose about 78% to 81% year over year.
• Licensing is the main story. Two license changes in three years, plus a move to registration keys, make Directus the least conventional of the group on terms.
• Funding is small and old. The last round I found was $7 million in 2022, and Directus discloses no revenue.
• Pricing is unclear from outside. I could not read the vendor’s own page, and two third-party sources disagree.

FAQ

Sources

• GitHub: directus/directus (Oct 20, 2026)
• npm downloads API for @directus/sdk, 2026 and 2025, and directus, 2026 and 2025 (queried Oct 20, 2026)
• Directus: v12 license change (Apr 22, 2026; vendor source)
• Directus: Why we are relicensing Directus (Apr 26, 2023; vendor source)
• Directus: Changing our license, one year later (Jun 14, 2024; vendor source)
• Directus: $7 million Series A press release (Nov 10, 2022)
• Capterra: Directus pricing (2026, undated) and StackScored: Directus pricing (page modified Oct 2, 2026; third-party snapshot)
• G2: Directus reviews (page modified Oct 17, 2026)