Download Pulse – downloads, rank and competitor tracking for authors with several plugins

Share & showcase Plugins
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Disclaimer

Download Pulse

The directory shows one lifetime number per plugin. If you maintain several plugins, that doesn’t tell you which one is growing, whether a release moved anything, or whether you’re gaining on competitors.

Download Pulse records Obsidian’s official download numbers every day and answers those questions in plain sentences, like “Galaxy View is pulling away” or “1,500 around Oct 6”.

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Dashboard with three plugins: total downloads, an orbit with one planet per plugin, insight cards, and the sidebar widget.

Your plugins

  • Downloads with a forecast, daily new downloads, rank among all plugins
  • Effect of each release (first three days) and downloads by version
  • Overview and Compare when you have several plugins

Competitors

  • Pick rivals (it suggests similar plugins) and switch a plugin to “vs competitors”
  • Your share of the group’s new downloads, the gap to the plugin ahead and when you’d pass it, and whether anyone behind is closing in

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A plugin against four competitors: rank, share of the group’s new downloads this week, and a card per plugin.

Where it lives

  • A dashboard tab, a right-sidebar widget, and a plugin-pulse code block for any note

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A note with a plugin-pulse code block comparing a plugin with its competitors, next to the sidebar widget.

Getting started: install, open the dashboard from the ribbon, type your author name or GitHub username, and your plugins are found at once. History is back-filled so charts aren’t empty on day one. You can also follow plugins you don’t own.

Good to know

  • Numbers come from Obsidian’s daily community-plugin-stats.json. They count installs and updates, not users, and change once a day.
  • Only anonymous GET requests for public data, no telemetry, nothing about your vault is sent. Back-filling past history uses a public third-party archive; you can turn it off in settings. The README lists every request.
  • Requires Obsidian 1.13.0+. Works on mobile. English and Korean.

Source and README: GitHub - elliott-json-park/obsidian-download-pulse: Download Pulse: analytics for Obsidian plugin authors. Track every plugin's downloads, rank and milestones in one dashboard, and monitor the plugins you compete with. · GitHub

Feedback is welcome here. I’ll post all updates in this thread.

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A few notes on how the numbers are calculated:

  • “Pass in N days” assumes the last 14 days’ pace continues for both plugins. If the plugin ahead is growing faster, it just says it’s pulling away.
  • Share of new downloads is your part of the group’s downloads gained in the last 7 days.
  • The public archive used for back-filling has a few missing days. I don’t interpolate: those downloads are added to the next recorded day and the tooltip says so.

Ideas I’m considering next: more UI languages, and saving more than one competitor group per plugin.

If there’s a comparison or metric you’d want that isn’t there, let me know here.

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Update: 1.3.1

Momentum is easier to read now:

  • The “Last 7 days” tile says what it compares (“▲ 37% vs the 7 days before”), and its bars show those two weeks side by side, each with its daily average.
  • Hover a tile or a table cell to see both weeks with their dates and totals.
  • When the earlier week had fewer than 30 downloads, the change is shown as a count (▲ +19) instead of a percentage, since 3 → 9 as “▲ 200%” says more about chance than about change.
  • Competitors: a momentum map (size × momentum), “You ▲ 37% · competitors steady”, and a summary table you can sort by any column.

1.3.1 fixes a bug in 1.3.0 where the dashboard stopped after the first tile, so the charts and tables below it were missing. If you saw that, please update.

Since the first post, there’s also a share card: save your plugins and numbers as an image for posts or stories (16:9 or 9:16).