2025 ROS Metrics Report
2025 ROS Metrics Report.pdf (3.7 MB)
For comparison, heres the 2024 Metrics Report.
Once a year, we take a moment to evaluate the health, growth, and general well-being of the ROS community. Our goal with this annual report is to provide a relative estimate of the community’s evolution and composition to better help us plan for the future and allocate resources.
As an open-source project, we prioritize user privacy above all else. We do not track our users, and as such, this report relies on aggregate statistics from services like GitHub, Google Analytics, and download data from our various servers. While this makes data collection difficult, and the results don’t always capture the information we would like, we are happy to report that the data we have captured clearly show a thriving and rapidly growing ROS ecosystem! 
2025 Report Highlights
The full report is available for download here (3.7 MB) If you would like just the highlights we’ve summarized the top line results below.
- 984,135,185 ROS packages were downloaded in 2025 representing an 85.18% increase over 2024 (this is despite missing data for July, see note below).
- Over 1,300,000 individuals / unique IPs downloaded ROS packages in October, 2025.
- ROS 2 now makes up 91.2% of all ROS downloads.
- ROS Humble currently makes up 48.53% of all ROS downloads.
- ROS Jazzy currently makes up 24.45% of all ROS downloads.
- ROS Index visitors have increased by 63.3%.
- The ROS 2 Github organization saw an 11.2% increase in contributors and a 37.59% increase in the number of pull requests.
- Discourse posts have increased by 24% and viewership has increased by 29.7%.
- Our newest ROS 2 paper (Macenski et al., 2022) had 1,929 citations, representing 90% growth year over year.
- 92.14% of Gazebo downloads are now for modern versions of Gazebo.
A Landmark Year for Community Growth
The 2025 metrics highlight a massive surge in users across almost all of our websites and servers. In the month of October 2025, ROS 2 package downloads saw a staggering 284% increase in the number of package downloads over the previous year. ROS 2 package downloads now make up the overwhelming majority of ROS package downloads (91.2% of all downloads in October 2025). This growth isn’t just from users transitioning from ROS 1 to ROS 2, most of it appears to be explosive growth in the number of ROS 2 users overall. The number of unique users / IPs downloading ROS packages grew from 843,959 in October 2024 to 1,315,867 in October of 2025, an increase of just shy of 56%!
Meanwhile, ROS 1 downloads declined slightly from 12,206,979 packages in October of 2024 to 11,590,884 in October of 2025, a decrease of slightly over 5%. The ROS Wiki, which is now at End-of-Life, saw an 8.5% decrease in users, a trend we view positively as the community migrates to modern documentation platforms and away from ROS 1. Similarly, there were only 5 questions tagged with “ROS1” on Robotics Stack Exchange in 2025, in contrast to the 1,449 questions tagged “ROS2.” On every platform, and by every metric, ROS 2 is now the dominant platform ROS development.
Our discussion platforms are also busier than ever. Annual topics on ROS Discourse rose by 40% (to 1,472), and annual posts increased by 24% (to 4,901). Overall viewership of Discourse grew by nearly 30%. Similarly our community on LinkedIn has increased by 23.9% and hovers at just shy of 200,000 followers. The only notable decrease of any ROS metric was on Robotics Stack Exchange, which has seen a -42.49% decrease in the number of questions asked. This decrease mirrors larger industry wide trends as developers turn to large language models to answer their technical questions.
ROS 2 Adoption and Industry Momentum
The shift to ROS 2 has reached a definitive milestone, with package downloads now overwhelmingly centered on ROS 2 and likely surpassing one billion per year. This massive download volume is a testament to the ROS’s utility and widespread adoption. We are especially encouraged by the growing health of the ecosystem, which now features 34,614 unique ROS packages available via Apt (an increase of 9.15% over the previous year). This growth in package availability directly translates into greater functionality and choice for our users.
The dedication of the developer community is evident in the flourishing number of public repositories on Github: 3,848 repositories are tagged with “#ROS2” (a 39% increase in 2025), alongside 8,744 public repositories tagged with “#ROS” (up 4.73% since Jan 2025), demonstrating increasing development activity. Furthermore, the relevance of ROS in industry is undeniable: our private list of ROS companies grew 26% this year to 1,579 companies, showing strong commercial validation. In the academic sphere, our canonical ROS 2 paper continues to demonstrate explosive growth with 1,929 citations (up 89.9% in 2025), confirming the platform’s role in cutting-edge research. Collectively, these metrics confirm ROS 2’s status as the established platform for the next generation of robotics development, driving significant growth across both commercial and research sectors.
Conclusion and Feedback
The data from 2025 depicts a thriving, maturing ecosystem that is increasingly centered on modern ROS 2 and modern Gazebo tools. We are immensely proud of this community’s growth and its successful shift toward next-generation robotics software!
We encourage you to dive into the full report for a more detailed breakdown of these metrics. We also encourage you to take a look at the ROS project contributor metrics published by our colleagues at the Linux Foundation for a detailed breakdown of project contribution statistics. As always, we would love to hear your thoughts on what metrics you would like to see included in future reports.
A Note on 2025 Data
Our goal with the ROS metrics report is to develop an understanding of the magnitude and direction of changes in the ROS open source community so we can make better decisions about where we allocate our time and resources. As such, we’re looking for ballpark estimates to help guide decision making, not necessarily exacting figures. This year, due to circumstances beyond our control, we’ve had to fill in some gaps in our data as explained below. We believe the numbers reported here paint a reasonable lower bound on various phenomena in the ROS community.
Our ROS package download statistics are culled from an AWStats instance running on our OSU OSL servers. In July of 2025 we moved our AWStats host at OSU OSL and upgraded AWStats ahead of its imminent deprecation. Unfortunately, this migration had two negative side effects that impacted our results for 2025. First, it caused us to lose most of our AWStats data for the month of July, 2025. Second, the upgrade did not provide a migration utility for existing log data, and our AWStats summary page for 2025 only presents data for the six months after the migration. Thankfully, we still have the raw log data for the proceeding six months (with the exception of July), and we were able to manually re-calculate the results for most metrics, albeit missing some data from the month of July.
For our Gazebo download metrics we rely upon the Apache logs available on an OSRF AWS instance and AWStats download data from the OSU OSL servers. For privacy reasons we do not retain the Apache log data in perpetuity, instead we rely on a logging buffer that periodically rolls over. In prior years this buffer was sufficient to capture well over a month’s worth of Gazebo download data. Gazebo downloads have grown significantly over the past year, and when we evaluated our logs, we found that only a little over two weeks worth of data was available. As such we decided to evaluate the download data on a two week period from January 13th, until January 27th and extrapolate those results out to the entire month.