Developer tool directories

How to choose developer tool directories

Developers do not click directory links often, but when they do they arrive ready to install something. These sites send fewer visitors than the general directories and convert far better, which makes the smaller numbers misleading.

What counts as a developer tool directory

A developer tool directory indexes things engineers install rather than things they subscribe to: CLIs, libraries, APIs, self-hosted services, editor extensions. The audience arrives with a specific problem and leaves as soon as they have solved it, which makes these sites low in traffic and unusually high in intent.

The good ones are opinionated. They will list twelve options in a category and say which they would use, which is why developers trust them and why getting in is harder than filling a form.

By the numbers

These 33 directories have a median rating of DR 71. The strongest is DEV Community at DR 91, the weakest at DR 10. 12 of them accept a submission for nothing, and 7 charge for every listing. 18 pass a dofollow link.

That is 13 points above the median for the full list of 175 directories, which sits at DR 58. By band that is 6 rated 80 or above, 16 rated 60 to 79, 5 rated 40 to 59 and 6 rated below 40. 8 of them have no traffic estimate at all, which usually means too little to measure rather than none.

What a listing actually gets you

A listing here converts at rates the general directories cannot approach, because everyone reading it is already looking for what you built. Ten visitors from a developer directory will often outperform a thousand from a launch platform on any metric you care about after the first week.

There is a second effect worth knowing about. Developer directories are heavily represented in the training and retrieval data behind coding assistants, so a listing increasingly determines whether your tool gets suggested when someone asks an AI how to solve the problem you solve.

Submitting without wasting the evening

Link the documentation, not the marketing page. Developers arriving from these sites want to see the install command, the API surface and the licence before they will consider anything else. An honest limitations section converts better here than a feature list, because the audience will find the limitations anyway. If your tool is open source, say so prominently: it is the single strongest signal on most of these sites.

Common mistakes

Sending traffic to a landing page with an email capture and no documentation. Describing what the tool is instead of what it replaces. Hiding the licence, the pricing, or the fact that the free tier stops at a hard limit, all of which get discovered in the first comment and then discussed instead of your product.

Where to start

By audience size, the biggest here are Hacker News, DEV Community and Product Hunt, led by 13.53M visits a month. The highest-rated one you can use without paying is DEV Community at DR 91. 7 approve quickly, Twelve Tools, StackShare and Dofollow Tools among them.

Questions people ask

Every figure quoted above is read off the table on this page, so it moves as the list does. Domain rating and traffic are third-party estimates captured in September 2026: useful for ordering a shortlist, not precise figures.