Here are practical ways you can discover similar GitHub repositories based on the repositories you’ve starred — both using built-in GitHub features and external tools/services:
🚀 1. Use GitHub Explore & Personal Recommendations
🔹 GitHub Explore
GitHub’s Explore page gives you trending and suggested repositories based on stars and popular content. It’s not personalized to only your starred list, but GitHub uses overall star signals to highlight related projects.
🔹 Your GitHub Stars page
Your “⭐ Your stars” view shows repositories you’ve starred, and GitHub sometimes shows related content (e.g., trending or popular repos in similar topics) in your feed based on what you’ve starred.
🧠 2. Tools That Generate Similar Repo Recommendations
🧩 SimRepo — Similar repositories in GitHub sidebar
SimRepo is a browser extension that automatically displays similar repositories in the GitHub sidebar whenever you view a repository page. It uses machine learning and star-based embeddings to find related projects.
Works as an extension for Chrome/Chromium-based browsers (and planned on other browsers)
Shows similar repos for popular projects (e.g., >150 stars)
Provides suggestions automatically in the UI
Good for: discovering related projects while browsing repos.
🔍 GitRec — Recommendations based on your stars
GitRec is another Chrome extension / tool that analyzes repositories you’ve starred and then suggests similar ones. It uses a recommendation engine (often Gorse) to calculate relevance from your activity.
Adds recommendations directly into GitHub browsing
Suggests repos you may like based on starred history
Compatible with GitHub.com
Good for: seamless discovery without leaving GitHub.
🛠 3. CLI & Search Tools
📦 github-stars-search
A command-line tool that lets you semantically search within your starred repositories and can help you cluster or search for similar ones based on README content and embeddings.
You fetch all starred repos
The tool generates vector representations of README/text and lets you search semantically
Useful if you want offline or scriptable similarity querying
🐍 starred-repo-finder
Another CLI utility that finds other repositories by analyzing stargazers of a given repo — essentially looking at users who starred a repo and what else they’ve starred.
Helps discover repos favored by similar users
Filter results by popularity or forks
Outputs results in JSON/CSV
📌 4. DIY Data & Scripts
📊 Build your own similarity model
If you’re into data science or custom workflows, you can:
Fetch your starred repo list via the GitHub API
Extract metadata (stars/topics/languages/README text)
Compute similarity using text embeddings, graph analysis, or collaborative filtering
Tools like StarDose (a GitHub recommender system) demonstrate this approach.
Good for: fully customized recommendations or research.
🧠 5. Practical GitHub Search Tricks
While GitHub search doesn’t directly provide similarity scoring, you can use advanced filters to find related projects manually, for example:
topic:machine-learning stars:>50 language:python
This helps you target repositories in the same domain as your starred set.
🧩 Summary: Which to Use?
Goal Best Option
Automatic similar repo suggestions while browsing SimRepo, GitRec Terminal-based search & custom queries github-stars-search, starred-repo-finder Manual discovery within GitHub Explore, advanced search Custom data-science recommendations Build your own embedding/graph model