less
Leaner CSS
npm says
14,780,092
per week
Every tarball fetch: mirrors, scanners, CI and people.
real installs
high confidence≈ 14.8M
per week
Mirror spikes and crawlers removed. CI and dependency installs still count, so this is not a head count.
noise under 1% of npm's count, so nearly all of it counts. noise real installs
Why this estimate
With JavaScript on, this lists what the filter found for this package.
Most used major version: 4, the latest one, with 87% of last week's downloads above the crawler floor. Most used single version: 4.2.0.
Snapshot from the daily build of Nov 6, 2026, last 7 days of npm data. With JavaScript on, this page recomputes it live from the npm API.
How many people use less?
npm counted 14,780,092 downloads of less in the last 7 days. Nobody can count people exactly, npm included: it does not record who downloaded what. After removing mirror spikes and crawlers, about 14.8M look like real installs. At this scale most of them come from CI, builds and other packages that depend on less, so the number of people behind them is far smaller.
Is less still maintained?
Most likely yes, going by its releases. The latest version, 4.9.1, came out on Sep 2, 2026. The last 12 months saw 14 stable releases, typically 8 days apart, plus 18 pre-releases. It was first published on Jan 23, 2011. npm lists 5 maintainers.
Is less still used?
Downloads with publish spikes removed are up 19% over 3 months and up 62% over 11 months. For scale, the median of the 269 packages we track, which lean towards today's most downloaded, is up 157% over 11 months, so this one is behind that. Last week, 87% of downloads above the crawler floor were on major version 4, the latest one; the most used single version was 4.2.0, with 14%. Weekdays get 2.3× the downloads of weekends, which fits people at work, though CI follows the same rhythm. Crawlers account for about 1,344 downloads a week, roughly 8 per version.
How the estimate works
- Cut the spike every new version gets from mirrors in its first days.
- Subtract the flat floor robots download from every version each week.
- Show what is left as a range, with a confidence level. It still includes CI and dependency installs, so it is not a count of people.