At a glance
Over 10 years, Jazzband had 3,135 members and 84 projects. Those projects receive 150M+ PyPI downloads/month, and the Jazzband release pipeline shipped 1,312 releases.
Jazzband is sunsetting. Before moving on, I wanted to look back at how people used it over the past 10 years, including where it let them down.
Five years in, we had about 1,350 members and 55 projects.
20 active projects never shipped a release through it. Watson (2,515 stars) and django-admin2 (1,187), for example, didn’t release at all while under Jazzband. Others, including django-rest-knox, django-fsm-log and django-recurrence, published directly to PyPI on their own. They used Jazzband for shared access and maintenance while keeping their own release process.
django-avatar’s repo was created in 2008 and shipped its most recent Jazzband release in January 2026. A 17-year-old repo was still getting releases. django-axes (2009), sorl-thumbnail (2010), django-constance (2010) and over 20 other projects created before 2015 were still getting releases in 2025 or 2026. Jazzband helped keep them alive long after their original authors moved on.
django-axes had the most active release cadence: 258 release files across 129 versions, peaking at 28 versions in 2019, roughly one every 13 days. pip-tools was second at 146 releases across 73 versions.
Meanwhile, 7 active projects have no team members at all, including django-permission and django-mongonaut. Nobody was actively working on those seven projects, but they had a home and stayed installable.
With 69 team members, pip-tools was much larger than any other project. The next largest, djangorestframework-simplejwt, had 24. pip-tools was almost an organization within Jazzband.
People were still finding value in the model near the end. django-tagging and django-summernote joined in 2024 with single-digit stars and zero releases.
When django-newsletter transferred in, its author @dokterbob worried that giving 800 members write access would “dissolve the responsibility so much that it might actually reduce participation.” I wrote a long reply defending the open model.
An earlier project, Collectfast, left Jazzband after a member pushed directly to master without review and merged commits the author had been holding off on. We discussed code review, branch protection and what “open access” should mean. We never fully resolved the tension between openness and control.
Over the years I had to block 10 accounts from the GitHub organization. First came crypto spammers who joined just to be in the org, then community conflicts that needed moderation decisions, and finally the AI-driven spam that made the open model untenable. None of that is unusual for an organization this size, but it all went through me.
Every transferred project got an onboarding checklist. A webhook opened
an “Implement Jazzband guidelines” issue with TODOs such as fixing
links, adding badges, setting up CI, adding jazzband to PyPI and
choosing a project lead. Of the 41 projects that received one, 28
completed it and 13 still have it open.
In those 13 projects, contributors would finish the work they could do, then get stuck on things that required admin access: configuring webhooks, fixing CI checks or setting up the release pipeline. They had to wait for me, sometimes for months.
django-user-sessions’ original author pinged me five times over two months about broken CI checks that only an admin could fix. Watson’s lead asked twice to remove legacy CI tools that blocked PR merges. The checklist was useful, but I couldn’t keep up with the work it left for me.
django-debug-toolbar was one of the earliest and most visible Jazzband projects. It transferred in during 2016, grew to over 8,000 stars, and moved to Django Commons in 2024.
django-simple-history, django-oauth-toolkit, PrettyTable and tablib also moved on. They needed more autonomy than Jazzband’s structure could provide.
Projects that were ever part of Jazzband account for over 150 million PyPI downloads a month. Current projects alone account for around 95 million.
Top 15 by monthly downloads:
| Project | Downloads/month | Note |
|---|---|---|
| prettytable | 42.4M | left Jazzband |
| pip-tools | 23.3M | |
| contextlib2 | 10.7M | |
| django-redis | 9.6M | |
| django-debug-toolbar | 7.3M | left, now Django Commons |
| djangorestframework-simplejwt | 6.1M | |
| dj-database-url | 5.5M | |
| pathlib2 | 4.9M | |
| django-model-utils | 4.8M | |
| geojson | 4.6M | |
| tablib | 4.1M | |
| django-oauth-toolkit | 3.7M | left |
| django-simple-history | 3.1M | left, now Django Commons |
| django-silk | 2.7M | |
| django-formtools | 2.1M |
I was surprised that prettytable alone accounts for 42 million downloads a month. It isn’t a Django package, and neither are contextlib2, pathlib2 or geojson. Jazzband ended up being broader than the Django ecosystem it started in.
django-debug-toolbar ranked in the top three most used third-party packages in the Django Developers Survey and is featured in the official Django tutorial. It spent 8 years under Jazzband before moving to Django Commons.
You may have come across these projects through the Django News newsletter, Python Weekly or Opensource.com’s 2020 piece on how Jazzband worked.
| Project | Stars |
|---|---|
| pip-tools | 7,997 |
| django-silk | 4,939 |
| tablib | 4,752 |
| djangorestframework-simplejwt | 4,310 |
| django-taggit | 3,429 |
| django-redis | 3,059 |
| django-model-utils | 2,759 |
| Watson | 2,515 |
| django-push-notifications | 2,384 |
| django-widget-tweaks | 2,165 |
Written by Jannis Leidel on Mar 14, 2026, 12:02:00 PM