How Many Mods and Plugins Are There Really for Minecraft

Someone asked me how many mods there are for Minecraft. I made the mistake of looking it up.

Wikipedia says 250,000+ as of March 2025. That figure comes with a "[citation needed]" tag, which is the internet's way of saying "we're pretty sure but don't quote us on that" - and yet here we are, quoting it. The number is in the right territory, but it doesn't tell you much. It lumps mods and plugins together, doesn't explain which platforms it's counting, and doesn't account for the fact that the same mod often shows up on multiple platforms at once.

So I went and counted myself. Sort of.

CurseForge

The biggest name in Minecraft content hosting is CurseForge. Their Minecraft page currently shows 289,837 pieces of content listed.

Before you tattoo that number on your arm, a few things. First, that total isn't mods only. It includes modpacks, resource packs, worlds, texture packs, and anything else people have uploaded. Mods are the biggest chunk but they're not the whole picture.

Second, CurseForge's own search is a bit embarrassed by the number. If you try to browse through the full catalog at curseforge.com/minecraft/search with 20 results per page, you hit a wall at 500 pages - which is 10,000 results. Their search won't surface the other 279,000. It's like finding out the library has 300,000 books but they only built 500 shelves.

Spigot

SpigotMC is the center of gravity for server plugins. It splits its resources into categories, so you can actually get a clean count:

Category	Count
Spigot	75,919
Bungee - Spigot	8,629
Bungee - Proxy	3,350
Premium	1,230
Web	595
Universal	529
Standalone	129
Total	90,381

If you're running a Bukkit, Spigot, or Paper server, this is where most of the plugin ecosystem lives. Ninety thousand is a lot of plugins. It's also a lot of plugins last updated in 2016 that technically still "work" if your definition of work includes not crashing immediately.

Modrinth

Modrinth is the newer platform that's grown fast enough to matter. It lists mods and plugins separately.

• Mods: 3,338 pages at 20 per page = ~66,760 mods
• Plugins (modrinth.com/discover/plugins): 783 pages at 20 per page = ~15,660 plugins

That's around 82,000 total items on Modrinth. The catch is that most of those popular mods are also on CurseForge. Modrinth has become the preferred home for newer mods, particularly in the Fabric ecosystem, but the overlap with CurseForge is significant.

Hangar and BuiltByBit

Hangar is PaperMC's official plugin repository. It's more curated than Spigot and currently lists 3,415 projects. It's where the actively maintained modern plugins tend to land.

BuiltByBit operates more like a marketplace, with free and paid resources mixed together. It has 6,621 plugin resources listed.

Both are smaller than Spigot, and both overlap heavily with what Spigot already has.

The Overlap Problem

Here's the thing nobody mentions when they throw out the big numbers: the same mod or plugin is almost always listed on more than one platform.

A popular mod is on CurseForge and Modrinth. A popular plugin is on Spigot, Hangar, Modrinth, and probably BuiltByBit too. If you add all the raw totals together you get something north of 470,000 - which sounds impressive but is about as meaningful as counting your sock drawer twice and calling yourself wealthy.

The platforms are distribution points, not unique content. They share catalogs constantly.

So What's the Real Number?

For mods, the honest estimate after deduplication is somewhere around 150,000-200,000 unique mods. CurseForge's 289,837 includes non-mod content and counts everything that's also on Modrinth. Third-party analyses that try to separate the duplicates land in that 150,000-200,000 range. For reference, Forge alone accounts for 50,000+ mods historically and Fabric sits around 15,000 - both within the CurseForge and Modrinth total.

Of those 150,000 to 200,000, only about 30,000-40,000 are actively maintained. The rest haven't been touched in years and won't run on any Minecraft version from the past three.

For plugins, Spigot's 90,381 is the most comprehensive single source. Accounting for the overlap with Hangar, Modrinth, and BuiltByBit, you're probably looking at 75,000-100,000 unique plugins that exist as distinct projects.

Mods and plugins don't overlap much with each other since they serve different purposes entirely. Stack them together and the combined ecosystem sits somewhere between 225,000 and 300,000 unique creations.

Wikipedia's 250,000 figure lands right in the middle of that range, so they weren't wrong. They just can't tell you where the number came from - hence the citation needed.

The Actual Answer

There are a lot. More than any one person will ever use. Enough that you could spend every evening for years trying different mods and never make a dent.

The platforms don't make it easy to get a precise count because they have no incentive to publish deduplication numbers. Each one would rather you think their catalog is the entire universe.

If you want a clean number to say at parties: roughly a quarter million mods and plugins once you strip out the duplicates. That's more than enough to keep you busy, and more than enough to keep mod developers busy uploading the same thing to five different websites.

Keep your pumpkin lit and your diamonds close. - MrPumpkin