BenchRank
#38 in Hosting & ComputeUpdated 2026-08

Debian

by Debian · Community-built universal operating system

BenchRank score

35.3 — BenchRank score out of 100

Screenshots of Debian

Homepage · Debian

Homepage of Debian

Overview

Debian is a free operating system built by a community project. Its site provides downloads, security advisories (DSA) and user support documentation, alongside pages on the project's philosophy and how to contribute. Releases are maintained through point updates — Debian 13.6 and 12.15 were both published in July 2026.

Best for
Users and administrators wanting a free, community-maintained operating system with security updates
Pricing
No prices are shown; the page describes Debian as a free operating system available to download.

Strengths and trade-offs

Strengths

  • Free operating system, downloadable from the project itself
  • Security advisories (DSA) plus an LTS team for older releases
  • Point releases shipped for two lines: 13.6 and 12.15 in July 2026
  • Site published in around 30 languages

Trade-offs

  • Homepage shows no features, hardware support or edition detail
  • Support offered is documentation and community help, not a paid plan
  • Two release lines to track; Bookworm security has moved to the LTS team

How Debian markets itself

A structured read of the promise, proof and page design on Debian’s captured homepage.

Homepage capture

“debian”

  • Angle: Open source / ownership
  • Hero: Abstract graphic

Pricing

Published plans and prices from Debian’s own pricing page.

How this score is made up

Each dimension is scored out of 100 and combined into the headline score using fixed weights.

  • MCP support

    Whether an agent can drive the product through the Model Context Protocol, and how much setup that takes.

  • Documentation

    Publicly reachable docs — coverage, freshness, code samples and machine readability.

  • Agent friendliness

    How readable the site is to an automated client: llms.txt, structured data, server-rendered content, crawler access.

  • Customer sentiment

    Third-party ratings, shrunk toward the catalogue mean by review volume and corroborated across independent sources.

  • Changelog

    A public, dated record of what shipped and when — the clearest signal that a product is still alive.

  • Marketing site structure

    Whether the site answers a buyer's questions: clear positioning, the pages that matter, and accessibility.

  • Page speed

    How fast the site loads for real visitors: Chrome UX Report 75th-percentile LCP, INP and CLS, with a Lighthouse mobile run standing in where a site has too little traffic for field data.

  • Operational trust

    Status page and incident history, security disclosure, compliance and data-processing documentation.

Measured, but not part of the score

Useful to know, but not a mark for or against the product — so these do not affect the ranking.

  • Openness

    Source availability, self-hosting, data export and open standards. Scored and shown, but not part of the composite — paid SaaS is not worse for being paid SaaS.

  • Maintenance

    Release cadence and repository activity. Scored and shown, but not part of the composite — it is only measurable for open repositories.

This doesn’t look right — report a problem with Debian’s score

Where this comes from

The Debian pages BenchRank reads when it scores the product — its documentation, release notes, status and security pages, and its repository where there is one.

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