This list matches up fairly closely with our preconceived notions of the international tech scene, but we were a little surprised by a couple of things:

• Dublin didn’t make the cut. For all its reputation for growth in the technology community, it's still most famous as an international tax haven. Its membership comes in at 10,007, putting it 24th internationally.
• India has three cities in the top 20: Hyderabad, Pune, and Bangalore. This is more cities in the top 20 than any other country.
• Budapest outdid Vienna. While Vienna often takes the lead economically between these two neighboring cities, its tech scene is lagging at 4,508 members, putting it at 46th.

Membership by US State

As mentioned, it’s not accurate to compare international cities to US cities, but it’s totally fair to evaluate US states and cities’ tech scenes by their meetup activity. Here’s what the picture looks like:

New York and California are well out in front, with the usual suspects following behind. In fact, California and New York are so dominant that they have more meetup memberships than the rest of the country put together.

Membership by City

But grouping New York City in with the rest of the state isn’t particularly useful: 90% of the membership for the entire state is located within NYC. 88% of Massachusetts’ 137,215 memberships are located within Boston and Cambridge.

If all politics is local, then the same holds true for tech. It’s your city that matters. The city fosters the universities, economic policies, and determines the quality and cost of living. And it houses the human capital. Commuting from Albany to Yonkers isn’t particularly fun; commuting from DUMBO to Soho is no problem. Human connections and human capital are formed at the city level.

Take a look at the map of the US, again, but with the cities highlighted this time. The size and color of the circles illustrate the number of meetup memberships in the corresponding city. The tech community—America’s largest engine of economic growth—is concentrated in the Northeast and in California.

Overall Ranking by City

In our analysis of US tech cities, we started by taking the top 30 cities by meetup group membership. Once a city made that cut, we then ranked it by four factors:

• Total # of tech meetup memberships
  The raw size of the tech community.
• Tech industry density
  We normalized the raw # of memberships by city population to get tech industry density. This gives an indication of how concentrated the tech scene is in a given city.
• Total number of meetup groups
  While the number of memberships gives an indication of raw size, the number of groups gives an indication of diversity. The more groups, the more diverse the topic areas.
• Percent growth in number of meetup groups in 2013
  Fast growth indicates potential future leaders.

We combined the rankings on each individual factor to arrive at a single ranking of every tech scene in the US. Let’s run through what we found.

Top Cities by Membership

New York wins this category, which shouldn’t be surprising. NYC is 8x larger by population than San Francisco, the only other city that comes close. New York is also home to the largest single tech meetup in the world, coming in at 38,681 members at the time of this analysis.

Top Cities by Density

It turns out that Palo Alto is the only city in the country to have more memberships than citizens. Six of the top ten cities in this category are in California. While NYC may have San Francisco beat when it comes to raw membership within city limits, Silicon Valley is clearly the densest concentration of technology folks in the world. To put this into perspective, NYC comes in at 5% in this category, ranking 14.

Top Cities by Number of Groups

Austin and Seattle move into the mix on this list, making up in diversity what they were lacking in raw membership.

Top Cities by 2013 Growth

Portland more than doubled its number of meetup groups in a year—impressive. And who knew that Minneapolis, Houston, Baltimore, and Pittsburgh were homes to the fastest growing tech scenes? While these cities most likely won’t be unseating the giants anytime soon, they’re worth watching in 2014 and beyond.

San Francisco is Clearly King

Technology isn’t a competition, but everyone loves a good rivalry. The debate about Silicon Valley vs. Silicon Alley has been going on for years, but our research shows that the Valley is still clearly dominant. Even excluding the Valley, San Francisco by itself beats out NYC in our rankings.

Curious about where your city is today or what the future might hold? The interactive chart below ranks all major cities by the four criteria defined above and adjusts for the relative importance of each. Click on the column headings to sort the data. Have fun!