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Does anyone know of any trustworthy sources for the popularity of each faction?

Yes.
GWs sales data. Though I doubt they publicly share the complete details.
Any they do would probably be buried in an annual shareholders report or such.

After that you might sift through all the tourney data.

Can't access sales data by faction sadly. The only thing you can do is look at tournament data.

40kstats.com has some data that can be manipulated to look at that as well but it hasn't been updated in a while and I had heard that goonhammer will be working with that site in the future so should be good source of info when that happens.

The tournament data is going to skew to that subset of the player base. “Popular” is not the same as “powerful”. People might be bringing armies not because they are their favorite, but due to chances of victory.

It is one of the sources of data we have, but just keep in mind that what it shows might not reflect the scene at your FLGS, or the hobby as a whole.

Well, Space Marines sell more than probably all of the rest of 40k combined. Other than that, not sure.

GW on their webstore lists the best selling units they have, but not sure how indicative that might be.

https://www.games-workshop.com/en-CA/Warhammer-40-000

you can google some ancient polls of popularity 'main army', but they are old 7th and before. #1 was always generic Space Marines, followed by dark/blood angels and space wolves so all space marines combined to maybe a third or more, then chaos. all the others were about the same percentage 5-10%

i imagine these days its the same but primaris replacing all the space marine factions, and straight old style "first born" or whatever being in the 5-10% or perhaps lower

harlequins were always at the bottom

 jaredb wrote:
Well, Space Marines sell more than probably all of the rest of 40k combined. Other than that, not sure.

GW on their webstore lists the best selling units they have, but not sure how indicative that might be.

https://www.games-workshop.com/en-CA/Warhammer-40-000

Just off the fact that it has Stompas in the top 5, I'd say not good.

No way to generate hard data on that but if i had to throw my hat into the ring of guessing the top 3 in popularity among the community, i would say, in no order top 3

Space marines ( and their varients)
Imperial knights
Guard

Bottom three
Crons
Tau
Nids.

Source

 Duskweaver wrote:


Source

It also varies by local meta. If that was my local group for example, Tau would be second place because they love those bloody fish-people. The other thing to consider is which armies are in the current & previous starter pack / Hachette subscription. That's why Marines, Crons and Chaos Marines are so common.

That feeling when the stats show both version of chaos knights, but don't show your faction at all

Karol wrote:
That feeling when the stats show both version of chaos knights, but don't show your faction at all

You're part of the Adeptus Astartes. Right there beside the SW/DA/BA/UM/etc.

If you are interested in terms of "sales"/"what will I see in my club" its difficult.
If you want to know what's happening competitively, there's someone on Reddit who posts a thread every week that's reasonably accurate. (What counts as a reasonable tournament will always be debated etc.)

When you look at Goonhammer - the idea that there are 80% CSM, Death Guard and Thousand Sons players as there are regular Space Marine players seems laughable. And the idea this blob is four times (~) the size of Eldar is likewise. But I don't know if that's just my meta and its very different in the US.

I have asked google the same question few days ago and found this site:

https://www.tabletoptournaments.net/game/Warhammer-40K?

I don’t know how representative it is, being based on European data, but goes back to 2004. According to this, main xenos factions are more popular than snowflake Marines and about a third of all armies owned are combined SM flavours. Then it is a near tie of combined CSM and combined Eldar flavours and those make up about 30% and then IG and the rest of xenos and smaller factions. If you separate flavours of SM, CSM and Eldar into their own, then the top three is vanilla SM, CSM and IG with Eldar close 4th an the rest of the xenos following not that much behind, then snowflake SM, then small factions.

nou wrote:
I have asked google the same question few days ago and found this site:

https://www.tabletoptournaments.net/game/Warhammer-40K?

I don’t know how representative it is, being based on European data, but goes back to 2004. According to this, main xenos factions are more popular than snowflake Marines and about a third of all armies owned are combined SM flavours. Then it is a near tie of combined CSM and combined Eldar flavours and those make up about 30% and then IG and the rest of xenos and smaller factions. If you separate flavours of SM, CSM and Eldar into their own, then the top three is vanilla SM, CSM and IG with Eldar close 4th an the rest of the xenos following not that much behind, then snowflake SM, then small factions.

The season end for BCP had 1917 Astartes and 379 GK. Compared to the next highest Tyranids at 806. Heretic Astartes come in at 956.

Even when they're not the strongest marines are incredibly popular.