Purpose This paper aims to examine integrated library systems (ILS) and web-scale discovery services (WSDS) of the National Institute of Ranking Framework’s (NIRF) top-ranked universities for the “Overall” category in the 2020 rankings. Further, the authors analyse how the ILS-WSDS transitions work in the academic libraries of higher educational institutions (HEIs) in India. Design/methodology/approach The 200 top-ranked institutions in the NIRF rankings 2020 were chosen to evaluate their ILS-WSDS systems available through their library websites. Out of ten categories of NIRF rankings, the “Overall” category was selected as the institutions ranked under this category are discipline-independent and have a minimum of 1,000 full-time students in their undergraduate and graduate programmes. Findings The authors found that Koha is a leading ILS with 52 libraries (26%), followed by LibSys with 18 institutions (9%), SOUL with ten institutions (5%), AutoLib with eight institutions (4%), VTLS and NewGenLib with four institutions each (2%) and SLIM with three institutions (1.5%). In regards to WSDS, 73 institutions use Knimbus (36.5%), followed by 12 institutions using EBSCO Discovery Services (6%), two institutions using Ex Libris Summon and others include LS Discovery, VuFind and independent platform each at 0.5%. At the core of technology adoption, for the ILS to WSDS transitions, the uptake is found to be rather slow. Originality/value Many studies have explored ILS and WSDS India. However, this study attempts to assess the ILS in comparison with discovery services at academic libraries in the top ranking HEIs in India.