head to head · open source
Audacity vs libvips
Audacity has 18,928 GitHub stars, 2,712 forks, 1,781 open issues and last shipped yesterday. libvips has 11,779 stars, 802 forks, 78 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Audacity leads on adoption by 61% (18,928 vs 11,779 stars). Audacity is written in C++ under a custom or non-standard licence; libvips is written in C under LGPL-2.1. Audacity has attracted 14% as many forks as stars, libvips 7%. libvips was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee.
Two open source projects, one decision. Both are free and self-hostable — the differences are community size, license terms, language stack and release pace.
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Side by side
| Audacity | libvips | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 19K | ★ 12K |
| License | Custom / other | LGPL-2.1 |
| Written in | C++ | C |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-11-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 2.7K | ⑂ 802 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick Audacity if
- You weight community size — 19K stars and counting
- You want the Custom / other license terms
- Your stack matches C++
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick libvips if
- You want the libvips feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the LGPL-2.1 license terms
- Your stack matches C
- You evaluated both and libvips fits your workflow better
About Audacity
Audacity Audacity is an easy to use, multi track audio editor and recorder for Windows, macOS, GNU/Linux and other operating systems. More info can be found on This repository is currently undergoing major structural change. We're currently working on Audacity 4, which means an entirely new UI and also refactorings aplenty. As such, the master branch is currently not particularly friendly to new contributors. It is still possible to submit patches to Audacity 3.x; make sure you branch off audacity3 if you choose to do so. Build instructions for 3.x can be found here; build instructions for Audacity 4 can be…
read the full Audacity overview →
About libvips
libvips: an image processing library Introduction libvips is a demand driven, horizontally threaded image processing library. Compared to similar libraries, libvips runs quickly and uses little memory. libvips is licensed under the LGPL 2.1 or later. It has around 300 operations covering arithmetic, histograms, convolution, morphological operations, frequency filtering, colour, resampling, statistics and others. It supports a large range of numeric types, from 8 bit int to 128 bit complex. Images can have any number of bands. It supports a good range of image formats, including JPEG, JPEG 2000, JPEG XL, TIFF…
read the full libvips overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Audacity or libvips more popular?
Audacity has 18,928 GitHub stars and libvips has 11,779. Audacity has the larger community by that measure.
Are Audacity and libvips free?
Both are open source. Audacity has no licence declared in this registry, and libvips is licensed under LGPL-2.1. Both are free to self-host.
What is the difference between Audacity and libvips?
Audacity is written in C++ and libvips in C. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, Audacity or libvips?
Choose Audacity if you want the larger community (18,928 stars) or its Custom / other licence terms. Choose libvips if its feature set, stack or LGPL-2.1 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.