head to head · open source
libvips vs Krita
libvips has 11,656 GitHub stars, 797 forks, 78 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Krita has 10,393 stars, 859 forks, 0 open issues and last shipped today. libvips leads on adoption by 12% (11,656 vs 10,393 stars). libvips is written in C under LGPL-2.1; Krita is written in C++ under GPL-3.0. libvips has attracted 7% as many forks as stars, Krita 8%. Krita 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
| libvips | Krita | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 12K | ★ 10K |
| License | LGPL-2.1 | GPL-3.0 |
| Written in | C | C++ |
| Last push | 2026-09-19 | 2026-09-20 |
| Forks | ⑂ 797 | ⑂ 859 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick libvips if
- You weight community size — 12K stars and counting
- You want the LGPL-2.1 license terms
- Your stack matches C
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick Krita if
- You want the Krita feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the GPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches C++
- You evaluated both and Krita fits your workflow better
About libvips
libvips is a demand driven, horizontally threaded image processing library in C, licensed LGPL 2.1 or later, for developers who need to resize, convert and analyse large images quickly without exhausting memory.
read the full libvips overview →
About Krita
Krita is a free and open source cross platform application for digital painting. It lives in the KDE ecosystem and is built on the KDE and Qt frameworks. The project is licensed under the GNU Public License, Version 3, and the GitHub repository is a mirror of the real code repository at https://invent.kde.org/graphics/krita.git.
read the full Krita overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is libvips or Krita more popular?
libvips has 11,656 GitHub stars and Krita has 10,393. libvips has the larger community by that measure.
Are libvips and Krita free?
Both are open source. libvips is licensed under LGPL-2.1 and Krita under GPL-3.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between libvips and Krita?
libvips is written in C and Krita 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, libvips or Krita?
Choose libvips if you want the larger community (11,656 stars) or its LGPL-2.1 licence terms. Choose Krita if its feature set, stack or GPL-3.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.