head to head · open source
LosslessCut vs chafa
LosslessCut has 45,969 GitHub stars, 2,327 forks, 300 open issues and last shipped yesterday. chafa has 5,398 stars, 125 forks, 54 open issues and last shipped 12 days ago. LosslessCut leads on adoption by 752% (45,969 vs 5,398 stars). LosslessCut is written in TypeScript under GPL-2.0; chafa is written in C under LGPL-3.0. LosslessCut has attracted 5% as many forks as stars, chafa 2%. LosslessCut 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.
← all 20902 open source comparisons
Side by side
| LosslessCut | chafa | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 46K | ★ 5.4K |
| License | GPL-2.0 | LGPL-3.0 |
| Written in | TypeScript | C |
| Last push | 2026-11-12 | 2026-11-01 |
| Forks | ⑂ 2.3K | ⑂ 125 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick LosslessCut if
- You weight community size — 46K stars and counting
- You want the GPL-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick chafa if
- You want the chafa feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the LGPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches C
- You evaluated both and chafa fits your workflow better
About LosslessCut
LosslessCut The swiss army knife of lossless video/audio editing Thanks to my supporters and everyone who purchased LosslessCut! LosslessCut aims to be the ultimate cross platform FFmpeg GUI for extremely fast and lossless operations on video, audio, subtitle and other related media files. The main feature is lossless trimming and cutting of video and audio files, which is great for saving space by rough cutting your large video files taken from a video camera, GoPro, drone, etc. It lets you quickly extract the good parts from your videos and discard many gigabytes of data without doing a slow re encode and…
read the full LosslessCut overview →
About chafa
    About • Gallery • Packages • Development About Chafa is a command line utility that converts image data, including animated GIFs, into graphics formats or ANSI/Unicode character art suitable for display in a terminal. It has broad feature support, allowing it to be used on devices ranging from historical teleprinters to modern terminal emulators and everything in between. The core functionality is provided by a C library with a public, well documented API. Both library and frontend tools are covered by the Lesser GPL license, version 3 or later (LGPLv3+). The official web pages and C API…
read the full chafa overview →
More in Miscellaneous
Related comparisons
More Photo & Video Editors projects
Compare either of these against the rest of the Photo & Video Editors field.
Frequently asked questions
Is LosslessCut or chafa more popular?
LosslessCut has 45,969 GitHub stars and chafa has 5,398. LosslessCut has the larger community by that measure.
Are LosslessCut and chafa free?
Both are open source. LosslessCut is licensed under GPL-2.0 and chafa under LGPL-3.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between LosslessCut and chafa?
LosslessCut is written in TypeScript and chafa 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, LosslessCut or chafa?
Choose LosslessCut if you want the larger community (45,969 stars) or its GPL-2.0 licence terms. Choose chafa if its feature set, stack or LGPL-3.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.