head to head · open source
manim vs visual-center
manim has 96,012 GitHub stars, 7,895 forks, 500 open issues and last shipped 2 months ago. visual-center has 1,448 stars, 39 forks, 4 open issues and last shipped 4 days ago. manim leads on adoption by 6,531% (96,012 vs 1,448 stars). manim is written in Python under MIT; visual-center is written in JavaScript under BSD-3-Clause. manim has attracted 8% as many forks as stars, visual-center 3%. visual-center 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
| manim | visual-center | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 96K | ★ 1.4K |
| License | MIT | BSD-3-Clause |
| Written in | Python | JavaScript |
| Last push | 2026-09-09 | 2026-10-30 |
| Forks | ⑂ 7.9K | ⑂ 39 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick manim if
- You weight community size — 96K stars and counting
- You want the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick visual-center if
- You want the visual-center feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the BSD-3-Clause license terms
- Your stack matches JavaScript
- You evaluated both and visual-center fits your workflow better
About manim
Manim is an engine for precise programmatic animations, designed for creating explanatory math videos. Note, there are two versions of manim. This repository began as a personal project by the author of 3Blue1Brown for the purpose of animating those videos, with video specific code available here. In 2020 a group of developers forked it into what is now the community edition, with a goal of being more stable, better tested, quicker to respond to community contributions, and all around friendlier to get started with. See this page for more details. Installation [!Warning] WARNING: These instructions are for…
read the full manim overview →
About visual-center
Visual Center Tool that will find the visual center of your images / logos. How it works. It calculates a visual weight value for every pixel on the image: the square root of the difference between that pixel and the background color. And then the algorithm tries to balance that weight in all directions. Why the square root? Programmatic Usage. License BSD 3 Clause License Made by Javier Bórquez. Online since 2016.
read the full visual-center overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is manim or visual-center more popular?
manim has 96,012 GitHub stars and visual-center has 1,448. manim has the larger community by that measure.
Are manim and visual-center free?
Both are open source. manim is licensed under MIT and visual-center under BSD-3-Clause. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between manim and visual-center?
manim is written in Python and visual-center in JavaScript. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, manim or visual-center?
Choose manim if you want the larger community (96,012 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose visual-center if its feature set, stack or BSD-3-Clause licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.