head to head · open source
sharp vs images
sharp has 32,741 GitHub stars, 1,439 forks, 123 open issues and last shipped yesterday. images has 2,836 stars, 247 forks, 23 open issues and last shipped 4 days ago. sharp leads on adoption by 1,054% (32,741 vs 2,836 stars). sharp is written in JavaScript under Apache-2.0; images is written in C++ under BSD-3-Clause. sharp has attracted 4% as many forks as stars, images 9%. sharp was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 2 topic tags (image-processing, libvips), so they are genuine substitutes rather than adjacent tools.
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
| sharp | images | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 33K | ★ 2.8K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | BSD-3-Clause |
| Written in | JavaScript | C++ |
| Last push | 2026-10-04 | 2026-10-01 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.4K | ⑂ 247 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick sharp if
- You weight community size — 33K stars and counting
- You want the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches JavaScript
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick images if
- You want the images feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the BSD-3-Clause license terms
- Your stack matches C++
- You evaluated both and images fits your workflow better
About sharp
sharp is a high performance Node.js image processing library that converts large images in common formats into smaller, web friendly JPEG, PNG, WebP, GIF and AVIF files, and it is built for JavaScript developers who need fast, dependency light resizing inside Node.js, Deno or Bun applications.
read the full sharp overview →
About images
wsrv.nl images is a self hostable image processing and caching server for developers who want to resize, convert, and proxy remote images from their own infrastructure instead of depending on a third party image CDN.
read the full images overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is sharp or images more popular?
sharp has 32,741 GitHub stars and images has 2,836. sharp has the larger community by that measure.
Are sharp and images free?
Both are open source. sharp is licensed under Apache-2.0 and images under BSD-3-Clause. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between sharp and images?
sharp is written in JavaScript and images 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, sharp or images?
Choose sharp if you want the larger community (32,741 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose images if its feature set, stack or BSD-3-Clause licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.