head to head · open source
sharp vs imaginary
sharp has 32,714 GitHub stars, 1,439 forks, 123 open issues and last shipped 3 days ago. imaginary has 6,079 stars, 500 forks, 135 open issues and last shipped 11 months ago. sharp leads on adoption by 438% (32,714 vs 6,079 stars). sharp is written in JavaScript under Apache-2.0; imaginary is written in Go under MIT. sharp has attracted 4% as many forks as stars, imaginary 8%. sharp was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 5 topic tags (image, image-processing, jpeg, 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 | imaginary | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 33K | ★ 6.1K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MIT |
| Written in | JavaScript | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-22 | 2025-11-08 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.4K | ⑂ 500 |
| 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 imaginary if
- You want the imaginary feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and imaginary 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 imaginary
imaginary is a fast, Docker ready HTTP microservice written in Go for high level image processing, and it is aimed at developers and platform teams that need to resize, crop, convert and watermark images at scale through one HTTP API instead of embedding an image library in every application.
read the full imaginary overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is sharp or imaginary more popular?
sharp has 32,714 GitHub stars and imaginary has 6,079. sharp has the larger community by that measure.
Are sharp and imaginary free?
Both are open source. sharp is licensed under Apache-2.0 and imaginary under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between sharp and imaginary?
sharp is written in JavaScript and imaginary in Go. 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 imaginary?
Choose sharp if you want the larger community (32,714 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose imaginary if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.