head to head · open source
sharp vs imaginary
sharp has 32,829 GitHub stars, 1,450 forks, 123 open issues and last shipped 4 days ago. imaginary has 6,091 stars, 502 forks, 135 open issues and last shipped 1.0 years ago. sharp leads on adoption by 439% (32,829 vs 6,091 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 | 2026-11-05 | 2025-11-08 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.4K | ⑂ 502 |
| 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 The typical use case for this high speed Node API module is to convert large images in common formats to smaller, web friendly JPEG, PNG, WebP, GIF and AVIF images of varying dimensions. It can be used with all JavaScript runtimes that provide support for Node API v9, including Node.js ( = 20.9.0), Deno and Bun. Resizing an image is typically 4x 5x faster than using the quickest ImageMagick and GraphicsMagick settings due to its use of libvips. Colour spaces, embedded ICC profiles and alpha transparency channels are all handled correctly. Lanczos resampling ensures quality is not sacrificed for speed. As…
read the full sharp overview →
About imaginary
imaginary Fast HTTP microservice written in Go for high level image processing backed by bimg and libvips. imaginary can be used as private or public HTTP service for massive image processing with first class support for Docker & Fly.io. It's almost dependency free and only uses net/http native package without additional abstractions for better performance. Supports multiple image operations exposed as a simple HTTP API, with additional optional features such as API token authorization , URL signature protection , HTTP traffic throttle strategy and CORS support for web clients. imaginary can read images from…
read the full imaginary overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is sharp or imaginary more popular?
sharp has 32,829 GitHub stars and imaginary has 6,091. 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 (32,829 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose imaginary if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.