Ente vs iCloud Photos
Ente and iCloud Photos are both photo management software. Ente is open source under AGPL-3.0, with 30k GitHub stars. iCloud Photos is a commercial product from Apple Inc.
Which to pick
- Pick Ente when
- You want a Google Photos alternative where the provider cannot see your photos.
- Pick iCloud Photos when
- Your household uses Apple devices and wants photos synced everywhere without extra apps.
Side by side
End-to-end encrypted cloud apps, mainly Ente Photos and the Ente Auth two-factor authenticator, available as a paid hosted service or self-hosted.
Syncs your photo library across iPhone, iPad and Mac through iCloud, with shared libraries and optional end-to-end encryption.
Encryption limits server-side features, and lost keys mean lost data; hosted storage is a paid subscription.
Awkward on Windows and Android, and exporting a large library out of iCloud is slow.
Production-ready (both)
Cloud service, self-hosted server, mobile app and desktop app
Cloud service, mobile app and desktop app
Dart, Flutter, TypeScript, Go and Rust
Not published
Open source, AGPL-3.0 (network copyleft)
Closed source, sold by Apple Inc.
Use inside your business is unrestricted. If you change it and let customers use it over the internet, you must publish your changes.
Closed source: you use it under the maker's terms and cannot change or resell the code.
30k GitHub stars
19k Wikipedia readers a month on phones
Established: started 4 years ago, latest release photos-v1.3.68.
Not known
Other comparisons
More photo management apps
Both sides were judged on 2026-11-03 from makers' descriptions, Wikipedia, READMEs and GitHub data. License, age and popularity lines are worked out directly.