Ente vs LibrePhotos
Ente and LibrePhotos are both photo management software. Ente is open source under AGPL-3.0, with 30k GitHub stars. LibrePhotos is open source under MIT, with 8.1k GitHub stars.
Which to pick
- Pick Ente when
- You want a Google Photos alternative where the provider cannot see your photos.
- Pick LibrePhotos when
- You want a private Google Photos alternative and have hardware for the machine learning jobs.
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.
A self-hosted photo management service with face recognition, object and scene detection, maps and timelines.
Encryption limits server-side features, and lost keys mean lost data; hosted storage is a paid subscription.
Smaller community than Immich, and indexing large libraries is resource-hungry.
Production-ready
Usable
Cloud service, self-hosted server, mobile app and desktop app
Self-hosted server
Dart, Flutter, TypeScript, Go and Rust
Python, Django, TypeScript, React and PostgreSQL
Open source, AGPL-3.0 (network copyleft)
Open source, MIT (permissive)
Use inside your business is unrestricted. If you change it and let customers use it over the internet, you must publish your changes.
You can build it into a product you sell, as long as you keep its copyright notice.
30k GitHub stars
8.1k GitHub stars
Established: started 4 years ago, latest release photos-v1.3.68.
Established: started 6 years ago, latest release 1.5.1.
Other comparisons
More photo management apps
Both sides were judged on 2026-11-03 from each project's README and GitHub data. License, age and popularity lines are worked out directly.