canvas VS node-canvas

Compare canvas vs node-canvas and see what are their differences.

canvas

High performance skia binding to Node.js. Zero system dependencies and pure npm packages without any postinstall scripts nor node-gyp. (by Brooooooklyn)

node-canvas

Node canvas is a Cairo backed Canvas implementation for NodeJS. (by Automattic)
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canvas node-canvas
7 22
1,589 9,877
- 1.0%
8.6 5.8
8 days ago 11 days ago
Rust JavaScript
MIT License -
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

canvas

Posts with mentions or reviews of canvas. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2021-08-01.

node-canvas

Posts with mentions or reviews of node-canvas. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-01-10.
  • 2024 Web Development Wish List
    7 projects | dev.to | 10 Jan 2024
    Assuming SWR (stale while revalidate) is working, we could definitely use the ability to edit images in workers. We would need support for node canvas or something similar.
  • Skinny legend (2017 - 2023)
    2 projects | /r/h3h3productions | 31 May 2023
    So at this point, I have all the images and the data required to align the images. I used node-canvas to do that. So here's how I aligned the images:
  • ECharts for Python
    3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 3 May 2023
    ECharts was originally a Baidu project, released under https://github.com/ecomfe/echarts (ecomfe = "E-commerce frontend"?). They still maintain some of the auxiliary libraries.

    I've been using it since around ... 2018-ish[0]? ... as a replacement for Google Charts. It was my first time using a big library from one of the Chinese tech giants -- basic docs and tutorials in English, then all the advanced stuff (and comments) written in Chinese. I was impressed by how comprehensive the charts library was, and how they'd obviously invested a lot of brainwork into the configuration system. IMO it's one of the highest-quality data visualization libraries in JavaScript unless you're willing to dive deep into something like d3.js.

    The blog post's author describes running echarts in a headless Chrome, though, which seems insane to me. It's JavaScript rendering to a -- can't it run in Node with https://github.com/Automattic/node-canvas ?

    [0] A small publicly-accessible example: https://john-millikin.com/reddit-front-page-2018#by-domain

  • Unify Protect Homebridge Plugin
    1 project | /r/homelab | 8 Jan 2023
    node-pre-gyp ERR! install response status 404 Not Found on https://github.com/Automattic/node-canvas/releases/download/v2.11.0/canvas-v2.11.0-node-v93-darwin-unknown-arm64.tar.gz
  • Social Media Cards with @vercel/og
    6 projects | dev.to | 9 Dec 2022
    Another approach is it to create a background image and insert the texts and the metadata with a canvas library like node-canvas. This approach is very well described in this Learn With Jason episode. But with a canvas library we have to specify on which coordinates we want to render our texts and it does not wrap automatically if it becomes to long.
  • Is there a simple way to draw a box on a JPG?
    1 project | /r/node | 18 Sep 2022
    Never used it but probably this: https://github.com/Automattic/node-canvas
  • Lambda keeps consuming more and more memory until it kills it self
    2 projects | /r/aws | 9 Aug 2022
    I found this issue: https://github.com/Automattic/node-canvas/issues/1974 and somebody commented with a link about node buffers. So I decided to test these parts.
  • best way to generate image on server
    2 projects | /r/webdev | 3 Aug 2022
    Some popular Node.js libraries for manipulating images are node-canvas and sharp.
  • BEGINNER PROJECT - How to parse a .txt and create .png files from each line?
    1 project | /r/learnjavascript | 28 Jun 2022
    node.js + imagemagick + node canvas + node canvas libraries (depends on your OS)
  • The tech behind creating your own 'Spotify Wrapped' style campaign in 2022
    1 project | dev.to | 10 Jan 2022
    If you want to go the same route check out the node-canvas library from the Automattic folks. That essentially lets you use the Browser Canvas API for drawing (but server side instead of in the browser).

What are some alternatives?

When comparing canvas and node-canvas you can also consider the following projects:

napi-rs - A framework for building compiled Node.js add-ons in Rust via Node-API

puppeteer - Node.js API for Chrome

Skia - Skia is a complete 2D graphic library for drawing Text, Geometries, and Images.

vercel - Develop. Preview. Ship.

rust-skia - Rust Bindings for the Skia Graphics Library

minesweeper - Minesweeper game developed with Rust, WebAssembly (Wasm), and Canvas

cryptopunk-nft-generator

ux-animate - A simple but powerful tweening, spring physics, animation library for Rust

urix - [DEPRECATED] Makes Windows-style paths more unix and URI friendly.

node-rs - Node.js bindings ❤️ Rust crates

resolve-url - [DEPRECATED] Like Node.js’ `path.resolve`/`url.resolve` for the browser.