ImGui.NET VS WinApi

Compare ImGui.NET vs WinApi and see what are their differences.

ImGui.NET

An ImGui wrapper for .NET. (by ImGuiNET)

WinApi

A simple, direct, ultra-thin CLR library for high-performance Win32 Native Interop (by prasannavl)
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ImGui.NET WinApi
17 4
1,709 806
2.2% -
6.7 0.0
5 days ago over 1 year ago
C# C#
MIT License Apache License 2.0
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.

ImGui.NET

Posts with mentions or reviews of ImGui.NET. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-06-01.
  • Using ImGui.NET with SDL2-CS?
    3 projects | /r/learncsharp | 1 Jun 2023
    Now I'm trying to integrate ImGui into the engine. One solution I found was using this but as far as I can tell it locks you into using OpenGL which is something I would like to avoid as one of the main selling points of SDL2 for me is it's abstraction over the rendering backend.
  • c# native with a gui
    3 projects | /r/csharp | 4 Jan 2023
    In additiona to imgui wrapper which works great with NativeAOT, only slight nudge and you have 10Mb executable. With all deps it's 13Mb. Also there Avalonia mentioned in sibling message which work great and in 11.0-preview5 probably would not need any additional configuraiton. In case if OP is have soft spot for web tech, he can use photino.Blazor which also with slight modifications would simply works and produce 27Mb executable.
    3 projects | /r/csharp | 4 Jan 2023
    There's a imgui wrapper https://github.com/mellinoe/ImGui.NET
  • Need help with converting C++ to C#
    3 projects | /r/imgui | 6 Oct 2022
    I'm converting rlImGui from C++ to C# so I can use it with ImGui.NET and Raylib-cs but I'm getting stuck at a couple places. I don't know how to convert line 331 to C# since in ImGui.NET cmd.UserCallback is an IntPtr and not something I can call. I did a quick google search and you can use the Marshal library to convert it to a callable delegate but I think you need to also have the delegate known to do that. There's also line 82 but that is specific to Raylib. The function it calls does not seem to be included in Raylib-cs. Also, rlImGui keeps using a Texture type but that is not defined in Raylib-cs or ImGui.NET. I assume I can substitute it with Texture2D from Raylib-cs but I'm not to the point in porting to see if Texture2D has the necessary fields/properties/methods.
  • Strange ImGui issue possibly related to ImGui.PushID()
    2 projects | /r/monogame | 14 Sep 2022
    ImGui.NET 1.87.3 (using the example implementation)
  • ImGui::ImageButton with a MonoGame Texture2D
    2 projects | /r/monogame | 13 Sep 2022
    If you use this example implementation for XNA/MonoGame, you can just use ImGuiRenderer.BindTexture() which returns an IntPtr.
  • Are there any low-level library options for creating desktop apps?
    6 projects | /r/csharp | 6 May 2022
    The only thing I could really think of is something like ImGui for C# (https://github.com/mellinoe/ImGui.NET) but I've never used it. It's going to give you some simple wrappers around ImGui (https://github.com/ocornut/imgui) but even this is going to lock you into the UI framework -- you can't just "draw a rectangle" per se and use it as a "control." Do note however this is an "immediate mode" GUI which is different from how most general desktop windowing systems work in "retained mode" (which are typically event driven, which saves on computing power to not draw the same stuff over and over).
  • Free UI frameworks for NET .Core 6 Winforms?
    2 projects | /r/csharp | 28 Mar 2022
  • does anyone have an imgui cs renderer with a working text input?
    2 projects | /r/csharp | 24 Mar 2022
  • Is it possible to write a C# application on Linux and run it with Wine?
    3 projects | /r/csharp | 20 Aug 2021

WinApi

Posts with mentions or reviews of WinApi. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2022-05-06.
  • Are there any low-level library options for creating desktop apps?
    6 projects | /r/csharp | 6 May 2022
  • Mozilla plans to remove the Compact Density option from Firefox's Customize menu
    4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 15 Mar 2021
    >What happened?

    Building extremely high quality user interfaces has been de-prioritized by our tech gods. See: ElectronJS. Every "native" "desktop" application built upon such technologies has a minimum latency bound that is user-detectable and a memory appetite that cannot be appeased by even the most opulent workstation-class system.

    Those of us seeking client->server->client trips that are measured in microseconds (on top of network stack latency) have been forced into the dark nether-reaches of technology. Writing 2D graphics libraries and client/server UI frameworks from scratch has become one of my new favorite hobbies.

    All of this is especially upsetting when you consider how much complexity has been magically hand-waved away over the last 20 years with modern OS, language and tool design. You don't even have to go to C/C++ to get the UI performance these days. A high-quality C# implementation using platform-specific graphics interop is more than capable of producing UIs that can respond in the 10-1000 microsecond range. WinApi interop and hooking the window message pump is a trivial exercise. See: https://github.com/prasannavl/WinApi et. al.

What are some alternatives?

When comparing ImGui.NET and WinApi you can also consider the following projects:

Veldrid - A low-level, portable graphics library for .NET.

imgui - Dear ImGui: Bloat-free Graphical User interface for C++ with minimal dependencies

Introducing .NET Multi-platform App UI (MAUI) - .NET MAUI is the .NET Multi-platform App UI, a framework for building native device applications spanning mobile, tablet, and desktop.

Monogame.ImGui - An ImGui.NET wrapper for Monogame

godot-3d-mannequin - An Open Source 3d character and character controller for the Godot game engine

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

Gtk# - Gtk# is a Mono/.NET binding to the cross platform Gtk+ GUI toolkit and the foundation of most GUI apps built with Mono

The-Forge - The Forge Cross-Platform Rendering Framework PC Windows, Steamdeck (native), Ray Tracing, macOS / iOS, Android, XBOX, PS4, PS5, Switch, Quest 2

Uno Platform - Build Mobile, Desktop and WebAssembly apps with C# and XAML. Today. Open source and professionally supported.

maui-linux - .NET MAUI is the .NET Multi-platform App UI, a framework for building native device applications spanning mobile, tablet, and desktop.

XWT - A cross-platform UI toolkit for creating desktop applications with .NET and Mono

MahApps.Metro - A framework that allows developers to cobble together a better UI for their own WPF applications with minimal effort.