microui VS imgui

Compare microui vs imgui and see what are their differences.

microui

A tiny immediate-mode UI library (by kennethrapp)

imgui

Dear ImGui: Bloat-free Graphical User interface for C++ with minimal dependencies (by ocornut)
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microui imgui
1 373
0 63,763
- 1.5%
3.9 9.8
7 months ago 5 days ago
C C++
MIT License 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.

microui

Posts with mentions or reviews of microui. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-01-15.
  • Immediate Mode GUI Programming
    15 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 15 Jan 2024
    There is also microui, which I like[0].

    Which I forked to work with SDL2[1], no guarantees. It's fun to hack on.

    [0]https://github.com/rxi/microui

    [1]https://github.com/kennethrapp/microui

imgui

Posts with mentions or reviews of imgui. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2025-02-27.
  • Lumix - a .NET open source ableton like DAW
    6 projects | dev.to | 27 Feb 2025
    The user interface has been entirely developed using immediate mode gui dear-imgui library, with the ImGui.NET wrapper. This allows for a fast and bloat free experience but, at the same time, harder customization for a task of this size, since the library isn't really suited to the development of end-user applications. On the other side, it's what I'm most familiar to work with.
  • What do you think about using a game engine for UI?
    3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 12 Jan 2025
    I've recently had a lot of fun/success with Dear ImGui (C++) -- not a game engine, but originally/partly meant for use in them. https://github.com/ocornut/imgui
  • Show HN: ImPlot3D – A 3D Plotting Library for Dear ImGui
    5 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 18 Dec 2024
    You can manually transform vertices (call ImGui::ShadeVertsTransformPos) this is what angled headers are using https://github.com/ocornut/imgui/issues/6917
  • Imgui Screenshot Gallery
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 5 Dec 2024
  • Seer: A GUI front end to GDB for Linux
    7 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 15 Nov 2024
  • Rewriting Rust
    23 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 25 Sep 2024
  • Microui+fenster=Small GUI
    3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 7 Sep 2024
    Cool project! Graphics programming is _hard_ and anything to make it easier is welcome.

    Maybe a dumb question, but why not Imgui (https://github.com/ocornut/imgui). "It's way too big and complex" is a completely reasonable answer, but I found it fantastic for debug menus, and there are a few applications that have used it as their _main_ GUI (Ship of Harkinian as an example).

  • Building cross-platform GUI apps in Rust using egui
    4 projects | dev.to | 27 Aug 2024
    The most well known immediate mode GUI framework, which egui is also inspired by, is Dear imgui. The egui repository also has a section on the trade offs when it comes to immediate mode GUIs, which I would definitely recommend you check out.
  • About the IMGUI Paradigm
    4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 22 Aug 2024
    > "Minimize state synchronization."

    > void UpdateUI()

    Minimize state synchronization by effectively synchronizing state on each screen refresh?

    > "Minimize state storage on user side."

    > Immediate mode is a style of API where important state is kept in user code

    Then reduce state stored in user code by storing "important state" in user code?

    > "Minimize setup and maintenance."

    I don't find the example convincing. It seems like any more complexity beyond this toy example puts you right back where you started. Building components by hand is stone age ideology regardless of how you push state.

    https://github.com/ocornut/imgui/blob/master/examples/exampl...

    > "Easy to use to create dynamic UI which are the reflection of a dynamic data set."

    Which is great for a video game.

  • Home to Anything JavaFX Related
    10 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 17 Aug 2024

What are some alternatives?

When comparing microui and imgui you can also consider the following projects:

symbiants - Ant Colony Sim + Daily Mental Health Exercises

wxWidgets - Cross-Platform C++ GUI Library

kayak_ui

NanoGUI - Minimalistic GUI library for OpenGL

hello_egui - A collection of useful crates for egui

nuklear - A single-header ANSI C immediate mode cross-platform GUI library

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