lvgl VS imgui

Compare lvgl vs imgui and see what are their differences.

lvgl

Embedded graphics library to create beautiful UIs for any MCU, MPU and display type. It's boosted by a professional yet affordable drag and drop UI editor, called SquareLine Studio. (by lvgl)

imgui

Dear ImGui: Bloat-free Graphical User interface for C++ with minimal dependencies (by ocornut)
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lvgl imgui
59 335
12,931 50,752
1.4% -
8.2 0.0
5 days ago about 15 hours 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.

lvgl

Posts with mentions or reviews of lvgl. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-06-19.

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 2023-10-03.
  • Unheard Engine: Adding spot lights, HDR support, compilation-free parameter node in material graph.
    2 projects | /r/gameenginedevs | 3 Oct 2023
    There are also misc bugfixes, editor changes this time. But I'm a bit tired of win32 and plan to port Dear Imgui afterward. Or leave a comment if you have a good idea about the GUI! I'd like to be focus on the runtime rendering more and keep GUI programming as simple as possible.
  • Textual Web: TUIs for the Web
    9 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 7 Sep 2023
    > [...] you can build UIs that are snappy and keyboard driven.

    That's not an advantage that is exclusive to TUIs; after all, you're running your TUI inside a graphical application that emulates a terminal. (Unless you're rocking an actual VT102, in which case I bow down to you.)

    In fact there's an entire class of applications that are extremely snappy and keyboard driven, by their very nature: games.

    Some people have taken to writing GUI apps like you'd write a game, and the effects range from OK to fantastic. Check out Lagrange (https://gmi.skyjake.fi/lagrange/), AppManager (https://tildegit.org/solene/AppManager), Dear ImGUI (https://github.com/ocornut/imgui), egui (https://github.com/emilk/egui), and many others.

  • Chip8 emulator
    2 projects | /r/EmuDev | 17 Aug 2023
    It's not that difficult, I recently started learning to use graphics APIs myself. OpenGL is for linux, etc., directx for windows and vulkan for all platforms. I read through a bunch of forums yesterday and decided to go for vulkan (here is a link to the sdk) for my next small projects because it can run on all platforms. I would recommend to watch a basic tutorial series (like this one) for the graphics api itself to get an understanding of whats going on. And on top of that I use SDL2 for eventhandling and ImGui for the graphical user interface. Here is a link to a guide for setting up vulkan on your platform in case you would go for it.
  • Make a game engine in C++
    4 projects | /r/learnprogramming | 10 Jul 2023
    UI ImgUI can be used in with SDL and SFML
  • Meta releases open source Intermediate Graphics Library which runs on top of Vulkan, Open GL, or Metal on multiple operating systems.
    3 projects | /r/linux_gaming | 8 Jul 2023
    Even the GUI is not theirs, but it's not credited. It's Dear ImGui.
  • Good gui libraries for simple note taking app with sqlite database?
    2 projects | /r/cpp_questions | 5 Jul 2023
    There's Dear ImGui
  • declarative GUI libraries
    5 projects | /r/cpp | 23 Jun 2023
    I think that Imgui would qualify as declarative. It is pretty much the industry standard for "simple GUI" at this point. It might be simple but it is powerful. People have built entire game engine editors using it.
  • Why do you love C++?
    2 projects | /r/cpp_questions | 21 Jun 2023
    When it comes to writing GUIs, I'm a big fan of Dear Imgui. It's not going to be the best tool for every job, but it's fairly easy to work with and it doesn't go about overcomplicating things.
  • “fractureiser” malware in many popular Minecraft mods and modpacks
    3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 7 Jun 2023
    Also here, what appeared to be a bug in ImGuis clipboard handling turned out to be a crypto stealer

    https://github.com/ocornut/imgui/issues/4029

  • Ask HN: Examples of desktop software with 20+ years of longevity?
    4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 25 May 2023
    I would say that the distinction between TUI and GUI - outside "how would I use this tool remotely" - is mainly one for the developer. Take ImGui (https://github.com/ocornut/imgui, an immediate mode GUI library) for example - the examples are much closer to TUI interfaces than a Swift UI app - the only difference between that an a terminal UI would be that the lines are thinner and that text has non-uniform spacing.

    Does that make ImGui a TUI? Or make TUIs a GUI? Why are those thin visual lines graphical, if the slightly thicker visual lines drawn by your graphical terminal emulator with support arbitrary color precision and inline image rendition is not?

    Maybe the issue is that it there is a terminal emulator to visualize the representation. But if an application that is not graphically heavy and needs an intermediary is a TUI, does that make most utility electron apps TUIs?

    The difference between a TUI and a GUI is just an implementation detail, and these do not matter in the distinction of desktop app or not. Heck, some modern terminal UIs are more graphically appealing than some GUI apps.

    > The established definition of desktop, mobile, gui, tui and commandline is pretty consistent for some decades now I would say.

    Considering that all good desktop apps were TUI apps 3 decades ago, that mobile apps are in their modern form has basically only existed for 1.5 decades, and that running mobile apps as desktop apps and the general merge between the disciplines is only a few years old at most, I'd say that this statement doesn't quite hold.

What are some alternatives?

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

wxWidgets - Cross-Platform C++ GUI Library

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

NanoGUI - Minimalistic GUI library for OpenGL

GTK+ - Read-only mirror of https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk

CEGUI

TFT_eSPI - Arduino and PlatformIO IDE compatible TFT library optimised for the Raspberry Pi Pico (RP2040), STM32, ESP8266 and ESP32 that supports different driver chips

egui - egui: an easy-to-use immediate mode GUI in Rust that runs on both web and native

LovyanGFX - SPI LCD graphics library for ESP32 (ESP-IDF/ArduinoESP32) / ESP8266 (ArduinoESP8266) / SAMD51(Seeed ArduinoSAMD51)

FLTK - FLTK - Fast Light Tool Kit - https://github.com/fltk/fltk - cross platform GUI development

nana - a modern C++ GUI library

nuklear

webview - Tiny cross-platform webview library for C/C++. Uses WebKit (GTK/Cocoa) and Edge WebView2 (Windows).