Immich vs PhotoPrism: which one to choose in 2026?
Both are open source alternatives to Google Photos. We compare license, tech stack and features to help you decide which fits your team best.
| Immich | PhotoPrism | |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Storage | Storage |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | Source-available (non-OSI) |
| GitHub stars | ~50k | ~37k |
| Tech stack | NestJS, Flutter, PostgreSQL | Go, TensorFlow |
| Replaces | Google Photos | Google Photos |
Immich has more GitHub stars, which usually indicates a larger community (not necessarily that it's the best option for your use case).
Immich
AI-powered photo and video backup, a self-hosted alternative to Google Photos.
ℹ️ Supports optional hardware acceleration for both video transcoding (NVENC, Quick Sync, VAAPI, RKMPP) and facial recognition/smart search (CUDA, OpenVINO, ROCm) — neither is required, both are enabled separately in Settings.
Pros
- The mobile app rivals Google Photos in quality
Things to consider
- Facial and object recognition benefit from having a GPU
PhotoPrism
AI-tagged photo manager, an alternative to Google Photos.
Pros
- Never modifies or moves your original files
Things to consider
- Source-available license, not pure OSI open source
Key features
Immich
- Automatic backup from mobile apps
- Facial recognition and object search
- Shared albums and family timeline
PhotoPrism
- Automatic AI photo tagging
- Semantic and location-based search
- Original files stay untouched
Already know which one you prefer?
Add it to your Stack Builder and generate a ready-to-deploy docker-compose.yml alongside the rest of your stack.
Go to Stack Builder