Immich vs PhotoPrism vs Ente: the best self-hosted Google Photos alternative

In the Immich vs PhotoPrism vs Ente comparison, Immich is the best self-hosted Google Photos alternative for most people in 2026. It has polished iOS and Android apps with automatic backup, a familiar timeline, face recognition and natural-language search, and it is the most-starred photo project on GitHub. Choose Ente instead if end-to-end encryption is non-negotiable, for example when friends or family will store photos on a server you run. Choose PhotoPrism if you mainly want to browse, tag and search an existing photo archive from a browser rather than back up phones.

The quick comparison

	Immich	PhotoPrism	Ente
Licence	AGPL-3.0	AGPL-3.0 (Community); paid tiers add features	AGPL-3.0
Primary focus	Phone backup and timeline	Browsing and organising a library	Encrypted backup and sharing
Native mobile apps	iOS and Android, background backup	No; progressive web app and third-party sync apps	iOS and Android, background backup
End-to-end encryption	No	No	Yes
Face recognition and smart search	Yes, on the server	Yes, on the server	Yes, on your devices
Minimum hardware	2 cores, 6 GB RAM (8 GB recommended)	2 cores, 3 GB RAM	1 core, 1 GB RAM for the server
Paid option	Optional supporter licence, no features locked	Essentials and Plus memberships	Optional hosted cloud plans
GitHub stars (Oct 2026)	115,648	40,272	29,252

Immich: the closest thing to Google Photos

Immich started as a direct Google Photos replacement and still feels like one. The mobile apps back up your camera roll in the background, the timeline scrolls smoothly through tens of thousands of photos, and features such as shared albums, partner sharing, a map view, memories and duplicate detection are all built in. Machine learning runs in a separate container and powers face clustering and CLIP-based search, so typing "dog on a beach" works the way you expect.

The project is developed with the backing of FUTO, reached its first stable release, 2.0, on October 1, 2025, and has kept up a fast pace since, with version 3.2.4 out in late September 2026 and 2,638 commits in the last year. Immich is completely free. An optional supporter licence, priced at $24.99 per user or $99.99 per server when it launched, funds development without unlocking anything.

Immich asks the most of your hardware: 6 GB of RAM at minimum, 8 GB recommended, and its Postgres database must sit on local storage, not a network share. Your photo library itself can live on a NAS. Our Immich deploy guide gets the official Docker Compose stack running in about 15 minutes.

PhotoPrism: the archivist's choice

PhotoPrism is a mature, browser-first photo manager built in Go. It indexes folders you already have, reads metadata thoroughly, recognises faces, classifies images and places them on a world map. It is excellent at turning a decade of folders into a searchable library, and it runs on lighter hardware than Immich: 2 cores and 3 GB of RAM.

Two things set it apart from Google Photos. First, there is no official native mobile app; you install it as a progressive web app and upload from phones with a WebDAV-capable sync app. Second, some features are reserved for paying members. The Community edition is free under the AGPL; Essentials (€2 per month, billed annually) adds extra user roles, 3D and satellite maps and enhanced geocoding, and Plus (from €6 per month) adds web-based user management and other advanced options. Our PhotoPrism deploy guide covers the Docker setup.

Ente: end-to-end encrypted, self-hosted or not

Ente solves a problem the other two do not: your server never sees your photos. Files are encrypted on your device before upload, and face recognition and semantic search run on your phone or computer, not on the server. Its cryptography has been audited by Cure53, Symbolic Software and Fallible.

Ente runs a hosted service with a 10 GB free tier and paid plans from $2.49 per month for 50 GB up to $19.99 for 2 TB, shareable with up to five family members. The same code is open source under AGPL-3.0 and self-hostable. The server, called Museum, is written in Go and needs PostgreSQL plus S3-compatible object storage such as MinIO, Backblaze B2 or Wasabi. A quickstart script sets everything up, and the server needs only 1 GB of RAM. The main gotcha: clients upload directly to your storage bucket through pre-signed URLs, so the bucket endpoint must be reachable from your phones, not just from the server.

Ente's repository is also the busiest of the three, with 16,902 commits in the last year, partly because it holds the server and every client app in one monorepo.

Which one should you choose?

• Choose Immich if you want to stop paying for Google Photos or iCloud and have a server with 8 GB of RAM or more. It is the most complete experience and the one your family will adopt without complaint.
• Choose Ente if privacy is the point, if you host for other people, or if your storage lives on a provider you do not fully trust. You can also start on Ente's cloud and move to your own server later.
• Choose PhotoPrism if you have a large existing archive to organise, mostly browse on a computer, or need to run on modest hardware.

Many self-hosters run Immich for phone backup and PhotoPrism read-only on the same archive for its search and metadata tools. That works fine, as long as only one app writes to the library.

Other options worth knowing

LibrePhotos is an MIT-licensed alternative with face recognition, Photoview is a simple, fast gallery for existing folders, and Nextcloud Memories adds a Google Photos-style timeline if you already run Nextcloud.

Bottom line

Immich is the default recommendation, Ente is the privacy pick, and PhotoPrism is the archivist's tool. Whichever you pick, set up backups first: a photo server that is your only copy is not a backup. Compare every open-source Google Photos alternative, browse the photo gallery category, see the head-to-head data for Immich vs PhotoPrism and Immich vs Ente, or start with the Immich guide.