Comparing
Friendly Python Imaging Library fork for opening, manipulating, and saving image files.
3D graphics in the browser — WebGL-powered scenes, lights, cameras, and geometries with a beginner-friendly JavaScript API.
| Metric | Pillow | three |
|---|---|---|
| Ecosystem | Python | npm |
| Difficulty | Beginner ✓ | Advanced |
| Weekly downloads | 12.0M↑ | 3.0M |
| Latest version | v10.4.0 | v0.170.0 |
| Recipes | 3↑ | 2 |
Pillow only
Shared
three only
Resizing/cropping/converting images, compositing overlays, generating thumbnails, basic drawing, reading EXIF metadata, converting between formats.
3D product viewers, data visualizations in 3D, games, interactive art, generative design, architecture visualization, any WebGL experience.
High-performance batch processing at scale (use ImageMagick or libvips/pyvips). Video processing. Complex image recognition (use OpenCV or ML models).
2D graphics (use canvas API or SVG), simple CSS animations, when you need a full game engine (use Babylon.js or Unity WebGL).
Pillow
three