LVGL is great for makers. Embedded Wizard is built for products.
That’s why professional GUI developers building high-quality devices choose Embedded Wizard. Try it out for free:
Why professional GUI developers prefer Embedded Wizard to LVGL
Build smarter. See the big picture.
Made for scalable embedded UIs.
Stop guessing. Start engineering.
Using LVGL means manually writing callbacks, managing memory, and stitching together third-party tools. Comparatively, Embedded Wizard gives you everything in one powerful environment.
LVGL loads many resources into RAM at once, using a static approach, even those not currently in use. As project complexity increases, so do the potential issues. In contrast, Embedded Wizard uses dynamic memory handling, and scales from small to complex projects, across product families and hardware platforms.
Tired of guessing what the GUI will look like or spending hours tracking down bugs? Not sure whether the problem lies in the prototyper or on the device? Embedded Wizard lets teams build, test, and preview pixel-perfect UIs, without hardware dependency hell.
"I thought open source would be cheaper..."
LVGL is open source. But what’s your time worth?
While LVGL comes with a $0 price tag, many projects end up spending more in engineering time, integration effort, and bug fixing.
That said, Embedded Wizard’s commercial business model means:
- Predictable costs
- Professional support and GUI development services
- Faster time-to-market and lower maintenance effort
Is developing with Embedded Wizard faster than with LVGL?
Short answer: yes.
LVGL requires you to manually manage callbacks, write resource managers, and implement animations from scratch.
By contrast, Embedded Wizard simplifies the entire process with powerful built-in features:
- A complete WYSIWYG GUI editor, including drag-and-drop functionality and animation tools
- Optimized source code generation for your selected chosen hardware platform
- A large library of ready-to-use GUI components
- Integrated tools for font and image handling, including compression
- A comprehensive documentation with tutorials and step-by-step explanations
Projects grow. Complexity shouldn't.
To be fair, LVGL has earned its popularity among hobbyists and small projects, and for good reason. It’s lightweight, free, and gets the job done for basic needs.
But when it comes to building scalable GUIs for commercial products, the trade-offs in complexity, development time, and memory management start to show.
That’s where Embedded Wizard comes in:
- Dynamic memory management with garbage collection
- Reusable UI components
- Built-in localization of images, texts, or other assets for multi-language support
- Support for themes and product variants, with automatic selection at build time or runtime
- Easy web-based GUI deployment for stakeholders, such as product managers or clients, allowing quick reviews and feedback without installing software
"I don’t want to start over every time we switch hardware."
In terms of hardware integration, LVGL offers native support for ST and NXP. For other platforms, support is typically provided by semiconductor manufacturers These versions may lag behind or differ from official releases, raising the question: who ensures your platform integration actually works? Is it LVGL, the semiconductor vendor, the community, or ultimately, you?
With Embedded Wizard, that responsibility is ours. Our team maintains and validates ports for all major chip vendors – including Renesas, STM, NXP, Microchip, Espressif, Texas Instruments, Ambiq, and more – leading to consistent quality and a reliable point of contact.
Additionally, Embedded Wizard is designed to be:
- Hardware-agnostic with separation of GUI & hardware layers with a clean software architecture
- Portable across Renesas, STM, NXP, Microchip, Espressif, Texas Instruments, Ambiq and many more
- Ready with GPU acceleration wherever your platform supports it
Low abstraction = high error rate
LVGL provides a low-level graphics library in C/C++, giving you full control over your GUI. While powerful, this means you’re responsible for every detail.
Alternatively, Embedded Wizard follows a low-code approach and offers a higher abstraction level via Chora, a declarative language purpose-built for embedded GUI logic, with generated C code. It also maintains full flexibility, letting you customize or extend any part of your GUI and underlying logic, down to the lowest levels.
Embedded Wizard delivers:
- Less repetitive code
- Reduced implementation effort
- Centralized state and event handling
- Reduced error-prone manual logic
- Full control to adapt every detail
Want to see for yourself?
Download Embedded Wizard for free and try it with your next GUI project. See how much faster (and more fun) embedded GUI development can be.
Frequently Asked Questions
LVGL is a low-level open-source graphics library in C/C++ that requires significant manual coding and configuration, whereas Embedded Wizard is a higher-level GUI development environment with a visual design studio and dynamic memory management. It enables faster, more maintainable development for complex embedded projects. Additionally, Embedded Wizard offers a straightforward proprietary license management, for example making it easy to handle any license-clearing concerns.
LVGL uses static memory allocation and loads many resources at once, which can increase RAM usage. Unlike LVGL, Embedded Wizard uses dynamic memory management and garbage collection, loading only the resources needed, making it more efficient for memory-constrained devices.
Embedded Wizard is often chosen by engineering teams working on professional-grade embedded products as a reliable alternative to LVGL. It offers a higher level of abstraction with a visual GUI editor, making development faster and easier. Developed in 2002, it provides robust tooling, efficient memory management, hardware acceleration, and commercial support: features that help ensure long-term stability and scalability beyond what LVGL’s community-driven open-source model typically offers. Furthermore, Embedded Wizard offers its customers fast and reliable support, as well as the possibility to use dedicated services, from trainings, UX design up to full GUI implementation.
LVGL is tightly integrated with STM32 and NXP platforms, but support for other MCUs often requires community-supplied drivers or extra adaptation. Compared to LVGL, Embedded Wizard offers official, production-ready support for a wide range of platforms, for example from Ambiq, Espressif, GigaDevice, Infineon, Microchip, NXP, Raspberry Pi, Renesas, ST, Texas Instruments, and more.
Embedded Wizard matches LVGL in raw performance but adds dynamic memory management, resource loading on demand, and out-of-the-box hardware acceleration. That means greater scalability and efficiency, especially for complex and high-performance GUIs.
Even though LVGL is open source, many users report higher development time and maintenance effort due to its low abstraction level. Meanwhile, Embedded Wizard reduces time-to-market and maintenance costs through better tooling, less manual code, and fewer bugs, often paying for itself within the first project.
LVGL offers a low-level C/C++ API that gives you full control, but also requires you to manually handle callbacks, memory, and animations. From a development efficiency standpoint, Embedded Wizard may be the better choice, thanks to its GUI editor with visual logic binding and declarative programming using Chora, making it easier and faster to build complex UIs with less code. Additionally, to support developers, Embedded Wizard offers an extensive, well-structured documentation covering everything from basic concepts and tutorials to platform-specific setup, the Chora language, the Mosaic framework, step-by-step tutorials for over 80 platforms, integration with real devices, and more. Compared to LVGL’s more API-focused documentation, Embedded Wizard offers a more guided and tool-integrated learning experience, making it easier to get started.
Both LVGL and Embedded Wizard work with or without an RTOS. LVGL is OS-agnostic and commonly used in bare-metal environments, but it requires manual setup for memory management, task scheduling, tick handling, and rendering synchronization.
Genereally, Embedded Wizard runs seamlessly on RTOS-based systems, Linux, or bare metal. That said, what sets Embedded Wizard apart is how much easier the integration is. Even in bare-metal setups, Embedded Wizard provides out-of-the-box hardware abstraction, platform packages, and helper functions that drastically reduce manual configuration, helping you get from hardware to GUI faster.