If you need to be able to draw or do effects on your images maybe you will still need canvas or ImageMagick but in terms of speed and memory usage there are a few better options.
Here is a benchmark of a few different image libraries.
https://github.com/libvips/libvips/wiki/Speed-and-memory-use
ImageMagick is slow and consumes lots of memory.
Try Vips, which is used by the sharp library.
