node:24-slim vs node:24-alpine

The short answer

• node:24-alpine is 61 MB smaller unpacked on amd64 (175 MB vs 236 MB, 26% less).
• As a download, node:24-alpine is 62 MB compressed against 81 MB for node:24-slim: 1.3× less to pull.
• node:24-alpine has fewer known vulnerabilities: 19 (6 critical or high) against 242 (55 critical or high) in node:24-slim.
• 20 of node:24-slim's 242 findings have a fixed version available upstream.
• 19 of node:24-alpine's 19 findings have a fixed version available upstream.
• Base OS: node:24-slim is built on Debian 12.15 (bookworm); node:24-alpine on Alpine Linux 3.24.3.
• Alpine images use musl libc instead of glibc. Most software runs unchanged; prebuilt binaries linked against glibc (some Python wheels, Node native modules, vendor agents) may not.
• Packages detected: 234 in node:24-slim, 165 in node:24-alpine.
• Filesystem layers: 5 vs 4.
• Platforms: only node:24-slim ships ppc64le; only node:24-alpine ships s390x.