Every open-source media streaming project we track, scored on maintenance, momentum and licence — so you can tell the live competitors from the abandoned repositories.
Media Streaming has 62 open-source implementations in this dataset, of which 36 show real momentum and 4 are dormant or abandoned. The leader is Jellyfin with 56k stars against a category median of 2.5k — roughly 22x the typical project. Saturation score 77/100: Crowded. Free, maintained alternatives already dominate this category.
Assume every prospect can find a free version in five minutes. Your wedge has to be something open source structurally cannot deliver: compliance, support SLAs, managed hosting at scale, or a workflow the maintainers refuse to build.
The practical test in this category: Jellyfin is the reference implementation at 56k stars, and 36 of 62 projects are still shipping. A buyer evaluating you will find at least one maintained free option, so your pricing and positioning have to answer "why not self-host Jellyfin?" in the first minute.
Media Streaming
Media server for audio, video, books, comics, and photos with a sleek interface and robust transcoding capabilities. Almost all modern platforms have clients, including Roku, Android TV, iOS, and Kodi
Media Streaming
A simple, high efficiency and real-time video server, supports RTMP, WebRTC, HLS, HTTP-FLV and SRT.
Media Streaming
Modern Music Server and Streamer, compatible with Subsonic/Airsonic.
Media Streaming
Alternative YouTube front-end.
Media Streaming
Multimedia/Entertainment center, formerly known as XBMC. Runs on Android, BSD, Linux, macOS, iOS and Windows.
Media Streaming
Ready-to-use, zero-dependency real-time media server and proxy to publish, read, record, playback and route video/audio streams over SRT, WebRTC, RTSP, RTMP, HLS, MPEG-TS, RTP.
Media Streaming
Personal music streaming server that works.
Media Streaming
Music library manager and MusicBrainz tagger (command-line and Web interface).
Media Streaming
Decentralized video streaming platform using P2P (BitTorrent) directly in the web browser.
Media Streaming
Audiobook and podcast server. It streams all audio formats, keeps and syncs progress across devices. Comes with open-source apps for Android and iOS.
Media Streaming
A web-based library organizer and player for your adult media stash, with auto-tagging and metadata scraping support.
Media Streaming
Decentralized single-user live video streaming and chat server for running your own live streams similar in style to the large mainstream options.
Media Streaming
Extensible music server. Offers a superset of the mpd API, as well as integration with 3rd party services like Spotify, SoundCloud etc.
Media Streaming
Organize, search, and enjoy your YouTube collection. Subscribe, download, and track viewed content with metadata indexing and a user-friendly interface.
Media Streaming
Synchronous multiroom audio server.
Media Streaming
Access H.264 real-time video streaming on your website without a streaming provider.
Media Streaming
Modern, fully featured open source video and media CMS, written in Python/Django/React, featuring a REST API.
Media Streaming
Streaming audio server with Linux/macOS/Windows/Android clients.
Media Streaming
Music streaming server.
Media Streaming
Modern and accessible web radio management suite.
Media Streaming
Web based audio/video streaming application.
Media Streaming
Streaming Server with Sub-Second Latency.
Media Streaming
Daemon to remotely play music, stream music, handle and organize playlists. Many clients available.
Media Streaming
Music browsing and streaming application optimized for large music collections, ease of use and high performance.
Media Streaming
Turn your choice of Linux-capable hardware into an audio and video source for a television or powered speakers (alternative to Chromecast).
Media Streaming
Lightweight music streaming server. Subsonic compatible.
Media Streaming
Innovative media browser designed for seamless streaming of anime, series and movies, offering advanced features like dynamic transcoding, auto watch history and intelligent metadata retrieval.
Media Streaming
Music streaming server with GUI management tools. Runs on Mac, Windows, and Linux.
Media Streaming
Swing Music is a beautiful, self-hosted music player and streaming server for your local audio files. Like a cooler Spotify ... but bring your own music.
Media Streaming
Lightweight and very quick server to stream MJPEG video from any V4L2 device to the net.
Media Streaming
Server software which controls a wide range of Squeezebox/Slim Devices audio players and compatible hardware (formerly Logitech Media Server).
Media Streaming
Access your self-hosted music using a web interface.
Media Streaming
Synchronize media, chat, and more for an arbitrary number of channels.
Media Streaming
Audiophile-quality music playback for the wonderful Raspberry Pi family of single board computers.
Media Streaming
UPnP Media Server, which allows you to stream your digital media throughout your home network and listen to/watch it on a variety of UPnP compatible devices.
Media Streaming
Personal Music Server, designed for collectors and music maniacs.
Media Streaming
Scrobble plays from multiple sources to multiple scrobbling services.
Media Streaming
Podcast management system with multi-user support. Pinepods utilizes a central database so aspects like listen time and themes follow from device to device.
Media Streaming
Broadcast streaming radio on the web (fork of [Airtime](https://github.com/sourcefabric/Airtime)).
Media Streaming
Host awesome karaoke parties where everyone can easily find and queue songs from their phone's browser. The player is also fully browser-based with support for MP3+G, MP4 and WebGL visualizations.
Media Streaming
Videostreaming service/torrent client that allows searching and playing videos from torrents in the browser or from a Chromecast/AppleTV/Smart TV.
Media Streaming
Simple personal server to serve audio files from directories (audiobooks, music, podcasts...). Focused on simplicity and supports sync of play position between clients.
Media Streaming
Music player with Youtube/Soundcloud import and iTunes/Spotify discovery.
Media Streaming
Public domain streaming media server that works with any device and any format.
Media Streaming
Lightweight and very simple to setup CyTube alternative to watch videos with friends and chat.
Media Streaming
Convert YouTube and Twitch channels to podcasts, no storage required. Transcodes VoDs to MP3 192k on the fly, generates an RSS feed to use in podcast clients.
Media Streaming
Python implementation of the Subsonic server API.
Media Streaming
Minimalist Plex/Jellyfin alternative to stream video.
Showing 48 of 62
100 maintained · leader Mastodon
58 maintained · leader Dify.ai
40 maintained · leader revealjs
28 maintained · leader copyparty
29 maintained · leader Strapi
27 maintained · leader HyperSwitch
Existence is not competition. A project competes with you only if it is maintained, findable, deployable by your buyer and licensed for their use. Most projects fail at least one of those tests. Run all four before you shelve an idea — or before you assume you have a clear run.
Stars are a lifetime counter with no decay, so a project abandoned in 2022 still looks like a leader in 2026. In this dataset 149 projects are dormant, abandoned or archived, and several of them sit in the top decile by stars. Sort by momentum and commit activity instead — popularity tells you the project was once interesting, maintenance tells you whether it will still be there when your customer needs a bug fixed.
When a prospect says 'we could just self-host the free one', they are usually comparing your price against zero. The real comparison is your price against hosting, upgrades, backups, security patching, integration work and the engineer hours behind all of it. Quantifying that number is the single most effective response to a free-alternative objection — and it is more persuasive coming with a spreadsheet than with a feature list.
Founders treat licensing as a legal footnote and then discover it dictates strategy. Permissive licences allow closed commercial forks, which is why so many managed services exist around MIT and Apache projects — and also why your differentiation cannot be the code itself. Copyleft licences, especially AGPL, remove the closed-wrapper option entirely, which reduces competition but restricts you too. Source-available licences exist precisely to stop the wrapper business.
Search this database by category and by the commercial product you would replace. It covers 1665 projects across 130 categories, each mapped to the paid tool it substitutes. If your category shows a "Crowded" verdict, a maintained free version almost certainly exists and your positioning has to account for it.
No. It means free is your price anchor. Plenty of large companies were built next to a good open-source project — the ones that failed were the ones selling the same job at a price the free tool made indefensible. Find the part of the job the project deliberately does not do, and sell that.
Each category gets a 0–100 score built from three inputs: how many implementations exist, what share of them are still actively maintained, and how far ahead the leading project is compared with the category median. 62+ is Crowded, 38–61 Contested, under 38 Open. 11 categories are Crowded and 88 are Open.
A project has momentum when it committed code in most of the last twelve months, shipped a release recently and is not archived. 736 of 1665 projects qualify. This is the single most useful filter here — it strips out the popular-but-dead repositories that make a category look more competitive than it is.
It depends entirely on the licence. MIT, Apache and BSD let you build and sell closed products on top. GPL and AGPL require derivative work to stay open, and AGPL extends that to network use, which blocks most SaaS wrappers. BSL, SSPL and Commons Clause are source-available, not open source, and usually restrict competing commercial use outright.
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