Ant Media Server vs Owncast Comparison 2026
Both cover live streaming. Here is what separates them on price, billing, what you can take with you, and coverage.
At a glance
- Only Owncast has a free tier.
Side by side
Ant Media Server | Owncast | |
|---|---|---|
| Starting price | From $109 | Free |
| Pricing model (they differ) | Paid subscription | Free |
| Free tier (they differ) | No | Yes |
| Billing | Monthly or annual | Not stated |
| Free trial | Not stated | Not stated |
| API | Yes | Not stated |
| Data export | Not stated | Not stated |
| Their cut | None | None |
| Runs on (they differ) | Web, Linux |
Shaded rows are where the two answers disagree and both listings have answered. A row where one side has not stated a fact is left plain, because silence is not a difference.
Ant Media Server
Sub-second streaming you run yourself
Ant Media Server is streaming infrastructure rather than a streaming service: it takes RTMP or WebRTC in, transcodes, and delivers with latency measured in fractions of a second. Licences are sold by the instance, by the hour for something that runs occasionally and by the month for something always on. SDKs are included rather than sold separately. This is a product for whoever is building the streaming app, not for whoever is going live tonight.
Our note
Work out your hours before choosing between the hourly and monthly licences, because the crossover is around the twentieth day of uptime and event streaming rarely gets near it. Anything running continuously should be on the monthly licence from the start rather than discovering that at the end of a billing period.
Owncast
Your own live streaming server, free
Owncast is a self-hosted live video server with chat built in, so a streamer can broadcast to their own site instead of to somebody else's platform. Any encoder that speaks RTMP points at it, which means the software already on a streaming desktop works unchanged. There is no account, no cut and nobody able to demonetise you. What replaces those things is a server bill and the job of keeping it alive.
Ratings are the average of reviews readers left. The facts are stated by each tool’s own listing and are not verified by CloutStack. How we make money.