Ant Media Server vs Restream Comparison 2026
Both cover live streaming. Here is what separates them on price, billing, what you can take with you, and coverage.
Sub-second streaming you run yourself
Stream to eight platforms from one encoder
At a glance
- Restream starts cheaper, at $19.
- Only Restream has a free tier.
Side by side
Ant Media Server | Restream | |
|---|---|---|
| Starting price (they differ) | From $109 | From $19 |
| Pricing model (they differ) | Paid subscription | Free plan, paid tiers |
| Free tier (they differ) | No | Yes |
| Billing | Monthly or annual | Monthly or annual |
| Free trial | Not stated | None |
| API | Yes | Not stated |
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.
Restream
Stream to eight platforms from one encoder
Restream takes one video feed and pushes it to YouTube, Twitch, TikTok and the rest at once, then pulls every chat back into one window so a host can read them all. The free tier does two destinations, which is enough to test whether multistreaming suits your show. Recording storage clears after fifteen days on the cheaper plans.
Only on this side
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.