bunny.net vs Mux Comparison 2026
bunny.net is a content delivery network with video on top, billed purely by the gigabyte of bandwidth with no free tier and a one dollar minimum. Mux is video infrastructure for a product, billed by the minute of delivery, with no dashboard for uploading a marketing video and a genuinely large free allowance of 100,000 delivery minutes a month. Both expect a developer at the keyboard, but bunny.net assumes you already have a player and just want delivery, while Mux hands back the player, the encoding and the analytics through one API.
At a glance
- bunny.net starts cheaper, at $1.
- Only Mux has a free tier.
Side by side
bunny.net | Mux | |
|---|---|---|
| Starting price (they differ) | From $1 | From $20 |
| Pricing model (they differ) | Paid subscription | Free plan, paid tiers |
| Free tier (they differ) | No | Yes |
| Billing | Usage-based | Usage-based |
| Free trial | 14 days | Not stated |
| API | Yes |
bunny.net
Pay-as-you-go video hosting and delivery
bunny.net is a content delivery network with a video product on top, and it charges by the gigabyte with a one dollar monthly minimum. A creator embedding video on their own site pays for what people actually watch instead of buying a plan sized for a good month. It expects you to be comfortable with a dashboard built for developers, and it does not try to be a membership platform.
Our note
This is the cheapest way to put video on your own site by a wide margin, and the cost of that is doing the integration yourself. Set the bandwidth limit on day one; usage billing without a ceiling is the one way this gets expensive.
Only on this side
- Covers media storage & review
Mux
Video hosting and streaming as an API
Mux is the video layer for somebody building their own product: you post a file or a stream to the API and get back encoding, storage, delivery and a player, billed by the minute. There is no dashboard for uploading a marketing video, and that is the point. Its analytics product measures playback quality for people who already have video working and want to know why it buffers.
Why people weigh these two
- Mux instead of bunny.net
- Mux serves the same developer crowd with video hosting and streaming as an API, with a free tier and paid from $20.
- bunny.net instead of Mux
- bunny.net bills pay-as-you-go from $1 a month with no free tier, a lighter-weight API than Mux for delivery without the encoding and analytics layer built in.
Which one should you pick
Pick Mux if the video lives inside a product you are building and the workflow needs to be code from the start, since there is no dashboard for uploading a one-off file. The free tier covers 100,000 delivery minutes a month, a real allowance, and Mux's own pricing example shows $100 covering a hundred five-minute videos end to end.
Pick bunny.net if a player already exists and the only job left is cheap, predictable delivery by the gigabyte. There is no free tier and no monthly minimum beyond one dollar, and billing by bandwidth rather than by minute suits anyone who already knows their file sizes better than their runtime.
Common questions
- Which one gives away more for free?
- Mux, with 100,000 delivery minutes a month on its free tier, a real standing allowance rather than a trial. bunny.net has no free tier at all, only a one dollar monthly minimum on usage-based pricing.
- How does the pricing unit differ?
- bunny.net bills by the gigabyte of bandwidth delivered. Mux bills by the minute of video delivered instead. The two are not directly comparable without knowing a video's bitrate, so model your own files before assuming either is cheaper.
- Does either one include a video player?
- Mux returns a player as part of its API response, built for embedding into a product you are coding. bunny.net is delivery infrastructure without a described player product, so a marketing team wanting to upload and get a link is the wrong audience for either, and should look at Vimeo or SproutVideo instead.
- Which one is built for live streaming as well as on-demand video?
- Mux handles both live and on-demand through the same API and account. bunny.net's listing describes bandwidth and storage for video delivery without specifically detailing live streaming support.
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.