Dacast vs Mux Comparison 2026
Dacast sells broadcasters a channel: live streaming, a paywall on the stream itself and white-label playback, billed in terabytes a year from $39 a month billed annually. Mux sells video as an API, with no dashboard for uploading a marketing clip and no plan to pick, just usage billed by the minute after a free allowance of 100,000 delivery minutes a month. One is a platform you configure. The other is infrastructure your own product calls.
At a glance
- Mux starts cheaper, at $20.
- Only Mux has a free tier.
Side by side
Dacast | Mux | |
|---|---|---|
| Starting price (they differ) | From $39 | From $20 |
| Pricing model (they differ) | Free trial, then paid | Free plan, paid tiers |
| Free tier (they differ) | No | Yes |
| Billing (they differ) | Monthly or annual | Usage-based |
| Free trial | 14 days | Not stated |
| API |
Dacast
Live streaming and hosting sold by the terabyte
Dacast is a broadcaster's video platform: live channels, a paywall, white-label playback and a bandwidth allowance measured in terabytes a year. Unused bandwidth rolls forward, which suits anybody whose schedule is a season rather than a week. It sells to events and businesses rather than to social creators, and the interface has never pretended otherwise.
Our note
The three-month minimum on monthly billing is the term to notice, because it makes a single event cost three payments. Buy this when you are selling access to the stream itself; for hosting recordings, SproutVideo or Vimeo is simpler and cheaper.
Only on this side
- Covers live streaming
- Works with YouTube
- Works with Facebook
- Works with Twitch
- Works with Kick
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 Dacast
- Mux is hosting and streaming as an API from $20 with a free tier, the build-it-yourself route for a team with developers.
- Dacast instead of Mux
- Dacast is built around live streaming sold by the terabyte, a different job from Mux's on-demand encoding and playback API.
Which one should you pick
Pick Dacast if you are selling access to a live broadcast and need a paywall, white-label playback and a dashboard built for that job, not an API key. There is no free tier, only a 14-day trial, and Starter works out to roughly 200GB of bandwidth a month for $39.
Pick Mux if an engineer is building the video experience into your own product and the player, the workflow and the analytics all need to be yours. The free plan alone carries 100,000 delivery minutes a month, a real allowance rather than a trial, and paid usage starts with a $20 monthly credit covering roughly a hundred five-minute videos end to end.
Common questions
- Does either one have a free plan?
- Mux does: 100,000 delivery minutes a month for on-demand video, a standing allowance rather than a trial. Dacast has no free tier at all, only a 14-day trial before Starter's $39 a month begins.
- Do I need to write code to use Mux?
- Yes, effectively. There is no dashboard for uploading a marketing video the way Dacast has; Mux is built to be called from your own product through its API. Dacast is the opposite, a configured platform with a paywall and white-label playback built in.
- Which one is built for selling tickets to a live event?
- Dacast, with pay-per-view and subscriptions on the live broadcast itself, white-label playback and bandwidth sold by the year. Mux has no paywall or ticketing feature of its own; it hands an engineer the encoding, storage and delivery to build that on top of.
- How is Mux actually billed?
- By the minute: storage from $0.0024 a minute and delivery from $0.0008 a minute after the free allowance, with a $20 monthly credit included once you move past pay-as-you-go. Dacast bills a flat monthly rate for a yearly bandwidth allowance instead, $39 a month for roughly 200GB averaged monthly.
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.