Best Open Source Media Servers in 2026
Software for hosting, streaming, and managing personal media libraries including movies, TV shows, music, and photos.
The most popular pick this year is Immich with 100,357 GitHub stars, but all 5 options below are worth considering depending on your needs.
5 open source media servers — ranked by GitHub stars. Browse all
Immich
High performance self-hosted photo and video management solution with automatic backup, facial recognition, and AI-powered search.
Google Photos
Jellyfin
Free and open-source media server for movies, TV shows, music, and photos — a fully self-hosted alternative to Plex.
Plex
MediaCMS
Modern, fully featured open source video and media CMS built with Django and React for self-hosted video sharing.
YouTube
Hound
A self-hosted media server for watching, tracking, and managing movies and TV shows with P2P streaming support.
Plex
Parados
A simple, lightweight home media server for UNIX systems.
PlexHow we rank these tools
Tools are ranked by GitHub stars as a proxy for community adoption and trust. Stars reflect how many developers found a project valuable enough to bookmark — a reasonable signal for quality in the open source world. We only list tools that are actively maintained and open source.
Looking for tools you can run yourself? Browse self-hosted media servers →