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 Jellyfin with 50,543 GitHub stars, but all 2 options below are worth considering depending on your needs.
2 open source media servers — ranked by GitHub stars. Browse all
Jellyfin
Free and open-source media server for movies, TV shows, music, and photos — a fully self-hosted alternative to Plex.
Plex
Hound
A self-hosted media server for watching, tracking, and managing movies and TV shows with P2P streaming support.
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 →