Best Self-Hosted Media Servers in 2026
Software for hosting, streaming, and managing personal media libraries including movies, TV shows, music, and photos.
The top-rated pick is Immich with 103,104 GitHub stars.
7 self-hosted 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.
YouTubePiGallery 2
A fast directory-first photo gallery website, with rich UI, optimized for running on low resource servers (especially on Raspberry Pi).
Google Photos
Home Gallery
Self-hosted open-source web gallery for photos and videos with AI-powered image discovery, face detection, and tagging.
Google Photos
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.
PlexWhy self-host?
Self-hosting puts you in control. You own your data, avoid vendor lock-in, and eliminate recurring subscription costs. For teams handling sensitive data or operating under strict compliance requirements, running your own infrastructure is often the only viable option.