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.

Alternative to:

Google Photos

Jellyfin

Free and open-source media server for movies, TV shows, music, and photos — a fully self-hosted alternative to Plex.

Alternative to:

Plex

MediaCMS

Modern, fully featured open source video and media CMS built with Django and React for self-hosted video sharing.

Alternative to:

YouTube

PiGallery 2

A fast directory-first photo gallery website, with rich UI, optimized for running on low resource servers (especially on Raspberry Pi).

Alternative to:

Google Photos

Home Gallery

Self-hosted open-source web gallery for photos and videos with AI-powered image discovery, face detection, and tagging.

Alternative to:

Google Photos

Hound

A self-hosted media server for watching, tracking, and managing movies and TV shows with P2P streaming support.

Alternative to:

Plex

Parados

A simple, lightweight home media server for UNIX systems.

Alternative to:

Plex

Why 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.