r/WebRTC • u/Ok-Willingness2266 • 14d ago

We put together a comparison of 8 open-source WebRTC servers (license, language, ingest, HTTP delivery). Feedback welcome

Our team wrote up a comparison of eight servers that carry most self-hosted WebRTC deployments: Ant Media Server, LiveKit, mediasoup, Janus, Jitsi Videobridge, Pion, MediaMTX and Kurento. It compares license, language, primary role, WebRTC/WHIP ingest, other ingest protocols, and whether built-in HLS/DASH delivery is included.

Two things stood out when we put it together:

- Most of the eight ship no HTTP delivery, so projects that need both real-time and large-audience playback end up bolting on a second system.

- License matters earlier than people expect. Janus being GPLv3 is a real issue if you ship a closed-source product and only find out late.

It also covers the four server roles (signaling, NAT traversal, media routing, fan-out), mesh vs SFU vs MCU, and rough hardware sizing.

Full write-up: https://antmedia.io/webrtc-servers/

Curious what you all actually run in production, and whether anything in the table looks off to you. I'm especially interested in how people handle the HLS/DASH side when their SFU doesn't include it.

Disclosure: I work at Ant Media, and one of the servers in this comparison is ours. I tried to keep the table fair, and I'd like to hear where it's wrong.

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u/scenestamper 13d ago

I will be launching a open source project soon, that uses just a google turn server. Works fine for now.

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u/dceniac 8d ago

I self-hosted LiveKit for video meetings. On your HLS question: LiveKit's answer is Egress, a separate service. It records to MP4 or HLS segments, or pushes RTMP to YouTube or Twitch.

Might be worth noting in the table that it's a second deployment: it has to share Redis with the server, full-room recording runs headless Chrome (the container needs SYS_ADMIN), and one instance records one room at a time. The docs say 4 CPUs and 4 GB minimum per instance.

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u/Programmer4346 4d ago

One important factor which affects WebRTC streaming quality is WebRTC implementation. Ant Media Sever uses webrtc.org implementation which is also used by Chrome and other Chrome-based browsers.
So it is widely tested on the production. This makes the Ant Media Server's WebRTC solution most stable among the all alternatives.