WebRTC Media Servers Comparison

4 min readNov 17, 2020

Most Popular WebRTC Media Servers Comparison

Hello everyone, this comparison is prepared according to my own experience. I hope it helps you to choose the right solution.

Let’s start from the basics!

What is Media Server?

Before the comparison let’s see what a media server is. Media Server is a solution that provides a flexible infrastructure for live and recorded audio/video streams in different formats for different kinds of sectors although it can be specialized in technical functions. As an example of today’s applications, media servers work in digital IP television broadcasts, in popular video websites, in music platforms with millions of users, video chat, social media live streaming, live games, esports and even in the infrastructure of systems recording and processing camera recordings.

What is WebRTC?

With WebRTC(Web Real-Time Communication), you can add real-time communication capabilities to your application that works on top of an open standard. It supports video, voice, and generic data to be sent between peers, allowing developers to build powerful voice- and video-communication solutions.

The technology is available on all modern browsers as well as on native clients for all major platforms. The technologies behind WebRTC are implemented as an open web standard and available as regular JavaScript APIs in all major browsers. For native clients, like Android and iOS applications, a library is available that provides the same functionality. The WebRTC project is open-source and supported by Apple, Google, Microsoft and Mozilla, amongst others.

Popular WebRTC Media Servers

Wowza

Wowza is the most-known media server in this ecosystem. Wowza is feature-rich and provides a customizable platform for broadcasters of all sorts. It was founded in 2005 by David Stubenvoll and Charlie Good. Wowza is a bootstrap start-up, with live and on-demand live streaming capabilities. Wowza offers two main products. The first is the Wowza Streaming Engine. This product is widely used in the industry for self-hosted streaming. The second is the Wowza Streaming Cloud offering. This functionality includes a variety of features aimed at providing low-latency content access to global audiences.

Ant Media

Ant Media allows developers to broadcast live video from their browser with WebRTC. Furthermore, live streams can be distributed to many HLS. In other words, users can broadcast live video from the browsers easily. Ant Media Server is a free and open source WebRTC media server that has some additional life-saving features for developers. For instance, it supports MP4 recording for live RTMP, WebRTC and RTSP streams. It supports HLS and RTSP so that streams (live or VoD) can play on almost all web browsers. There are two versions of Ant Media, Community and Enterprise versions. Ant Media has 360 degree video and adaptive bitrate support in enterprise edition. Ant media released their 2.1 version with some impressive features such as HEVC (H.265), WebM recording. Lastly, Ant Media offers free iOS, Android and JavaScript SDKs for free. Ant Media will be announcing the LL-HLS feature soon.

Kurento

Kurento is a WebRTC based media server. Its client APIs make the development of advanced video applications simple for WWW and smartphone platforms. Kurento Media Server features include group communications, transcoding, recording, mixing, broadcasting and routing of audiovisual flows.

As a differential feature, Kurento Media Server also provides advanced media processing capabilities involving computer vision, video indexing, augmented reality and speech analysis. Kurento modular architecture makes simple the integration of third party media processing algorithms (i.e. speech recognition, sentiment analysis, face recognition, etc.), which can be transparently used by application developers as the rest of Kurento built-in features.

Janus WebRTC Server

Janus is a WebRTC Server developed by Meetecho conceived to be a general purpose one. As such, it doesn’t provide any functionality per se other than implementing the means to set up a WebRTC media communication with a browser, exchanging JSON messages with it, and relaying RTP/RTCP and messages between browsers and the server-side application logic they’re attached to.

Any specific feature/application is provided by server side plugins, that browsers can then contact via Janus to take advantage of the functionality they provide. Examples of such plugins can be implementations of applications like echo tests, conference bridges, media recorders, SIP gateways and the like.

Red5Pro

Red5 is an open source media server. It is designed to be flexible with a simple plugin architecture that allows for customization of virtually any VOD and live streaming scenario. First created in 2005 by a team of developers that reversed RTMP as an alternative to the Flash Communication Server, Red5 is now used for live streaming beyond Flash including HLS, WebSockets, and RTSP. Built on the open source Red5 Server, Red5 Pro allows you to build scalable live streaming and second screen applications.