Owncast

MIT self-hosted live streaming and chat server

Comms / Live Streaming · OSS/MIT · 11.6k

Reviewed 2026-10-18 · last push 2026-10-18 · repo checked 2026-10-19

What's Good

MIT (owncast/owncast), release v0.3.0 (2026-09-03), active since 2020. It is a single service meant to work out of the box, with the player, chat and embeddable components in the web frontend, and you keep ownership of your content, interface and moderation. Because it takes plain RTMP, existing streaming setups work without changes. ★~11.6k.

The Catch

It is single-user, one-to-many broadcasting: one stream out to many viewers, not a WebRTC SDK for calls, meetings or interactive video in your own app. It is still pre-1.0 (v0.3.0). Windows servers are not supported natively, so on Windows you run it under WSL2. Video bandwidth and transcoding load are yours to provision.

Verdict

The easiest way to run your own Twitch-style stream and chat — not the tool for video calls.

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