Best Self-Hosted Alternatives to Twitch
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Twitch is where live streaming happens for most people: broadcast from OBS, viewers find the channel, chat scrolls beside the video, and the platform keeps the recordings for a while once you turn that on. It is free to stream. What sends people looking elsewhere is everything else that comes with the channel page: the platform's ads and discovery algorithm, its moderation and policy decisions, its monetisation terms, and viewer accounts and chat logs that belong to Twitch rather than to you. The two self-hosted servers below take an RTMP stream from the same broadcasting software and put it on your own domain, with chat, on a server you run.
Twitch is free — but your data lives on its servers, not yours. These researched, open-source alternatives give you the same workflow on hardware you own — here's what each needs to run.
The alternatives
OwncastMIT
CategoryVideo platformStackGo · TypeScript · SQLiteMin RAM1024 MBOfficial imageYesDifficulty1 / 5
PeerTubeAGPL-3.0
CategoryVideo platformStackTypeScript · Node.js · PostgreSQL · RedisMin RAM1536 MBOfficial imageYesDifficulty3 / 5
What you give up by leaving Twitch
Leaving Twitch means giving up its audience and discovery, a global delivery network that absorbs any number of viewers, transcoding you never run yourself (guaranteed for Partners, as capacity allows for everyone else), built-in monetisation, and a chat your viewers already have accounts for. Self-hosting hands you the bandwidth bill first: every viewer pulls the full bitrate from your server for the whole broadcast, and each extra quality variant is another encode running while you are live, so budget CPU and outbound transfer before you budget RAM. Owncast is the straight swap for one streamer: an MIT-licensed Go server with embedded SQLite, one container with a web page, chat, moderation and viewer stats, optional Fediverse publishing, and S3-compatible object storage to offload the video segments when the viewer count grows; it does live and only live. PeerTube is a federated video platform first, with uploads, transcoding, channels and playlists, and live streaming from OBS with replays, plus live chat through its livechat plugin, as one feature among them; it runs on PostgreSQL and Redis and is the heavier install. Pick Owncast to go live tonight, PeerTube to build a video library that also goes live.
Where to host itaffiliate disclosure
Kamateratrial any of these on
The entry tier is a free trial — fine for a first look. Size it up (or run the 2 vCPU / 4 GB box the cost figures above assume) once you're keeping it.1 vCPU · 1 GB RAM · 20 GB SSD · $4.00/moDigitalOceanalso works on
From $6/mo · 1 vCPU / 1 GB / 25 GB · US + EU + AsiaPaid link — we earn a commission if you shop through it.
Head-to-head
Common questions
Are these Twitch alternatives really free?
The software is open-source and free to run. Your only cost is the server it runs on — often a few dollars a month, less than most SaaS subscriptions.
How much server do I need to self-host one?
Most of these run comfortably on a small VPS — 1–2 GB of RAM is enough for a single-user or small-team setup. Each app's page lists its minimum RAM.
Will I lose features by leaving Twitch?
It depends on the app. The alternatives below cover the core workflow; polish and integrations vary, so check each one's stack and difficulty before you commit.