Owncast vs PeerTube

Owncast and PeerTube are the two video platforms in our catalog, and they share one feature: point OBS or any RTMP encoder at port 1935 and viewers watch in a browser. Past that they diverge. Owncast is "a self-hosted live video and web chat server that allows you to stream your content": one streamer, one page, one container with an embedded SQLite database, live only. PeerTube is "An alternative to Big Tech's video platforms": a federated library of uploaded videos with accounts, channels, quotas and transcoding, where live streaming is one publish tab and chat arrives as a plugin.

One streamer or a video site

Owncast is built around a single broadcast. Its README calls it a "decentralized, single user live video streaming and chat server", and the social docs spell out the model: "Each Owncast instance operates as a completely standalone server with a single user" that can take part in the Fediverse. There are no viewer accounts, no uploads, no channels. "Owncast accepts incoming streams over RTMP on TCP port 1935 by default", and "In general Owncast is compatible with any software that uses RTMP to broadcast to a remote server."

PeerTube is a video hosting platform first. Users register (or an admin creates them), each gets channels and a storage quota ("Video Quota represents the size limit a user cannot exceed when uploading videos."), and roles split the work: "Administrators can do anything, and have access to the full admin backend." Uploads are transcoded into multiple resolutions, because "Enabling transcoding ensures that your users will have a video playback that works." Live streaming is the same RTMP flow as Owncast, but it lands inside that library: "Stream via OBS or other RTMP software, enable replays and interact with viewers via live chat."

Replays, chat and the Fediverse

The sharpest difference is what happens when the stream stops. Owncast keeps nothing you can replay: its object-storage docs say the bucket is "not for permanent storage of recordings or archival purposes, just for live streams", and "The bucket never holds more than the last few minutes of your stream, so don't treat it as a recording archive." Replays are a roadmap item, not a feature; the roadmap's "Complete stream replays" milestone is to "Add support for replaying an entire past live stream via the Owncast interface." Record in OBS if you need a VOD. PeerTube makes replays a setting: "Allow your users to automatically save a replay of their live." A normal live means "stream only once, replay will replace your live"; a permanent/recurring live means "stream multiple times, replays will be separate videos".

Chat is the reverse. Owncast ships it: "The web chat supports some basic formatting using Markdown", moderators can "Add moderators, remove messages and users from your chat", and verified viewers get "an authenticated badge for people who have verified their identity". PeerTube has no chat in core; its FAQ tells streamers to "Communicate with your viewers using the livechat PeerTube plugin", which an admin adds ("To install or update the plugin, just use the Peertube web admin interface.") and which runs its own XMPP server.

Both speak ActivityPub, differently. Owncast's social features are a broadcast channel: "People can follow your server." and "Your followers will automatically get notified when you go live." They are "disabled by default" and "You must be hosting your Owncast server behind SSL, with a https URL." to turn them on. PeerTube's federation is two-way: "A follow is a kind of activity" that pulls another instance's videos into your pages and yours into theirs, and "PeerTube has a built-in videos redundancy system, allowing an platform to duplicate and serve videos of another platform."

CPU, bandwidth and where it goes

Live video costs the same wherever it runs: encoding and egress. Owncast puts both on your box. Each output quality is an encode, and "more qualities and higher bitrates mean more CPU"; the escape hatch is passthrough, where "Owncast copies your inbound video untouched instead of re-encoding it." For egress it can hand segments to S3: object storage "moves the bandwidth of serving video off your own server onto an S3 compatible provider", with the caveat above that the bucket is a live buffer, not an archive.

PeerTube transcodes more (every upload once VOD transcoding is on, as upstream recommends, in several resolutions, and "if you enable Web Videos and HLS, the storage will be multiplied by 2") but gives you more ways to move it. Live transcoding is opt-in, and upstream warns that with 10 concurrent lives "PeerTube will run 10 FFmpeg processes (high CPU/RAM usage)"; admins can "Set a max duration for lives." and cap parallel lives. Remote runners take the load off entirely: "PeerTube can offload high CPU/long job like transcoding to a remote PeerTube runner." for VOD, live and transcription jobs ("Registered runners can alter video content", so trust them). Object storage receives transcoded files after processing, and playback is peer-to-peer over WebRTC, which "reduces server bandwidth overload if a video becomes viral".

Licences

Owncast is MIT, the whole repository. PeerTube is under the "GNU AFFERO GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE", "Version 3": the stock image changes nothing for you; modify it and serve it publicly, and you owe those users the source.

Footprint and setup

Owncast is one container: web and admin on 8080, RTMP on 1935, everything under one ./data directory, and a default admin password and stream key of abc123 to change before the first stream. Upstream publishes no RAM figure, so our 1 GB floor is an estimate. PeerTube is four containers in our trimmed compose (PeerTube, PostgreSQL, Redis, Postfix) behind a reverse proxy you supply, web on 9000 and RTMP on 1935, and the hostname you set at first start is permanent: "Keep in mind your domain name is definitive after your first PeerTube start." Its FAQ documents the floor: "1.5 GB of RAM should be plenty for a basic PeerTube instance, which usually takes at most 500 MB in RAM", and "You will hugely benefit from at least a second thread though, because of transcoding."

In our install checks on a GCP e2-standard-2, Owncast idled at ~132 MB of RAM and ~295 MB of disk (Ubuntu 26.04, October 2026); PeerTube idled at ~210 MB of RAM and ~3.8 GB of disk (Ubuntu 26.04, September 2026). The disk gap is the Node application plus PostgreSQL and Redis images before a single video is uploaded; neither number describes a stream in progress, where encoding sets the CPU bill. We rate Owncast 1 out of 5 to deploy and PeerTube 3 out of 5.

Which to choose

Choose Owncast if one person or one channel wants to go live on their own domain with chat and moderation built in, you are happy to record in OBS rather than on the server, and you want a single MIT-licensed container that idled at ~132 MB.

Choose PeerTube if you want videos to outlive the stream, with uploads, channels, quotas, saved replays and two-way federation with other instances, and you will run PostgreSQL and Redis, budget CPU or remote runners for transcoding, and add the livechat plugin for chat.

Running Owncast or PeerTube on a VPS

Both installs are verified on Ubuntu 26.04; the compose files are on the Owncast and PeerTube pages. Both serve plain HTTP, so put a TLS reverse proxy in front of 8080 or 9000, and expose 1935 only where your encoder lives, because the stream key is its only protection. Size the server by viewers and encodes, not by the idle figures above.