Top 10 Mux Alternatives

The need to have all your streaming media and services under one roof is becoming a priority for organizations in 2023. Mux is one of the platforms that enables developers to build live and on-demand video experiences in its apps, but it can be costly, and its features are somewhat limited.

Many reliable contenders in the streaming industry offer services that match and exceed that of Mux.

With that in mind, we've compiled a list of the top 10 best Mux alternatives to help you integrate live video into your application as quickly and efficiently as possible! This list features some of the most reliable and flexible options available. So grab a seat, look at our definitive list of Mux alternatives for 2023, and get ready for an intuitive streaming experience.

What to Look for in an Alternative for Mux?

Here are some of the crucial things to consider when you are out looking for a Mux alternative:

1. SDK Capabilities: Look for a streaming platform that offers capabilities such as cross-browser compatibility and custom video layouts.
2. Unique Features: Find one with special features, such as audio-only calling or recording capabilities that add value to your live streams.
3. Interactive Elements: Consider whether the platform has interactive features like chat, screen-sharing, and on-screen comments or captions.
4. Streaming Quality: Ensure the streaming quality is high and reliable with no latency issues, even if the network fluctuates.
5. Integrations: Check that the platform offers open APIs that make it easy for you to integrate it with your app and various social media/online platforms for maximum reach.
6. Pricing: Review pricing plans to ensure they are within your budget.
7. UX: See if the SDK offers easy-to-use UI elements you can pick and stitch together to quickly build the user interface for your live experience.
8. Support: Lastly, please ensure the platform offers excellent customer support if you need help with any issues.

By looking out for these features in a Mux alternative, you can rest assured that you'll find the best solution for your live streaming needs. A suitable streaming platform can help you boost your live video's performance and reach, so consider all these factors before deciding.

The Top 10 Alternatives to Mux

There are the top 10 alternatives to Mux including Dyte, Zoom Video SDK, Agora, Twilio, EnableX, Vonage Video, AWS Chime SDK, Whereby, Daily WebRTC and Restream.

Let's talk about that offer their unique features, advantages and pricing for each of them.

1. Dyte
2. Zoom Video SDK
3. Agora
4. Twilio
5. Enablex
6. Vonage Video
7. AWS Chime
8. Whereby
9. Daily WebRTC
10. Restream

Reviews of Mux alternatives for building live video call experiences in your product

Below we'll review each alternative solution to give you a better overview of Mux's competitors and their pricing. All reviews highlight our findings and the considerations of real users.

Dyte

Dyte is an alternative to Mux for running large-scale live streams online. It offers powerful features and a simple setup process, and its capabilities include adaptive streaming, multi-bitrate streaming, and transcoding.

Dyte offers developer-friendly live video conferencing SDKs that enable you to effortlessly integrate 1:1 calls, group calls, and webinars into your platform. Because of its low-code approach and user-friendly documentation, one can go live with fewer lines of code. It supports live classes, telemedicine, online fitness, remote employment, social gatherings, dating, and B2B sales use cases.

Pros:

• The SDK offers extensive collaborative features out of the box
• It is super easy to integrate your product with its open APIs
• It provides detailed analytics on video call metrics
• It lets you do cross-platform streaming across YouTube, LinkedIn, Facebook, and more with RTMP built-in the platform
• Participants have almost no voice and video lag, so they may readily communicate with one another
• The SDK barely weighs ~200 KB GZIP, which makes it super easy on your user's network and their devices
• The team offers free 24*7 support at the channel of your choice — email, Slack, Discord, and more
• You can easily use the ready-made plugins available to make the user's streaming experience interactive

Cons:

• Currently, the SDK can support a maximum of 25 active speakers. However, the Dyte team is still working on upgrading these minor drawbacks

Pricing:

• 10,000 free minutes every month
• $0.001/min/user for Voice Conferencing
• $0.004/min/user for Video Conferencing

Dyte is well known for its ease of use, customer support, feature set, design, pricing, benefits, and community. With Dyte, you can be sure of a flexible streaming solution tailored to your needs and budget, with excellent customer support if any issues arise. Get the most out of your live streams today. Dyte offers secure streaming and encryption, ensuring your content is safe and private.

Zoom Video SDK

Zoom Video SDK helps you add live video to your app backed by the servers and technology of Zoom. The SDK provides video, audio, screen sharing, chat, data streams, and more as a service. You can build with all of these features or pick and choose. The Video SDK also has full server-side APIs and webhooks.

Pros:

• Build customizable video compositions
• Host up to 1,000 co-hosts/participants per session
• It supports seven major languages and provides open translation extensibility which opens any app to international growth and improved user experience
• Stream your meetings/webinars on Facebook

Cons:

• Doesn’t offer prebuilt UI kits to ease development
• You need to pay hundreds of dollars to get support from an actual real human being
• Restrictive to video calls—no audio calling possible
• No interactive features like polls, emoticons, and whiteboard
• Expensive subscriptions and add ons
• HD video is not the Standard quality
• Limited customization to the live video
• The SDK only allows the use of predetermined roles of a host and participant

Pricing:

• 10,000 minutes free every month
• $0.35/min/user for Video Conferencing
• Recordings $100 per month for 1 TB of storage
• Telephony at $100 per month

Agora

Agora provides a Real-time Engagement Platform as a Service (RTE PaaS). The SDK provider wants to allow anybody to communicate with anyone, in any application, at any time, and from any location. Its platform provides developers with APIs enabling them to embed real-time video and voice engagement experiences into their products.

Pros:

• Agora uses its own priority networking, and the service quality is much superior to Mux
• Additional functions include cloud recording and live broadcasting

Cons:

• It is tough to absorb documentation rapidly. To grasp the whole context, you may need to reread multiple times. Some information is scattered across several pages
• You need to consider different pricing for just about everything— video, voice, whiteboard, or plugins. It charges for everything separately, which makes pricing considerably complex
• Actual code may behave differently than the documentation indicates. To cover edge scenarios, a lot of black-box testing is required
• The SDKs are really basic, and a lot of manual plumbing or copy-pasting is required for a basic example to function
• Poor Slack assistance from the Agora staff; responses frequently take days
• Higher-resolution streams become significantly more expensive
• To add chat or message passing, you must combine two independent items

Pricing:

• $0.0009 /min/user for Voice Conferencing
• $0.0039 /min/user for HD Video Conferencing
• $0.0089 /min/user for Full HD Video Conferencing

If you're interested in delving deeper, we've written a comprehensive article on Agora pricing that provides an in-depth analysis.

Twilio Live

Twilio is gaining traction as an alternative to Mux for live video. It provides businesses with a wide range of attractive features, such as the ability to embed audio and video into applications, real-time access analytics, and secure data with end-to-end encryption.

Pros:

• Twilio Video SDK is designed to integrate easily with any web or mobile application
• The highly scalable platform allows applications to handle thousands of users without issues
• Twilio Video SDK works seamlessly across multiple platforms, including the web, iOS, and Android
• It features a dashboard to track and analyze errors

Cons:

• Supports a maximum of 50 hosts within a call
• Doesn't offer any plugins for ease of product development
• Developers need to spend a lot of time to integrate it since the documentation is old and support is non-existent
• No UI elements available — build everything from scratch
• Embed multiple SDKs just to create a basic live experience
• RTMP streaming isn't available, and you need to sort out HLS separately

Pricing:

• $0.004/min/user for Video Conferencing
• Recordings cost starts at $0.004/min + recording compositions at $0.01/min

Learn more about Twilio Video pricing.

Enablex

Enablex is another alternative to Mux for video streaming. It provides features such as scalability, low-latency video, and real-time analytics. It allows businesses to customize their individual usage plans to fit their needs and budget. Additionally, it offers streaming services with low latency, so viewers don't experience buffering or lagging issues.

Pros:

• It is straightforward to use the API
• You can use its visual building to customize your video meeting UI — add logos, play with colors, and experiment with different UI elements
• Control user access with moderated entry, room lock, floor access control, and viewer role. All video/audio signals are also encrypted
• EnableX helps in implementing the Cordova plugin for both iOS and Android

Cons:

• The issue with using web-based API in terms of video quality and user interface
• The support can take over 72 hours to respond
• The pricing can get out of hand very quickly

Pricing:

• $0.004/min/user for up to 50 participants/room
• For pricing with over 50 participants, you need to contact its sales team
• Recording at $0.10/min/user
• Transcoding at $0.10/min
• Storage at $0.05/GB/month
• RTMP streaming costs $0.10/min

Vonage Video

TokBox (now known as Vonage Video SDK) is another alternative for Mux. It runs on root servers on a small scale and can be quickly scaled to meet the demands of organizations, national data centers, or ISPs.

Pros:

• The SDK lets you build custom audio/video streams with effects, filters, and AR/VR on mobile devices. It supports use cases ranging from 1:1 video, group video chat, or large-scale broadcast sessions
• The SDK offers performance data through the account dashboard or its insights API
• It encrypts all voice, video, and signaling traffic with AES-128 or AES-256 encryption

Cons:

• Due to its complexity, it requires significant technical expertise to set up and use TokBox
• Video conferences can accommodate up to 25 users, which can be a problem if you plan to invite a large number of participants or live stream
• The SDK doesn't let you configure live video calls
• You can't add more features on top of live video because the platform doesn't offer plugins or allow you to integrate with third-party services easily
• The support takes a while (sometimes over 72 hours for a reply), and you can only reach out reliably via email

Pricing:

• Plans start at $9.99/month (plus taxes & fees as applicable), with 2,000 minutes included in all plans. $ 0.00395 per participant / per minute after the 2,000 minutes are consumed
• Learn more about Vonage Video pricing here.

AWS Chime

Amazon Chime is an Amazon Web Services communications service with a VoIP solution. Amazon Chime is a pay-as-you-go service that can be used for online meetings, video conferencing, and business calls.

Amazon Chime Voice Connector is a service that transmits voice communications over the internet and scales to meet capacity requirements as part of Amazon Chime. Users can remove fixed telephone network costs and simplify voice network administration by moving their voice network to the AWS Cloud.

Pros:

• Uses AWS Identity and Access Management policies for security
• Includes collaborative features like screen-sharing
• Using the SDK, you can chat with people inside and outside of your organization
• The SDK offers simulcast — which lets the user’s device pick up the resolution best suited for their network
• Amazon Chime SDK encrypts all the calls, videos, and chats

Cons:

• It can host up to 25 participants only (50 on mobile)
• It lacks some useful features like polling, auto-sync with Google Calendar, and a background blur effect
• It doesn’t work well in a Linux environment
• Supports audio recording content only in .m4a format
• The pricing can get out of control very quickly as you scale

Pricing:

• Free tier: Includes one-on-one audio and video calls and group chat
• Plus tier: $2.50/user/month
• Pro tier: $15/user/month

Whereby

Whereby is another alternative to Mux. It provides browser-based permanent rooms, hybrid setups, interactive whiteboards, and support for up to 50 participants. Additionally, Whereby offers audio/video streaming and recording capabilities so users can broadcast and capture their sessions. Furthermore, it has a built-in chat feature allowing users to communicate during meetings.

Pros:

• No need to install a client to manage calls
• Good stability and audio quality
• GDPR compliant

Cons:

• Very basic video customizations
• Issues with dropping off
• Switching between small and big rooms can be confusing

Pricing:

• Free: Supports up to 4 participants and 1 room
• Pro: $9.99/month with up to 12 participants and three rooms
• Business: Starting with $59.99/month with up to 12 participants and multiple users and team rooms

Daily WebRTC

Daily WebRTC offers features such as cross-browser compatibility and custom video layouts. It also supports up to 10,000 participants in a single call and does not require users to download any software to their devices to use it so that it can be used across different platforms easily.

Pros:

• Supports native mobile libraries
• Offers collaborative features like HD screen sharing, breakout rooms, and more
• Access logs around an event and media quality metrics
• APIs are available for Javascript, Flutter, iOS, and Android platforms
• You can monitor call performance and user engagement by examining logs and analytics.

Cons

• Incertitude regarding the future codecs
• The project’s mobile SDK is still in development
• Support can take time to resolve issues
• Costly video recording cost.

Pricing

• 10,000 free minutes/month
• $0.004/min/user for the video
• $0.015/min for RTMP output
• $ 0.01349/min for cloud recording

Restream

Restream allows you to broadcast to over 30 social media platforms from one screen, and it's an upcoming competitor of Mux. It enables you to start the live stream directly from your browser without using third-party programs, schedule a pre-recorded video to be played anytime, and invite remote guests from any location to your live stream.

Pros:

• Restream offers a forever-free plan
• You can use Restream to upload and broadcast pre-recorded videos
• Restream includes a talking function to enhance video engagement with chat discussions
• The analytics engine tracks all essential metrics to provide insights into your streaming channels, viewership, followers, and chats

Cons:

• Users need to pay $49 per month to get full HD streaming
• Restream does not support 2K and 4K video streaming
• The number of pre-recorded films you can store and the duration and size of each upload are limited
• Pre-recorded video streaming is only available to users on the professional plan or higher
• Priority customer service is only available to company users on the Premium and Business programs

Pricing:

• $16 per month for Standard Plan
• $41 per month for a Professional Plan

Final Verdict

All in all, all of these live video streaming alternatives come with their advantages and disadvantages. It is essential to consider your needs and budget when deciding which streaming solution will work best for you.

But at the end of the day, Dyte emerges as an excellent choice for creating a reliable live video in your application. It's open APIs and prebuilt UK kit makes it particularly easy for developers to access powerful live video conferencing APIs and ensure consistent performance with reliable streaming solutions.

Whether you are looking for high-speed mobile broadcasting or large-scale web conferencing solutions – Dyte ticks all the boxes! So now is the time; sign up for Dyte today and experience our world-class streaming capabilities first-hand!