Open-source Pandora alternatives

Spotube is an extensible, open-source music streaming app for desktop and mobile, written in Dart with Flutter. Rather than being tied to one service, it relies on plugins that supply music metadata, playlists and audio sources, so community-made or custom plugins can add support for different platforms. GitHub lists the license as 'Other'.

The README highlights freely downloadable tracks with tagged metadata, time-synced lyrics regardless of plugin support, a small installation size, low data usage and native performance. Playback control is done locally rather than on a server, and the project states it has no telemetry, diagnostics or user data collection.

Installers and packages cover Windows, macOS, Android, Linux through Flatpak, Debian, Arch, Fedora and openSUSE packages, and Homebrew, while iOS uses an IPA file that needs sideloading. New versions usually arrive every three to four months. It suits listeners who want a lightweight, privacy-minded music client they can extend with plugins.

Navidrome is an open-source music server written in Go. You point it at your own folder of audio files and it serves the collection through a web player and through mobile apps, much like a personal streaming service. It is compatible with the Subsonic API family, so many existing Subsonic and OpenSubsonic client apps can connect to it.

The project says it handles very large music collections and can stream almost any audio format. It is light enough to run on small hardware such as a Raspberry Pi, and its topics also mention Airsonic and Madsonic, older servers it can stand in for. A live demo is available so you can try the interface first, and the maintainers recommend using tagged releases rather than the unstable master branch.

Navidrome is GPL-3.0 licensed and installed following the instructions on its website. For people who prefer not to run a server, PikaPods has partnered with the project to offer an officially supported cloud-hosted option, with part of the revenue helping fund development. It appeals to music collectors who want to keep control of their libraries instead of relying on a commercial service.

Koel is a free, open-source music streaming server that turns a personal music collection into a web-based player. It is built on Laravel and Vue, scans a music library and serves it back through a modern interface that works in any browser.

Beyond playback, Koel supports playlists and smart playlists, scrobbling, podcasts and radio, integrations with Last.fm, Spotify and MusicBrainz, and an AI assistant that responds to natural-language commands. Koel Player is the official mobile app for iOS and Android, which avoids the limits of the mobile web version.

The core is MIT licensed and designed to be self-hosted, with install and upgrade guides in the official documentation. A premium edition, Koel Plus, adds multi-user libraries, collaboration, SSO, cloud storage drivers, custom themes and white-labeling for organizations that want to run their own streaming service. The author is supported through sponsors on OpenCollective and GitHub.

Mopidy is a music server written in Python and designed to be extended. It runs on a computer or small device and plays music that you control remotely from a phone, tablet or another computer, using any MPD client or web client.

Music can come from local disk, Spotify, SoundCloud, internet radio and other sources, with additional sources added through extensions listed on the project website. This design lets one server and one set of clients cover many services. Packages and installation instructions exist for Debian, Ubuntu, Raspberry Pi OS, Arch Linux and macOS, as well as manual installation.

Mopidy is licensed under Apache-2.0. The project provides documentation for installing, configuring and developing extensions, a Discourse forum for help and a Zulip chat for development discussion. Contributions such as bug fixes, testing, documentation and user support are welcome.

Ampache is a web-based audio and video streaming application and file manager that lets you reach your music and videos from almost any internet-enabled device. It presents an already organized collection in a useful way rather than reorganizing your files.

Its usefulness depends on extracting correct metadata from embedded tags or file names, and it assumes you manage your files yourself. It runs on web servers including Apache, lighttpd, nginx and IIS, with most testing on Apache, and a documented API supports clients. The development branch, Ampache 8, adds an opt-in Jellyfin-compatible API so third-party clients such as Finamp and Symfonium can browse and stream a library.

The project recommends the stable release 7 branch for most users, notes that the develop branch can be unstable and needs PHP 8.5 or later, and provides a Docker image, wiki and admin and user guides. Ampache is written in PHP and licensed under AGPL-3.0.