About PeerTube
PeerTube is a free, decentralized and federated video platform, developed by Framasoft as an alternative to centralized services such as YouTube, Dailymotion and Vimeo. It is a network of many small, interoperable video hosting providers, called instances, and it is described as community-owned and ad-free.
Users can upload videos and have them streamed anywhere, with descriptions and tags that make them discoverable across the whole federated network, not only one instance. Live streaming, including permanent streams, is supported, and a player can be embedded on other websites. Viewers can follow channels from the Fediverse, such as Mastodon, without an account on the instance hosting the video.
PeerTube uses ActivityPub for federation and peer-to-peer technology in the browser to share bandwidth between viewers. It is written in TypeScript with Angular and released under the AGPL-3.0 license. People can join an existing instance or create their own, so it fits both self-hosters and communities, and demonstration instances are listed.
Key features
- ActivityPub federation between instances
- Peer-to-peer streaming in the browser
- Live streaming and permanent streams
- Embeddable video player
- Follow channels from the Fediverse
- Ad-free, community-owned hosting
Good fit for
- →Hosting a community video site
- →Creators publishing outside centralized platforms
- Tags
- video
- decentralized
- federated
- activitypub
- p2p
- streaming
- fediverse
- angular
PeerTube: questions and answers
- What is PeerTube used for?
- PeerTube is a free, federated video platform that uses ActivityPub and peer-to-peer streaming as an alternative to YouTube and Vimeo. It is a good fit for hosting a community video site and creators publishing outside centralized platforms.
- Is PeerTube open source?
- Yes. PeerTube is open source under the AGPL-3.0 licence. Its source code is on GitHub at Chocobozzz/PeerTube and is written mainly in TypeScript.
- Is PeerTube free?
- Yes. PeerTube is open source, so the software itself is free to use. A managed cloud version is also available.
- Can I self-host PeerTube?
- Yes. PeerTube can be self-hosted on your own server or infrastructure.
- What is PeerTube an alternative to?
- PeerTube is an open-source alternative to YouTube, Vimeo, Twitch and Kick. Other open-source alternatives to YouTube include MediaCMS, NewPipe and Invidious.
- Is PeerTube actively maintained?
- Yes. The most recent commit to PeerTube was on 2 October 2026, and the latest release is v8.3.1, published on 28 September 2026. The project has 15k stars on GitHub.
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Kick
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Rumble
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Wistia
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