7 Mux Alternatives in 2026, With Prices Read From Each Vendor's Own Page

Short version: if you are leaving Mux because delivery is your biggest line, Bunny Stream is the cheapest replacement for Western audiences and Cloudflare Stream the simplest. If you are leaving because you need HEVC, AV1 or control over the encoding ladder, Mux’s hosted-platform peers do not help — you need an encoding-first vendor (Bitmovin, or us). If you are leaving because you want a subscription with predictable quotas, Gumlet. If you already pay for Cloudinary, its video product may be “free enough”. If you want EUR invoicing and an EU-owned vendor, api.video.

Two disclosures. First, Transcodely is one of the seven; we sell a transcoding API and hosting, and we put ourselves last with the same scrutiny as the others. Second, every price here was read from the vendor’s own pricing page on 7 September 2026 — never from another listicle — and the page is linked next to each figure. We did that because every alternatives article we could find fails this test: the ones that quote Mux’s prices quote the model Mux replaced in July 2025, and the rest quote nothing at all.

#What Mux costs today, so the alternatives have a baseline

Mux cut prices by about 20% on 17 July 2025 and the current model, per Mux’s rate tables, is:

• Encoding (“input”) — free on the Basic quality tier at any resolution up to 4K, with a reduced ABR ladder and no codec choice. Plus costs $0.025 per minute at 720p ($0.03125 at 1080p, $0.10 at 4K); Premium $0.0375 at 720p. Live requires Plus or Premium.
• Storage — per minute of video per month, by resolution: $0.0024 (720p), $0.003 (1080p), $0.0048 (1440p), $0.0096 (4K). Assets not played for 30 days get 40% off, 90 days 60% off, and every new asset sits in the cold tier until its first play.
• Delivery — the first 100,000 minutes each month are free, then $0.0008 (720p), $0.001 (1080p), $0.0016 (1440p), $0.0032 (4K) per minute delivered.
• Add-ons — DRM $100/month plus $0.003 per license (Plus/Premium only); custom domains $100/month; Mux Data analytics, Mux Player, on-demand auto-captions and signed URLs are free; MP4 static renditions are now a paid add-on from $0.00075 per minute.
• Plans — Free (100k delivered minutes, up to 10 stored videos), pay-as-you-go with a $20 monthly credit, pre-pay bundles, enterprise from $3,000/month.

Mux’s marketing page and its docs disagree on two figures (Premium 720p input “$0.0384” vs “$0.0375”; live captions “$0.0024” vs “$0.024” per minute); we use the docs rate card. Mux publishes no data-residency or region choice for stored video.

#The reasons people actually leave

We went looking for real user statements rather than the triggers competitors assert. Reddit was not reachable for us; what we could read was Hacker News and vendor forums, so treat this as indicative:

• Usage-metered bandwidth at scale. The recurring calculation in one HN thread was a live event with a thousand viewers costing hundreds of dollars on any hosted platform, with Mux’s co-founder replying that “services that try to get away from charging for usage are just trying to play an averages game”. That is honest, and it is also why people with predictable heavy traffic shop for per-GB pricing.
• Model complexity. Three quality tiers × four resolution multipliers × volume bands × unbundled add-ons. Nobody quoted a wrong price for Bunny in the articles we read; several quoted wrong prices for Mux. The model is hard to hold in your head.
• No codec or ladder control. Mux documents H.264 output. If your product needs HEVC for Apple devices, AV1 for bandwidth, a specific CRF, or a ladder that stops at 720p, Mux’s tiers do not expose that.
• No stated region. For European teams with data-processing agreements to honour, “no statement” is a problem in itself.

Match your reason to the list below; there is no single best alternative.

#The seven

#1. Cloudflare Stream — one flat unit, no surprises

Pricing: “$5 per 1,000 minutes stored, regardless of file size” and “$1 per 1,000 minutes delivered”. Encoding and ingress are free, live is billed the same way as on-demand, and there are no egress or resolution multipliers. Storage is rounded up to the second; delivery is counted in 4-second segments, and “client-side preloading and buffering is counted as billable delivery”.

Codecs and control: H.264 only, 360p to 1080p, fixed ladder. Signed URLs and allowed-origin restrictions are included; the docs describe no DRM. Uploads are capped at 30 GB per file. Player for web, iOS, Android and Apple TV is included.

Better than Mux: one billable unit for everything, no tiers, no add-on fees for signing or the player, live at the same price as VOD. Worse than Mux: 1080p ceiling, no 4K, no HEVC/AV1, no DRM, and because storage is per minute “regardless of file size” a 240p clip costs the same to store as a 1080p one. No free tier is stated.

#2. Bunny Stream — cheapest bytes, EU by default

Pricing: storage $0.01/GB/month in the default Frankfurt region (+$0.01 for a second replication region, +$0.005 for each further one). Delivery on the 119-PoP Standard network is $0.01/GB in Europe and North America, $0.03 Asia and Oceania, $0.045 South America, $0.06 Middle East and Africa; the 10-PoP Volume network is $0.005/GB flat. H.264 encoding up to 1080p is free (“a shared service intended for low volume workloads”); Premium Encoding is $0.025 (≤480p), $0.05 (720p/1080p) or $0.15 (1440p/2160p) per source minute per output codec, in 10-second increments. Enterprise DRM (Widevine + FairPlay) is $99/month per library plus $0.005 per license; AI transcription $0.10 per language-minute. There is a $1 monthly minimum and a 14-day trial, no free tier.

Codecs and control: free tier H.264 only; premium adds H.265, VP9 and AV1 with 10-bit HDR, up to 2160p. No live streaming product exists as of our check.

Better than Mux: delivery is 2.5–4× cheaper per viewer-hour in Europe and North America at any realistic bitrate (we show the conversion in Mux vs Bunny Stream); modern codecs; explicit EU storage; 72-hour inputs. Worse than Mux: no live, no playback-quality analytics, no free tier, delivery cost triples outside the West, and per-GB billing means your bill scales with the bitrate you choose.

#3. api.video — the most Mux-shaped API, priced in euros if you are in Europe

Pricing: encoding is “free for unlimited minutes”; hosting “as low as $0.00285 per minute of video stored” per month; delivery (including live) “as low as $0.0017 per minute of video delivered”. Those “as low as” figures are the floor of a volume ladder whose upper tiers are not shown on the page, so the rate a new account actually pays is higher and unstated [unverified]. EU customers are billed in EUR, SEPA is available on request, and custom domains are €60/month each. There is a sandbox (30-second, watermarked, deleted after 24 hours) rather than a free production tier.

Codecs and control: H.264 MP4 and HLS in up to six sizes from 240p to 2160p; no HEVC/AV1, no ladder customisation. Player, SDKs, low-latency live, captions and watermarks are in the product. The company is headquartered in Roubaix and owned by OVHcloud.

Better than Mux: free 4K encoding, a two-line rate card, EU ownership and EUR invoicing. Worse than Mux: H.264 only, opaque volume tiers, no free tier — and an observation, not a prediction: the company blog’s most recent post is from November 2024. Check that the product is moving before you build on it.

#4. Gumlet — subscription quotas instead of metering

Gumlet’s pricing page is rendered client-side and we could not read it mechanically; the figures below come from Gumlet’s own pricing announcement of 13 May 2026 and should be confirmed on gumlet.com/pricing before you sign: Free $0 (60 minutes stored, 100 GB streamed); Creator $9/month (1,000 minutes, 3,000 GB, $0.10/GB overage); Growth $29/month (3,000 minutes); Business $149/month (15,000 minutes, $0.06/GB overage). DRM (Widevine + FairPlay) is an add-on at $99/month including 100,000 views, then $1 per 1,000. 4K, HDR10 and AI subtitles are included from the free plan. One inconsistency to raise with Gumlet: the announcement quotes storage quotas in minutes, while Gumlet’s overage docs bill storage overage per GB.

Codecs and control: 4K and HDR10, ABR from 360p to 4K; HEVC output is gated to the Business plan; no AV1 or VP9 mentioned; no ladder control mentioned. Live minutes are capped per plan (60/month free, 4,000/month Business).

Better than Mux: a bill you can predict, big included streaming allowances, flat-fee DRM with views bundled, a dashboard a non-engineer can run. Worse than Mux: mixed units (storage in minutes, streaming in GB), HEVC only at $149/month, live quotas, and pricing you can only verify in a browser.

#5. Bitmovin — encoding control, bring your own storage

Pricing, pay-as-you-go: VOD encoding “2k free minutes / month included” then “$0.02 per additional minute”, with “pricing varies by resolution and codec with multiplier factors”, billed in 10-second increments. Live encoding: 6 free hours a month then $3 per hour. Player: 10,000 free impressions then $1.50 per 1,000. Analytics: 100,000 free impressions then $0.65 per 1,000, 30-day retention.

The $0.02 is per output minute, and the multipliers are published: HD is 2×, 4K 4×, 8K 120×; HEVC and VP9 2×, AV1 4×; two-pass 1.25×, three-pass 2×; per-title 1.1×. Our arithmetic, not Bitmovin’s: a 1080p HEVC two-pass per-title rendition is 2 × 2 × 1.25 × 1.1 = 5.5 factors, or $0.11 per output minute, and a ladder is charged per rendition.

Codecs and control: H.264, HEVC, MV-HEVC, VP8, VP9 and AV1, per-title encoding configurable per codec, multi-DRM packaging (Widevine, PlayReady, FairPlay, Marlin). Output is written to your S3, GCS, Azure Blob, FTP/SFTP or Akamai NetStorage; there is no storage or CDN line on the price list.

Better than Mux: explicit codec and resolution control priced as multipliers, a player and analytics you can buy separately, an enterprise-grade encoder. Worse than Mux: it is not a hosting platform — storage and CDN are your problem — and the multipliers hide the real per-minute cost until you configure a job.

#6. Cloudinary — video as part of a media platform

Pricing: Free (25 monthly credits), Plus $99/month (225 credits), Advanced $249/month (600 credits), Enterprise custom. One credit is “1000 transformations or 1 GB of managed storage or 1 GB of viewing bandwidth or 500 SD video seconds or 250 HD video processing seconds”. Maximum video file size is 100 MB on Free, 2 GB on Plus, 4 GB on Advanced. The price of credits beyond your plan was not exposed on the pages we read [unverified].

Cloudinary’s FAQ explains why: “plan limits are soft limits. If you exceed them, we’ll ping you and suggest that you upgrade” — escalating, per the billing docs, to account suspension. There is no metered overage to price. The billing docs also name “Advanced Extra” and “Pro PAYG” plans that the pricing page did not show us.

Codecs and control: the vc_ transformation accepts h264 (with profile and level), h265, vp8, vp9, av1, prores and theora, with HLS and DASH via streaming profiles — more codec choice than any hosted platform above. No built-in DRM is documented; Cloudinary positions itself as delivery alongside a third-party DRM provider.

Better than Mux: if you already run images through Cloudinary, video rides the same credit pool, URL-based transformations and CDN with nothing new to integrate — and you get a codec parameter Mux does not offer. Worse than Mux: the credit arithmetic — on Plus one credit is about $0.44, so an HD minute of processing costs roughly $0.10 and every gigabyte stored or delivered eats the same pool; file caps are tight; video is the secondary product.

#7. Transcodely — encoding control, your bucket or ours

We are a transcoding API first and a hosting product second, and we bill in euros. Pricing: encoding per output minute by codec and resolution — H.264 or HEVC 1080p €0.010, 720p €0.0075, 480p €0.005; VP9 €0.015 and AV1 €0.040 at 1080p; quality tiers 0.75×/1×/2× — plus a flat processing fee of €0.05–€0.50 per job by machine class. Hosting is €0.020/GB/month storage and €0.010/GB egress with an embeddable player and signed URLs. DRM (Widevine, PlayReady, FairPlay) is a 1.25× multiplier on the encode, not a monthly fee. AI captions are €0.05 per source minute. Failed jobs cost nothing.

Codecs and control: explicit codec, CRF, bitrate, profile and ladder per output; HLS, DASH and CMAF; HDR10/HLG on 10-bit HEVC; watermarks, thumbnails, sprites, subtitle conversion and burn-in, clip ranges. Outputs can go to your own S3, GCS or R2 bucket instead of our hosting. Every advertised capability is exercised by a public conformance suite — 164 cases, two known gaps, all listed.

Better than Mux: encoding control and modern codecs without a tier, per-GB delivery, EU billing, outputs into your own storage, published validation. Worse than Mux: no live streaming, no playback-quality analytics (usage and cost rollups only), no free tier beyond a trial, and our CDN is BunnyCDN rather than a network we operate. We are also smaller and younger — a real consideration for a dependency this central.

#One worked month, same workload for everyone

The billing units above do not line up — minutes by resolution, minutes flat, gigabytes, credits, plan quotas — so here is a single workload run through each metered vendor. Assumptions, printed: 2,000 source minutes uploaded per month as a 480p/720p/1080p H.264 ladder (about 8.7 Mbps combined, so 3.9 GB per hour of content); 1 TB stored (≈ 255 hours ≈ 15,300 minutes of content); 10,000 viewer-hours (600,000 minutes) delivered at 1080p and 5 Mbps (2.25 GB per viewer-hour) to a European and North American audience.

Gumlet, Bitmovin and Cloudinary are omitted from the table on purpose: Gumlet’s plans would need overage terms we could not read, Bitmovin does not sell storage or delivery, and Cloudinary’s credit pool has an overage price we could not find. Currency conversion for our row uses €1 = $1.08; Mux, Cloudflare, Bunny and api.video publish in USD.

Two things to notice. Cloudflare Stream’s flat minute is more expensive than Mux here because Cloudflare has no free 100,000 minutes and its delivery unit costs the same at every resolution. And api.video’s simple-looking rate card produces the highest delivery bill in the table even at its floor rate — “per minute delivered” at $0.0017 is $0.10 per viewer-hour, roughly 4.5× Bunny’s per-GB equivalent at this bitrate.

Cut the audience to 1,500 viewer-hours a month and Mux’s free tier makes it $46 total, beating everyone. Move the audience to Southeast Asia and Bunny’s delivery triples. Your traffic shape decides; the table only makes the units comparable.

#Choosing by reason

#What we could not verify

For the record: api.video’s volume ladder above its floor rates; Gumlet’s live pricing page; Cloudinary’s overage price; AWS MediaConvert’s per-minute rates (its pricing page renders them client-side, so the DIY route of MediaConvert + CloudFront appears in no table here); and Reddit sentiment, which we could not fetch at all. FastPix and Qencode are credible further options — FastPix is a near one-to-one Mux model with a free tier, Qencode has a full per-codec transcoding rate card — but FastPix’s storage and delivery rates were not exposed on its pricing page when we read it, so neither made the seven. We would rather publish six verified alternatives than nine half-verified ones.