Mux vs Bunny Stream (2026): Pricing on One Axis, Features Side by Side
Mux bills delivery per minute, Bunny bills per gigabyte, and no comparison converts between them. We do the bitrate math, re-verify every rate on the vendors' own pages, and say where each one wins — including where both beat us.
Short version: Bunny Stream is the cheaper way to deliver video at any realistic bitrate in Europe and North America, and the only one of the two that outputs HEVC, AV1 or VP9. Mux is the only one with live streaming, the only one with real playback-quality analytics, and the more generous place to start for free. Which one is “cheaper” depends almost entirely on how much you deliver and where your viewers are — and the two vendors bill on units so different that most comparisons refuse to put a number on it. This one does.
Disclosure first: Transcodely is a third vendor in this space. We sell a transcoding API and hosting that compete with both products, and we say so again at the end, where we list what Mux and Bunny each do better than we do. Every price below was read from Mux’s and Bunny’s own pricing pages on 7 September 2026, with the exact page linked. If you are reading this months later, re-check them — both vendors move.
The unit problem
Mux prices storage and delivery per minute of video, tiered by resolution. Bunny prices both per gigabyte, tiered by region. Neither is wrong, but you cannot compare a per-minute rate with a per-GB rate without picking a bitrate, and a bitrate is a property of your encode, not the vendor’s.
So here is the conversion. A 1080p H.264 stream at a typical 5 Mbps moves 5 × 3,600 ÷ 8 = 2.25 GB per viewer-hour. At 720p (2.5 Mbps) it is 1.125 GB; at 4K (16 Mbps) it is 7.2 GB. Those are the same bitrate targets our own cost calculator uses; if your encodes run leaner or fatter, scale the Bunny and Transcodely columns accordingly — the Mux column does not move, because Mux does not care how many bytes the minute contains.
Delivery, per viewer-hour
| Resolution | Mux (per-minute, Basic/Plus rate) | Bunny (EU/NA, $0.01/GB) | Bunny (Middle East & Africa, $0.06/GB) |
|---|---|---|---|
| 720p @ 2.5 Mbps | 60 × $0.0008 = $0.048 | 1.125 GB = $0.011 | $0.068 |
| 1080p @ 5 Mbps | 60 × $0.0010 = $0.060 | 2.25 GB = $0.023 | $0.135 |
| 4K @ 16 Mbps | 60 × $0.0032 = $0.192 | 7.2 GB = $0.072 | $0.432 |
Sources: Mux rate tables (first-500K-minute tier), Bunny Stream pricing (Standard network).
Two things fall out of that table that no other comparison states plainly:
- In Europe and North America, Bunny is cheaper to deliver at every resolution — by 2.5× to 4×. For Mux’s per-minute rate to beat Bunny’s $0.01/GB at 1080p, your stream would have to run above 13 Mbps. Nobody delivers 1080p at 13 Mbps.
- Outside those regions the sign flips. Bunny’s Standard network charges $0.03/GB in Asia and Oceania, $0.045 in South America and $0.06 in the Middle East and Africa. At $0.06/GB a 1080p viewer-hour costs more than double what Mux charges. If your audience is in Jakarta or Lagos, Mux’s flat per-minute price is the cheaper one — Mux publishes no regional delivery tiers at all.
Mux also gives away the first 100,000 delivered minutes every month — about 1,667 viewer-hours — before any of its delivery charges apply. Bunny has no free delivery; it has a $1 monthly minimum and a 14-day trial. For a side project that never crosses 100k minutes, Mux delivery is $0 and this whole table is moot.
Bunny’s cheaper Volume network ($0.005/GB flat, worldwide, 10 PoPs instead of 119) halves the Bunny column again, at the cost of fewer edge locations.
Storage, per hour of content per month
| Vendor | Rate | 1 hour of 1080p content |
|---|---|---|
| Mux, hot | $0.003 per stored minute per month | $0.18 / month |
| Mux, “Infrequent” (no plays for 30 days) | −40% | $0.108 / month |
| Mux, “Cold” (no plays for 90 days, and every new asset until first play) | −60% | $0.072 / month |
| Bunny | $0.01 per GB per month | A 480p–1080p H.264 ladder is roughly 8.7 Mbps combined ≈ 3.9 GB → $0.039 / month |
Mux’s storage price is per minute regardless of how many renditions the ladder holds; Bunny bills every byte actually stored, so a taller ladder or a stored original costs more. Even so, a hot Mux title costs about 4–5× a Bunny title to keep. Mux’s automatic cold-storage tiers close some of that gap for long-tail libraries, and — a detail Mux’s own pricing page buries — every asset starts in the Cold tier until it is played for the first time. Bunny has no cold tier; it charges the same $0.01/GB whether the file is watched hourly or never. Bunny’s second replication region costs another $0.01/GB; third and later regions $0.005/GB.
Encoding
| Mux | Bunny Stream | |
|---|---|---|
| Free tier | Basic: free, “reduced” ABR ladder, no codec or ladder control, up to 2160p | Standard: free, H.264 only, 1080p/720p/480p/360p/240p, you pick which rungs are on; Bunny describes it as “a shared service intended for low volume workloads” |
| Paid tiers | Plus $0.025 (720p) → $0.10 (2160p) per source minute, “standard” ladder, per-title encoding. Premium $0.0375 → $0.15 per source minute, “extended” ladder — and Premium raises your storage and delivery rates by 50% too | Premium Encoding $0.025 (≤480p), $0.05 (720p/1080p), $0.15 (1440p/2160p) per source minute, per output codec — pick H.264 and AV1 and you pay twice — billed in 10-second increments |
| Output codecs | H.264 (Mux documents “high-bitrate H.264” for 4K; we found no HEVC or AV1 output option published) | Free: H.264. Premium: H.264, H.265, VP9, AV1, with 10-bit HDR |
| Input limits | 12-hour max duration; standard-input spec is H.264/HEVC ≤ 8 Mbps at 1080p, ≤ 20 Mbps at 4K; non-standard input takes a slower mezzanine path | 72-hour max duration; 3840×2160 max; ≤ 60 fps; accepts H.264, H.265, VP9, VP8, AV1, MPEG-2, ProRes |
Sources: Mux quality levels, Mux 4K guide, Mux input spec, Bunny video specification, Bunny premium encoding billing.
Two footnotes on the numbers. Mux’s marketing page says Premium starts at “$0.0384/min for 720p” while its docs rate table says $0.0375 — we quote the docs. Bunny’s premium-encoding docs page still lists H.265 and AV1 as “coming soon” while Bunny’s own February 2025 announcement says they shipped; we treat them as shipped.
Features that decide it
Live streaming — Mux, and only Mux
Mux streams live up to 1080p in three latency modes (roughly 30 s standard, 10–15 s reduced, about 5 s low), records the broadcast to an on-demand asset automatically, and can simulcast for $0.02 per minute per target. Live is not available on the free Basic tier — you pay Plus or Premium encoding rates for every live minute.
Bunny Stream has no live product. Bunny wrote in 2021 that live streaming was “coming in the near future”; as of our check there is nothing in the Stream docs or price list. If live matters to you, the comparison is over.
Playback analytics — Mux, decisively
Mux Data is included at no charge for video hosted on Mux and reports the metrics that tell you whether playback actually worked: startup time, rebuffering, playback failures, and composite quality scores, with 100 days of retention. Bunny’s statistics cover views, watch time, a heatmap, per-country breakdowns, bandwidth and an “engagement score” — useful, but there is no startup-time or rebuffering metric anywhere in the documented list. If you need to know that viewers in one ISP are stalling, only Mux tells you.
DRM — close, with different systems
Both charge about the same: Mux is $100/month plus $0.003 per license and requires Plus or Premium encoding; Bunny’s MediaCage Enterprise is $99/month per library plus $0.005 per license, falling to $0.003 above 100,000 licenses per month. Mux covers Widevine, PlayReady and FairPlay; Bunny documents Widevine and FairPlay only. Bunny’s included MediaCage Basic is clear-key encryption — a deterrent, not DRM.
Captions and AI
Mux’s on-demand auto-captions are free. Bunny’s Transcribe AI is $0.10 per language-minute across 57 languages, with AI-generated titles and descriptions thrown in. Mux’s additional AI features (“Mux Robots” — translation, chapters, summaries) are metered in units with a 100k-unit free allowance per month.
Player
Both include a player at no charge. Mux Player ships as a web component, a React component, native mobile players and an iframe. Bunny shipped a rebuilt player in March 2026, customisable with your own CSS and JavaScript, with iOS and Android SDKs.
A worked month
Take a mid-size catalogue: 2,000 source minutes uploaded a month as a 1080p H.264 ladder, 1 TB stored, 10,000 viewer-hours (600,000 minutes) delivered to a European and North American audience.
| Mux (Basic encoding) | Bunny Stream (free encoding, Standard network) | |
|---|---|---|
| Encoding | $0 | $0 |
| Storage | 1 TB ≈ 15,300 stored minutes of ladder × $0.003 ≈ $46 hot; less as titles age into Infrequent/Cold | 1,000 GB × $0.01 = $10 |
| Delivery | (600,000 − 100,000 free) × $0.001 = $500 | 22,500 GB × $0.01 = $225 |
| Month | ≈ $546 | ≈ $235 |
(The Mux storage line converts 1 TB back to minutes at the same 8.7 Mbps ladder bitrate: 3.9 GB per hour of content, so 1 TB holds about 255 hours. Bunny’s $1 minimum is irrelevant at this size.)
At this shape Bunny costs well under half. Move the audience to Southeast Asia and Bunny’s delivery line triples to $675, and Mux is now the cheaper bill. Cut delivery to 1,500 viewer-hours and Mux’s 100k free minutes swallow it entirely. There is no universal winner here, only your traffic shape.
Where each one wins
Choose Mux if you need: live streaming; playback-quality analytics; a free tier that covers real usage (100k delivered minutes and free captions, no minimum); PlayReady in your DRM set; per-title encoding; or an audience concentrated outside Europe and North America.
Choose Bunny Stream if you need: the lowest delivery cost for Western audiences; HEVC, AV1 or VP9 output; control over which ladder rungs exist without paying for encoding; inputs longer than 12 hours or in ProRes; storage that defaults to Frankfurt with explicit, per-region replication pricing; or a bill you can predict from bytes rather than from a resolution tier you do not fully control.
Where both of them beat us — and where we differ
We would rather you hear this from us than from a review. Compared with Transcodely:
- Both have things we do not. Mux has live streaming and Mux Data; we are a VOD pipeline with usage and cost rollups, not viewer analytics. Mux’s free tier is bigger than anything we offer. Bunny runs its own 119-PoP CDN with a $1 minimum — and, in the interest of full disclosure, our hosting product delivers over BunnyCDN, so on raw edge reach we are not a differentiator against Bunny at all. Our storage is €0.020/GB/month against Bunny’s $0.01.
- Where we sit on their axes. Our hosting egress is €0.010/GB — the same order as Bunny’s EU/NA rate — with the same per-GB unit, so the conversion table above applies to us with a currency swap. Encoding is billed per output minute by codec and resolution, from €0.005 (480p H.264) and €0.010 for 1080p H.264, with explicit codec, CRF, profile and ladder control on every output and HEVC/VP9/AV1 with no surcharge tier. DRM — Widevine, PlayReady and FairPlay — is a 1.25× multiplier on the encode, not a monthly access fee. Failed jobs bill nothing.
- What we do that neither does. Every capability we advertise is exercised by a published conformance suite that runs real jobs through real workers and probes the produced bytes — 164 cases, two known gaps, all public. And we will write outputs into your own S3, GCS or R2 bucket instead of holding them.
Our interactive comparison calculator models all three vendors — plus Cloudflare Stream and Coconut — on whatever workload you type in, using the same rates cited above. Head-to-head pages: Transcodely vs Mux, Transcodely vs Bunny Stream.
What we could not verify
For completeness, the holes in this comparison: Mux publishes no storage-region or data-residency choice for Mux Video that we could find, so that row is absent. Bunny’s list of available replication regions is not enumerated on the pages we fetched. Reddit and G2 were inaccessible to us, so the “what users say” evidence we saw was limited to Hacker News threads and vendor forums — it consistently paired Mux with “best developer experience, expensive at scale” and Bunny with “cheapest bandwidth, more assembly required”, which matches the numbers above. Nothing in this post relies on a third-party price figure.