Best open-source alternatives to Spotify

Navidrome is an open source music server designed for people who want to self-host their own streaming service. It manages large personal music collections and serves them through a modern web interface that works in browsers and on mobile devices. The project positions itself as a personal alternative to commercial music subscription platforms. It is aimed at users who want broad format support, strong metadata handling, and compatibility with existing Subsonic-compatible clients. The README highlights multi-user support, low resource usage, automatic library monitoring, and transcoding, suggesting it is suitable both for personal use and for shared household or small-team media setups. Installation and deeper usage details are documented on the project website, with binaries, Docker images, and source builds available.

Koel is a web-based personal audio streaming service aimed at web developers and users who want a modern self-hosted music experience. It presents itself as a simple application for streaming audio through the browser, with a client built in Vue and a server built in Laravel. The project also includes Koel Player, an official companion mobile app for iOS and Android that extends access beyond the mobile web experience. The README points users to the official documentation for installation, upgrades, troubleshooting, and development guidance, indicating that the core project is meant to be deployed and maintained by self-hosters rather than used as a hosted SaaS product.

Ampache is a self-hosted, web-based media application for people who want to stream and manage their own music and video collections. It is designed around existing organized libraries and relies on embedded tags and filenames to present content with useful metadata, rather than acting as a media organizer itself. The project is aimed at users and administrators running their own server. The README describes support materials for admins and users, a documented API, and installation/configuration guidance. It also lists the server stack it expects, including a web server, PHP, Node.js for newer releases, and a MySQL-compatible database, which indicates it is meant to be deployed and maintained like a typical PHP web application.

Polaris is a self-hosted music streaming server designed for people who want to access their own music library from a browser or mobile device. It emphasizes performance, responsiveness, and usability for very large collections, including libraries with 100,000 or more songs. The project is aimed at self-hosters and music enthusiasts who want a polished server for managing and playing their collection across devices. It supports multiple operating systems and Docker deployment, offers a modern web UI with browsing, searching, and configuration tools, and includes an OpenAPI-documented server API for integration and interactive exploration.

Swing Music is a self-hosted music player designed for people who want to manage and stream their own local audio libraries without relying on a commercial streaming service. It runs as a web application, letting users open it in a browser to configure and play their collection, and it also includes an Android client for mobile listening. The project emphasizes music-library organization and listening features such as daily mixes, metadata normalization, album versioning, playlists, collections, statistics, lyrics, and Last.fm scrobbling. It supports multiple users and can be deployed either from prebuilt binaries or via Docker, while development setup is based on Python 3.11+ and uv. The README also notes required system packages like FFmpeg and libev for certain features and platforms.

LMS is a self-hosted music streaming application designed for people who want to browse and play their own music collection through a browser. It emphasizes rich library organization and metadata handling, using tags, MusicBrainz data, and artist information folders to present albums and artists in a more structured way than a simple file browser. The project is aimed at users who manage sizable personal libraries and want features such as recommendations, radio playback, playlists, lyrics, podcast support, and transcoding. It also provides user management with multiple authentication backends and exposes a Subsonic/OpenSubsonic-compatible API, making it suitable for clients and integrations that speak that ecosystem.

Web-based media streamer and jukebox.

Modern, web-based, convivial, multi-user and free music server.