Audio and podcasting

Apple Music alternatives

2 open-source projects that already do this job. Free to use - not free to run, which is what the numbers on the right are for.

The full assessment →

The projects

navidrome/navidrome22,728GPL-3.0A lightweight personal music streaming server that indexes libraries and provides a web player and APIs.Open on GitHub koel/koel17,207MITWeb-based personal music streaming solution that indexes local music and offers playback, playlists, and search.Open on GitHub

What you give up either way

Licensed commercial music catalog and exclusive releases
Cross-device cloud-synced library integrated with Apple ecosystem
Curated editorial playlists and human curation
Deep platform integrations (Siri, Apple Watch, system-level playback on iOS) and DRM-protected streams

An open-source project doing the core job proves a replacement is possible. It does not prove it matches Apple Music, and it does not prove anyone has run it for a month. How we decide.