Privacy
Accounts, rooms, chat and usage live in your group’s own Cloudflare account. Nothing is recorded, there are no ads and nothing scans your content.
Open source · self-hosted · v0.1.7
Watch together, on a server you own.
Openlive is a private alternative to Discord for groups of friends: rooms with screen streams, voice, text and cameras. Each group runs its own instance on its own Cloudflare account, so the rooms, the members, the messages and the bandwidth bill are theirs.
Viewers need only a browser. Streams up to 4K60, about a tenth of a second behind.
Why Openlive
Your group, your rules, your bill.
Ownership and control
Sign-up is by invite, and the group sets its own roles, room rules and bans. No platform decides what your group can do or whether it exists. The code is AGPL-3.0 and you host it yourself.
Quality without a subscription
Streams up to 4K60 (1080p120 and 1440p120 if the admin allows), about 100 ms behind the streamer’s screen, for everyone in the group.
A tour
Everything a room needs, nothing it doesn’t.
All screenshots are from the real app on a local instance with made-up people.
Watch together
The stream and the cameras share one stage, with the chat beside. Someone clicks Go live and everyone else watches in the browser, with nothing to install.
- Any recent browser, on desktop or phone. No account on a third-party service.
- First frame in about 0.4 s: the player connects while you look at the room.
- Automatic quality with a manual override, theater mode, picture in picture, full screen and stats for nerds.
- A full stream has a queue, members first.
Go live from the web
Pick a screen, then quality and sound. A small native helper captures a screen or a single window with that app’s sound and sits in the tray.
- Linux: GStreamer and PipeWire, encoding on the GPU (NVENC, VA-API) or with x264. macOS: ScreenCaptureKit and VideoToolbox.
- Start, pause (a privacy curtain), change quality and stop from the web.
- Presets from text and code (1080p30) to native (up to 4K60), plus 1080p120 and 1440p120 when the admin allows.
- Sent as simulcast layers, so each viewer gets what their connection holds.
Voice and cameras
A voice channel is a video call, with whoever is speaking ringed.
- Mute, deafen, push-to-talk, input and output devices, and a volume per person.
- Up to 12 people in voice by default; owners and admins can server-mute.
- Cameras off by default: 360p and 180p layers, 6 per room by default.
- On a bad network the camera steps down before the voice does.
Text chat
Every room can have its own chat, and in a text channel the page is the chat.
- Mentions, edit and delete, unread badges and links.
- History kept for none, 7, 30 or 90 days, as the room chooses.
- Each room picks what it has: streams, voice (with or without cameras), text, or any mix.
An admin panel that watches the bill
The platform overview shows the month’s bandwidth, its projection and the cost per space, plus how streams played.
- A first-run wizard checks every secret and service and opens the first space.
- A monthly bandwidth limit in plain tiers; near it, economy mode caps the quality, and at it new streams are blocked.
- Ceilings for resolution, frame rate, bitrate and viewers, which spaces and rooms can only lower.
- Invite links with roles, optional approval and expiry; restricted rooms, bans and an audit log.
A space and its rooms
Members and roles
First-run wizard
Every account on the instance
On the phone, too
The web app is installable and works on phones: the stage, the chat as a bottom sheet, voice and cameras. An Android app (beta, Android 7 or later) adds voice that keeps running in the background, with the screen locked.
How it works
Media never touches the server.
Someone clicks Go live, the helper on their computer captures and encodes the screen with the app’s sound, Cloudflare Realtime carries it, and everyone else in the room watches in the browser.
The helper captures
On the streamer’s computer, it encodes the screen or window on the GPU and publishes it as simulcast layers.
Cloudflare Realtime carries
The Realtime SFU fans the stream out from the Cloudflare location nearest to each person.
Browsers watch
Each viewer pulls one layer, the one their connection holds. Nothing to install.
One Cloudflare Worker serves the web app, the REST API and the room WebSockets. Each room is a Durable Object that knows who is here, who is live and who holds a viewer slot; D1 keeps the accounts, spaces and usage; R2 keeps the stream thumbnails.
Numbers
Measured, not promised.
- Glass-to-glass latency
- ~100ms
- Median 102 ms at 1080p60, 91 ms at 1440p60
- First frame
- ~0.4s
- Median 363 ms, pulling on hover
- Native quality
- 4K60
- 1080p60 and 1440p60 presets; native up to 4K60
- High frame rate
- 120fps
- 1080p120 and 1440p120, off by default
- Free bandwidth a month
- 1,000GB
- Per instance (Cloudflare Realtime), about 19 full hours
Measured on one machine; there is no measured side-by-side test against Discord.
Openlive vs Discord
How it compares.
 Openlive | Discord | |
|---|---|---|
| Screen streams | Up to 4K60, 120 fps up to 1440p (opt-in), ~100 ms, no subscription | HD streaming is a Nitro perk |
| Voice | Per room: mute, deafen, push-to-talk, per-person volume | Yes |
| Text | Per room: mentions, unread, retention you choose (none to 90 d) | Yes |
| Cameras | In voice, 360p and 180p layers, 6 per room by default | Yes |
| Who holds the data | Your group, in your Cloudflare account | Discord |
| Who sets the rules | Your group’s admins | Discord’s terms, then the server’s admins |
| Cost | Free within Cloudflare’s 1,000 GB a month; brakes at your limit | Free, with paid Nitro tiers |
| DMs, bots, push notifications | Not yet | Yes |
Discord’s public Go Live tiers list HD streaming as a Nitro perk. Measured on one machine; there is no measured side-by-side test against Discord.
Honest limits
What it is not, yet.
“Free” has a ceiling
Free means within Cloudflare’s free tier, 1,000 GB of egress a month. Above it Cloudflare bills US$ 0.05 per GB, and the app warns and brakes at the monthly limit the admin picks.
It depends on Cloudflare
That is a much smaller dependency than a social network: the account, the code and the data are yours, and the code is portable.
Not there yet
Direct messages, bots and integrations, push notifications. Openlive is for private groups, not large public communities. The Windows helper comes last.
Self-host
Your own instance in a few steps.
Each group deploys to its own Cloudflare account, on its own domain or a free workers.dev address, without editing any file. The setup checks the toolchain and the account, helps with the Discord and Resend keys, creates what is missing, deploys, and prints the install code that makes you the admin. It is safe to run again.
A Cloudflare account
The free plan is enough. R2 asks for a payment method once, even though it costs $0 within its free tier.
Node 26 and pnpm 12.15
Install Node, run corepack enable, then clone the repository and install.
Log in twice
Wrangler for D1, R2 and the deploy; the cf CLI for the Realtime app and TURN key.
Check the plan, then run it
A dry run calls nothing and writes nothing. Use your own domain or a free workers.dev name.
Sign in and open your space
The install code makes you the admin; the wizard walks through the ceilings and the monthly limit.
git clone https://github.com/henriquefps/openlive.git && cd openlive
pnpm install
pnpm --filter @openlive/api exec wrangler login
pnpm --filter @openlive/setup exec cf auth login
# checks and plan; calls nothing
pnpm run setup -- --domain live.example.com --dry-run
# or: --workers-dev <name>
pnpm run setup -- --domain live.example.com
Download
Watching needs a browser. Streaming needs the helper.
The official builds are on GitHub Releases. A self-hosted server also offers them to its members from its own Download page, with the pairing command filled in.
Linux
Wayland (KDE tested; GNOME, Hyprland, Sway expected) through the portal and PipeWire. A tarball and a Flatpak.
Helper releasesmacOS
macOS 13 or later, ScreenCaptureKit and VideoToolbox. A signed, notarized disk image.
Helper releasesAndroid (beta)
Android 7 or later. Watch, chat and talk, with voice in the background. Not on the Play Store: install the APK.
Android releasesWindows
The Windows helper comes last. Watching already works in any recent browser.
Then pair the helper with your server:
openlive-helper pair --instance https://live.example.com