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Dev tools · alternatives · 2026

24 alternatives to I took back Video.js after 16 years and we rewrote it to be 88% smaller

What do you do when private equity buys your old company and fires the maintainers of the popular open source project you started over a decade ago? You reboot it, and bring along some new friends to do it. Video.js is used by billions of people every month, on sites like Amazon.com, Linkedin, and Dropbox, and yet it wasn’t in great shape. A skeleton crew of maintainers were doing their best with a dated architecture, but it needed more. So Sam from Plyr, Rahim from Vidstack, and Wes and Christain from Media Chrome jumped in to help me rebuild it better, faster, and smaller. It’s in beta…

Video.js is a rebuilt open-source video player library used by billions of people monthly on platforms like Amazon, LinkedIn, and Dropbox. Originally created over a decade ago, it has been completely rewritten to be… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes.

  1. 1BJ

    2012 · dfcb.github.com · its alternatives →

  2. 2

    Hi HN! Thanks for your attention to my post. It was a big challenge to run most of Node.js packages in browser, fast moreover. Virtual File system, resolve import/export. I got cold many times, depressions, burned out, yet still alive and finished it. Many guys helped me with an advice. Many users give a lot of positive feedback. There are 200,000 monthly unique users. I work full time now because of the freemium business model. To be honest - I am happy after many years of hard work.

    2022 · playcode.io · its alternatives →

  3. 3
    Editor.js▲723

    A block-styled editor with clean JSON output

    2019 · editorjs.io · its alternatives →

  4. 4

    Hey all, creator of Video.js and co-founder of Mux & Zencoder here. My team and I built this. I hope you like the themes we’ve built so far, and maybe even get inspired to build your own. I know Web Components are in a bit of a drama cycle right now. I’m happy to see them get any attention really. I’ve been pretty bullish on them since ~2013 when I started working with them, at least in the context of a widget like a video player. I’ve even given many related talks on them like this one (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N6Mh84SRoDg). I would never push them for a large app or…

    2024 · player.style · its alternatives →

  5. 5OS

    Hey everyone, for the past like six months I've been working on a portfolio project. I got tired of doing easy projects, so I decided to tackle something bigger and more challenging. That's when I came up with the idea of a video editor. This piece of work is intended to showcase my skills and land me a job, but I like to think when working on projects that my idea is so cool that people will like to use it, and I treat every project like a startup idea. Also I havent seen many open source video editors especially on web so that was one of the points why I decided to make that and not…

    2024 · its alternatives →

  6. 6

    Pts is a javascript library for visualization and creative-coding.

    2018 · ptsjs.org · its alternatives →

  7. 7

    Faster user-land reimplementations for several common builtin native JavaScript functions. - codemix/fast.js

    2014 · github.com · its alternatives →

  8. 8

    Motion (prev Framer Motion) is a fast, production-grade animation library for React, JavaScript and Vue. Build smooth UI animations at a tiny footprint.

    2021 · motion.dev · its alternatives →

  9. 9

    Typeform's VideoAsk is now available on your web browser

    2019 · videoask.com · its alternatives →

  10. 10NJ

    Hey HN, I'm Sindre, CTO of Scrimba (YC S20). We originally launched Scrimba to make video learning more interactive for aspiring frontend developers. So instead of passively watching videos, you can jump in an experiment with the code directly inside the video player. Since launch, almost two million people have used Scrimba to grow their skills. However, one limitation is that we've only supported frontend code, as our interactive videos run in the browser, whereas most of our learners want to go fullstack—building APIs, handling auth, working with databases, and so forth. To fix this, we…

    2025 · its alternatives →

  11. 11WJ
  12. 12BJ
  13. 13

    Hey HN! We’re building Revideo (https://github.com/redotvideo/revideo), an open source framework for programmatic video editing. Revideo lets you create video templates in Typescript and render them with dynamic inputs through an API. It also comes with a component that lets you preview your projects in the browser and integrate video editing functionality into web apps. The project is useful for anyone who wants to build apps that automate certain video editing tasks. A lot of companies in the space build their own custom stack for this, like Opus…

    2024 · github.com · its alternatives →

  14. 14

    Hello HN, Video content is more popular than ever, but the toolkit for creating such content is a bit behind. You usually have to rely on a server for rendering whenever you want to create a video editing project in the browser. This means uploading content to a server, coding complex filters and effects, and more. My friend and I spent a year developing an SDK that handles all these complexities and offers an easy-to-use interface for developers. The SDK works entirely in the browser, manages memory efficiently so it can run even on a 7-year-old Android device, supports GLSL effects and…

    2024 · rendley.com · its alternatives →

  15. 15TJ
  16. 16VJ

    Velocity.js: An incredibly fast animation engine for motion designers.

    2014 · velocityjs.org · its alternatives →

  17. 17IJ

    The video platform trusted by 287 million creatives, entrepreneurs, and businesses. Everything you need to create, manage, and share stunning videos.

    2013 · secure.vimeo.com · its alternatives →

  18. 18

    A fast, <1kb virtual DOM

    2021 · github.com · its alternatives →

  19. 19

    Made a video game in < 15 min

    2022 · github.com · its alternatives →

  20. 20
    PlayJS▲138

    Playground JavaScript web, now with superpowers

    2023 · its alternatives →

  21. 21

    It's an open source video editor designed for motion effects and versatility. developed with electronjs &#x2F; TypeScript, FFmpeg, Litjs. I'm currently focusing on making it easier to edit long-form videos. Specifically, adding subtitles to podcast episodes or creating short-form content from YouTube videos. And I’m also developing several extensible utilities. For example, recording video with a floating webcam—similar to Loom—or using LLMs to make cut editing easier. To make all this possible, I believe the first step is to build a versatile, general-purpose video editor. Demo :…

    2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

  22. 22

    faster.js is a Babel plugin that compiles idiomatic Javascript to faster, micro-optimized Javascript. - vzhou842/faster.js

    2018 · github.com · its alternatives →

  23. 23RA

    I wanted to have a framework that would let me build web apps faster than ever before. I didn’t care if it was a little hacky or didn’t use best practices — I wanted to be able to get a multi-user application out the door in hours instead of months. I researched the CMS space for months before deciding to build something from scratch. My goal was to be 90% done building a web app once I had the static HTML and CSS finished. I’m not a big fan of building out API endpoints over and over again for every new app, fiddling with a database, or doing lots of config. What I ended up with was a…

    2020 · its alternatives →

  24. 24

    A Javascript library to implement NFTs in web3 app

    2022 · nft-js.web.app · its alternatives →

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Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Prices were read from each product’s own site when checked and can change. Refine with your own description →