SHSelfHostIndex

Airsonic-Advanced vs Black Candy

A side-by-side comparison of two self-hosted media servers options — licensing, setup difficulty, resource needs, and what each one replaces.

Not the right match-up?
AI Airsonic-Advanced Community-driven music streaming server VS Black Candy Music streaming server
FeatureAirsonic-AdvancedBlack Candy
Deploy effortUnder-an-hour setupUnder-an-hour setup
Health score15 · At risk89 · Excellent
CategoryMedia ServersMedia Servers
LicenseGPL-3.0MIT
LanguageJavaScriptRuby
Setup difficultyMediumMedium
Min. RAM512 MB512 MB
Deploymentdocker, bare-metaldocker
GitHub stars★ 1,404★ 4,418
First released2019None
ReplacesSpotifySpotify, Apple Music

What are Airsonic-Advanced and Black Candy?

Airsonic-Advanced

Airsonic-Advanced is a community-maintained fork of Airsonic providing music streaming with Subsonic API compatibility. It targets users wanting a stable Java-based music server. It is deployed via Docker or a JAR file.

  • Subsonic API compatible
  • Multi-user music streaming
  • Podcast support
  • Transcoding

Read the full Airsonic-Advanced guide →

Black Candy

A self hosted music streaming server. Contribute to blackcandy-org/blackcandy development by creating an account on GitHub.

  • Personal music streaming
  • Responsive web player
  • Multi-user accounts
  • PWA support

Read the full Black Candy guide →

Airsonic-Advanced vs Black Candy: key differences

Airsonic-Advanced is written in JavaScript, while Black Candy is built with Ruby. Licensing differs — GPL-3.0 for Airsonic-Advanced versus MIT for Black Candy. Black Candy has the considerably larger community, at 4,418 GitHub stars versus 1,404.

Why pick each one

Choose Airsonic-Advanced if…

  • Works with many clients
  • Mature feature set
  • Multi-user

Watch out for

  • Heavier Java runtime
  • Slower development pace
Airsonic-Advanced details

Choose Black Candy if…

  • Clean modern interface
  • Simple to deploy

Watch out for

  • Music only
  • Smaller ecosystem
Black Candy details

Frequently asked questions

Is Airsonic-Advanced or Black Candy better?

Neither is universally better. Black Candy has the larger community; both share a medium setup difficulty, so the decision comes down to features and licensing.

Are Airsonic-Advanced and Black Candy free and open-source?

Yes. Airsonic-Advanced is licensed under GPL-3.0 and Black Candy under MIT. Both can be self-hosted at no software cost.

Can I run Airsonic-Advanced and Black Candy with Docker?

Airsonic-Advanced: yes. Black Candy: yes.

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