Comparing Visylix and Ant Media Server across WebRTC streaming, AI analytics, scalability, face recognition, and enterprise deployment for video platform buyers in 2026.
Platform Overview: WebRTC Server vs AI Powered Video Platform
Ant Media Server has carved out a strong niche as an open source friendly WebRTC streaming server that provides low latency video delivery, adaptive bitrate streaming, and scalable live broadcasting capabilities. It is popular among developers building video conferencing applications, live streaming platforms, and interactive broadcast solutions. Visylix, developed by Aptibit Technologies, occupies a different position in the market as a comprehensive video intelligence platform that combines enterprise grade streaming with native AI analytics and video management system capabilities.
At their core, these platforms solve different problems. Ant Media focuses on the streaming transport layer, excelling at getting video from publishers to viewers with minimal latency. Visylix addresses the broader challenge of not just streaming video but understanding it, managing it, and acting on it in real time. For buyers evaluating both platforms, the key question is whether you need a streaming server or a complete video intelligence solution.
This comparison provides a detailed analysis of both platforms across streaming performance, AI capabilities, scalability, deployment options, and enterprise readiness to help technology decision makers choose the right platform for their specific use case in 2026.
WebRTC Streaming and Protocol Support
Ant Media Server is primarily built around WebRTC, and it delivers strong performance in this area. It supports WebRTC publishing and playback, RTMP ingest, HLS delivery, and adaptive bitrate streaming. The platform also handles recording to MP4, cluster mode for horizontal scaling, and peer to peer streaming for reduced server load. Its open source community edition provides a solid foundation for developers, while the enterprise edition adds features like clustering, hardware encoding, and advanced security.
Visylix provides comprehensive protocol support including WebRTC, RTSP, RTMP, HLS, SRT, and ONVIF. Its WebRTC implementation delivers sub 500 millisecond glass to glass latency, which is competitive with Ant Media performance and optimized specifically for surveillance and monitoring use cases where consistent low latency across thousands of concurrent streams is essential. The inclusion of ONVIF and RTSP support is significant for security and IoT applications, as these protocols are standard in the IP camera ecosystem but are not natively supported by Ant Media.
For organizations building media streaming applications like live broadcasting, video conferencing, or interactive entertainment, Ant Media WebRTC centric approach is well aligned. For organizations whose primary video sources are IP cameras, encoders, and IoT devices that speak RTSP, ONVIF, and SRT, Visylix native support for these surveillance grade protocols provides a more natural fit without requiring protocol translation middleware.
AI Analytics: Where the Platforms Diverge Completely
Ant Media Server does not include any built in AI or video analytics capabilities. Its focus is squarely on video transport, and any analytics requirements must be addressed by integrating external AI services, building custom computer vision pipelines, or using third party analytics platforms. This means that organizations needing capabilities like face recognition, object detection, or behavioral analytics must architect, deploy, and maintain separate systems alongside Ant Media.
Visylix includes 10 native AI models that process video within the streaming pipeline itself. Face recognition achieves 99.7 percent accuracy and operates in real time across live video feeds. Object detection, ANPR, crowd density estimation, pose estimation, PPE compliance monitoring, heat map generation, motion detection, and unique person counting are all available out of the box. These models run on GPU accelerated infrastructure using TensorRT and OpenVINO, delivering enterprise grade inference performance without requiring data to leave the platform.
The gap in AI capabilities is not a criticism of Ant Media, which was never designed to be an analytics platform. However, for organizations whose use cases require intelligence on top of streaming, such as security monitoring, retail analytics, smart city deployments, or industrial safety, the absence of native AI in Ant Media means significant additional development and integration effort. Visylix eliminates this effort by delivering streaming and intelligence as a single integrated product.
Scalability and Enterprise Readiness
Ant Media Server scales through its cluster mode, where multiple instances work together to handle increasing publisher and viewer loads. The enterprise edition supports auto scaling in cloud environments and provides monitoring dashboards for cluster management. This scaling model is effective for media streaming workloads characterized by a moderate number of publishers serving a large number of viewers.
Visylix is architected for a fundamentally different scaling challenge: handling over one million concurrent input streams, each potentially running AI inference, recording, and real time alerting simultaneously. Its zero copy video architecture and efficient resource management enable this scale without proportional hardware growth. For enterprise deployments, Visylix provides centralized device management, role based access control, comprehensive audit logging, and multi tenant support, capabilities that are essential for large organizations but are not part of Ant Media core feature set.
Enterprise readiness extends beyond raw scalability to include support, SLAs, compliance certifications, and long term platform stability. Visylix is backed by Aptibit Technologies with enterprise support agreements, professional services, and a product roadmap driven by enterprise customer requirements. Ant Media offers commercial support for its enterprise edition, but organizations building mission critical security or analytics deployments should carefully evaluate whether a primarily streaming focused server meets their enterprise support and compliance needs.
Deployment Models and When to Choose Each Platform
Ant Media Server can be deployed on premise or in cloud environments, with Docker and Kubernetes support for containerized deployments. Its open source community edition makes it accessible for experimentation and small scale deployments. The platform is a natural fit for media companies, EdTech platforms, telehealth applications, and any scenario where the primary need is reliable, low latency video streaming without embedded analytics requirements.
Visylix supports cloud, on premise, edge, and hybrid deployment architectures. Its ability to run AI inference on NVIDIA Jetson edge devices makes it uniquely suited for distributed deployments where bandwidth is limited and local intelligence is essential. For organizations evaluating Ant Media for a project that also requires video analytics, the total solution cost of Ant Media plus a separate analytics platform plus custom integration should be compared against the all in one pricing of Visylix.
Choose Ant Media Server if your primary need is a WebRTC streaming server for media publishing and playback, you have an existing analytics pipeline or do not require video intelligence, or you prefer an open source foundation with the option to self host and customize. Choose Visylix if your use case requires AI powered video intelligence alongside streaming, you need to manage IP cameras and IoT devices natively, you are deploying at enterprise scale with thousands or millions of streams, or you want a single platform that replaces the need for separate streaming, analytics, and VMS tools.