FreeSWITCH
After twenty-one months of silence, FreeSWITCH 1.11 deleted thirty legacy modules and moved on
Comparison · Meetings
SRS vs Asterisk
A side-by-side editorial comparison of SRS and Asterisk — release velocity, themes, recent moves, and the top alternatives to consider.
SRS vs Asterisk: at a glance
What is SRS?
SRS 6.0 went stable by making H.265 work everywhere, not just in one protocol.
SRS shipped 6.0 release 0 in December 2025, promoting the 6.0 line to stable in place of 5.0 at roughly 170,000 lines of code. The headline is H.265/HEVC carried across RTMP, HTTP-FLV, HLS, HTTP-TS and SRT, with DVR recording to both MP4 and FLV. WebRTC gained WHEP for playback, stereo Opus over SDP and a configurable AAC-to-Opus bitrate; SRT moved to libsrt 1.5.3 with round-trip latency reported down to 200ms.
What is Asterisk?
Six branches patched inside thirteen minutes — Asterisk's security process is the story here
The entire visible window is a single coordinated security publish. Within thirteen minutes on 25 June, the project shipped security releases across every supported line at once: 23.4.1, 22.10.1, 21.12.3 and 20.20.1 on the standard branches, plus certified-22.8-cert3 and certified-20.7-cert11 on the certified track. Each carries roughly twenty commits and points at the same downloads infrastructure.
SRS vs Asterisk: editorial side-by-side
SRS
0.0MEETINGS
SRS 6.0 went stable by making H.265 work everywhere, not just in one protocol.
◆ Current state
SRS shipped 6.0 release 0 in December 2025, promoting the 6.0 line to stable in place of 5.0 at roughly 170,000 lines of code. The headline is H.265/HEVC carried across RTMP, HTTP-FLV, HLS, HTTP-TS and SRT, with DVR recording to both MP4 and FLV. WebRTC gained WHEP for playback, stereo Opus over SDP and a configurable AAC-to-Opus bitrate; SRT moved to libsrt 1.5.3 with round-trip latency reported down to 200ms.
◆ Where it's heading
The eighteen months of alpha and beta tags before release 0 were overwhelmingly crash, leak and iterator fixes — smart-pointer conversions, use-after-free repairs in the HLS and bridge paths, RTC-to-RTMP stability. That is the signature of a project stabilizing an existing engine rather than extending it, with the codec work landing at the end. SRS is positioning as the self-hosted streaming server that speaks every ingest and egress protocol in one binary.
◆ Prediction
With 6.0 now the stable line, the pattern from the 5.0 era points to a run of 6.0 patch releases carrying fixes rather than features. The entries give no indication of what the next major line targets.
Asterisk
0.0MEETINGS
Six branches patched inside thirteen minutes — Asterisk's security process is the story here
◆ Current state
The entire visible window is a single coordinated security publish. Within thirteen minutes on 25 June, the project shipped security releases across every supported line at once: 23.4.1, 22.10.1, 21.12.3 and 20.20.1 on the standard branches, plus certified-22.8-cert3 and certified-20.7-cert11 on the certified track. Each carries roughly twenty commits and points at the same downloads infrastructure.
◆ Where it's heading
What this shows is the cost structure of a telephony platform with long-lived deployments: four standard branches and a separate certified track all have to receive the same fix on the same day. The engineering signal is not new capability but the ability to backport across six lines simultaneously, which is what enterprise PBX operators actually buy into.
◆ Prediction
Expect the next window to be regular branch releases across the same set of lines, with any further advisory triggering the identical simultaneous publish across all supported and certified branches.
Alternatives to SRS and Asterisk
Other Meetings products tracked by Sparkpulse, ranked by recent ship velocity. Each card links to a full editorial trajectory and lets you pivot into a head-to-head comparison with either SRS or Asterisk.
FusionPBX
The release feed stops in 2018, so nothing here describes the current product
PeerTube
PeerTube 8.2 spends its release candidates hardening instances against scrapers and locking down account data
Muvi
Buried in Muvi's OTT explainer mill, Alie is quietly becoming the reason to buy.
mediasoup
mediasoup's Rust line is absorbing an outside security audit while finishing subchannels over pipe transport.
EventMobi
EventMobi's feed argues for onsite badge printing while saying nothing about what it shipped
See all SRS alternatives → · See all Asterisk alternatives →
Recent activity from SRS and Asterisk
Latest ship moves from both products, interleaved chronologically. ⚡ = editorial spark.
- 1mo agoAsteriskAsterisk 23.4.1 security release
- 1mo agoAsteriskAsterisk 22.10.1 security release
- 1mo agoAsteriskAsterisk 21.12.3 security release
- 1mo agoAsteriskAsterisk 20.20.1 security release
- 1mo agoAsteriskCertified Asterisk 22.8-cert3 security release
- 1mo agoAsteriskCertified Asterisk 20.7-cert11 security release
- 7mo agoSRSSRS 6.0 goes stable with H.265 across RTMP, HLS, TS and SRT ⚡
- 8mo agoSRS6.0-b3: use-after-free and HLS cleanup fixes
- 9mo agoSRS6.0-b2: configurable SRT stream IDs and a WHIP transcoding fix
- 10mo agoSRS6.0-b1: RTC crash fixes, Windows binary dropped
- 11mo agoSRS6.0-b0: WebRTC recording sync fixed, forwarding configurable by env var
- 1y agoSRS6.0-a2: first H.265 DVR support, plus leak fixes
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between SRS and Asterisk?
They serve adjacent needs but don't currently overlap on shipped themes. SRS and Asterisk are shipping at a similar cadence (velocity 0.0 vs 0.0, both within Sparkpulse's "active" band). See the at-a-glance table above for a side-by-side breakdown of velocity, recent sparks, and editorial themes.
Is SRS better than Asterisk?
Sparkpulse doesn't pick a winner — we score release velocity, not feature parity. SRS and Asterisk are shipping at a similar cadence (velocity 0.0 vs 0.0, both within Sparkpulse's "active" band). For your specific use case, the alternatives sections above list other Meetings products to evaluate alongside.
What are the best alternatives to SRS?
Top SRS alternatives in Meetings are ranked by recent ship velocity. Browse the "SRS alternatives" section above for the current picks, or visit /alternatives/srs for the full list with editorial commentary on each.
What are the best alternatives to Asterisk?
Top Asterisk alternatives in Meetings are ranked by recent ship velocity. Browse the "Asterisk alternatives" section above for the current picks, or visit /alternatives/asterisk for the full list with editorial commentary on each.