If you're running coturn in production, you already know the routine. TLS certificate renewals, capacity planning for traffic spikes, debugging relay failures at 2 AM, and patching CVEs that drop with zero warning. Your senior engineers are spending 15-20 hours a month maintaining TURN infrastructure that isn't your product.
There's a better path. Migrating from self-hosted coturn to a managed TURN service eliminates the operational burden entirely. And the switch is simpler than most teams expect -- TURN servers are loosely coupled to your application, so the migration requires changing just a URL and credentials.
This guide covers everything you need to make the move. You'll learn why teams are seeking a coturn alternative, what managed services are available, how to evaluate them, and how to execute the migration step by step. Whether you're exploring the Open Relay Project for a free option or evaluating Metered TURN server for production-grade infrastructure, this guide walks you through the full process.
Why teams look for a coturn alternative
Coturn is the de facto open-source TURN server. With 13,500+ GitHub stars and widespread adoption across projects like Jitsi, Nextcloud Talk, and Matrix, it has been the default choice for self-hosted TURN infrastructure for years.
But popularity doesn't mean it's the right choice for every team today. Here's why a growing number of engineering organizations are searching for a coturn alternative.
The maintenance burden is real
Running coturn across multiple regions means you own every piece of the stack. OS patching, TLS certificate rotation, DDoS mitigation, capacity planning, monitoring, and on-call -- all of it falls on your team.
In practice, this translates to 15-20 hours per month of senior engineering time per deployment. At senior WebRTC engineer salaries ($180-250K/year), that's roughly $36-50K per year in opportunity cost -- time your team could spend building features that drive revenue.
The operational surface area is significant:
- Multi-region deployment: Each region is a separate instance to provision, configure, and maintain
- Credential management: No built-in API for credential rotation or expiry -- you build custom tooling or manage it manually
- Auto-scaling: Coturn doesn't scale automatically. Traffic spikes require manual intervention or custom orchestration
- Monitoring and alerting: You need to build or integrate your own observability stack
- DDoS protection: Public-facing TURN endpoints are frequent targets, and protection costs thousands of dollars per month
Security vulnerabilities keep surfacing
In December 2025, CVE-2025-69217 disclosed a serious vulnerability in coturn. Versions 4.6.2r5 through 4.7.0-r4 used libc's random() function instead of OpenSSL's RAND_bytes for generating nonces and randomizing ports.
The result? An attacker could predict nonces with roughly 50 sequential unauthenticated allocation requests, enabling authentication spoofing and port prediction. This isn't a theoretical attack surface -- it's a practical exploit vector.
Coturn v4.8.0 (released January 2026) patched this CVE. But here's the thing: when you self-host, you are responsible for applying the patch. Every hour between disclosure and deployment is a window of exposure.
This isn't a one-time issue either. Coturn's CVE history includes:
- CVE-2020-26262: Loopback address bypass
- CVE-2020-4067: Information leak via uninitialized buffer
- Pre-4.5.0.9: SQL injection in the admin web portal and unsafe default configuration with unauthenticated telnet admin access
A vulnerability scan of the coturn Docker image (v4.6.2, Debian 12.7) found 116 vulnerabilities: 1 critical, 10 high-severity, 21 medium, and 80 low. The v4.8.0 image may have improved this count, but the underlying challenge remains -- you must continuously monitor and patch.
Sustainability concerns persist
Coturn's maintenance history has been uneven. A widely cited 2022 analysis called it "the Fragile Colossus", pointing to periods of inactivity, hundreds of open issues, and unmerged pull requests.
The project has seen renewed activity since then -- v4.8.0 is a meaningful release with DDoS handling improvements, memory leak fixes, and the CVE-2025-69217 patch. The repository now shows 143 contributors and 1,832 total commits.
But 343 open issues remain. And the project has no corporate backing or dedicated full-time maintainer. For teams building mission-critical applications -- telehealth platforms, enterprise collaboration tools, contact centers -- the question isn't whether coturn works today. It's whether you can depend on it for years of continuous operation without a guaranteed support structure.
The case for a managed coturn alternative
When teams evaluate a coturn alternative, the decision often comes down to a fundamental question: do you want to operate TURN infrastructure, or do you want TURN infrastructure that operates itself?
Managed TURN services shift the entire operational burden to the provider. Here's what that means concretely.
What you stop doing
The moment you migrate from coturn to a managed service, your team stops:
- Provisioning and configuring servers across regions
- Managing TLS certificates and protocol configurations
- Building custom credential rotation tooling
- Monitoring server health and setting up alerting
- Handling DDoS mitigation for public-facing endpoints
- Debugging relay failures at 2 AM
- Planning capacity for traffic spikes
- Applying security patches within hours of CVE disclosure
What you gain
A managed TURN service replaces all of that with:
- A single API call to provision credentials
- Global coverage across dozens of regions without deploying a single server
- Automatic geo-routing that connects users to the nearest relay
- Built-in scaling that handles traffic spikes without intervention
- SLA-backed uptime with the provider on the hook for reliability
- 24/7 support from engineers who specialize in TURN infrastructure
The trade-off is cost. You're paying a provider instead of running your own infrastructure. But when you factor in engineering time, bandwidth, DDoS protection, and monitoring, the total cost of ownership for self-hosted coturn often exceeds managed service pricing -- especially at moderate traffic volumes.
Managed coturn alternatives: your options
When searching for a coturn alternative, two managed services stand out for teams at different stages: the Open Relay Project for development and testing, and Metered for production workloads.
Open Relay Project -- free TURN for development and prototyping
The Open Relay Project provides a free community TURN server that's ideal for getting started without any cost commitment.
What you get:
- 20 GB per month of free TURN relay traffic
- REST API with automatic geo-routing to the nearest server
- No credit card required -- sign up and start relaying traffic immediately
- Standard TURN protocols: UDP, TCP, TLS, and DTLS
Best for:
- Prototyping and development environments
- Hackathons and proof-of-concept builds
- Testing NAT traversal before committing to a paid service
- Small hobby projects with low traffic
Limitations:
- No SLA or uptime guarantee
- Shared infrastructure
- Not suitable for production workloads where reliability is critical
- Limited bandwidth (20 GB/month)
As a coturn alternative, the Open Relay Project is ideal for teams that want to stop self-hosting in development environments. Instead of maintaining a local coturn instance for testing, point your ICE server configuration at the Open Relay Project and focus on your application logic.
Here's what the credential request looks like:
// Fetch TURN credentials from Open Relay Project
const response = await fetch(
"https://openrelayproject.metered.ca/api/v1/turn/credentials?apiKey=YOUR_API_KEY"
);
const iceServers = await response.json();
// Use in your WebRTC peer connection
const pc = new RTCPeerConnection({ iceServers });
That's it. No coturn installation, no turnserver.conf, no TLS certificate setup, no firewall rules.
Metered -- production-grade managed TURN
For production workloads, Metered TURN server provides enterprise-grade infrastructure purpose-built for TURN relay.
Infrastructure:
- 31+ named regions with 100+ Points of Presence across 5 continents
- Sub-30ms latency from anywhere in the world
- 99.999% historical uptime -- that's less than 26 seconds of downtime per month
- Private high-speed TURN backbone connecting all global servers over optimized private paths, not the public internet
- Premium bandwidth from local providers with direct peering -- maintains consistent quality during network congestion
Developer experience:
- REST API for full credential management (create, rotate, expire programmatically)
- Dashboard with real-time usage, bandwidth, and connection metrics
- Projects for organizing credentials by application or tenant
- Webhooks for event-driven notifications
- Quotas for per-project or per-credential usage limits
- Multi-tenancy with built-in tenant isolation for platform companies
- Region pinning for data residency and compliance requirements
- Custom domain support for white-label deployments
Support:
- 24/7 phone and email support -- actual humans who specialize in TURN infrastructure, not a general support queue
- Dedicated account management on enterprise plans
Pricing:
| Plan | Monthly Price | Included Bandwidth | Overage Rate | Uptime SLA |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free Trial | $0 | 500 MB | -- | -- |
| Growth | $99 | 150 GB | $0.40/GB | 99.95% |
| Business | $199 | 500 GB | $0.20/GB | 99.99% |
| Enterprise | $499 | 2 TB | $0.10/GB | 99.999% |
| Custom | Contact Sales | Custom | Volume discounts | Custom |
No credit card required for the free trial. Start relaying in under five minutes.
Coturn alternative cost comparison: self-hosted vs managed
The most common objection to choosing a coturn alternative is cost. "Coturn is free -- why would I pay for something I can run myself?"
But coturn isn't free. It costs engineering time, cloud infrastructure, bandwidth, and operational overhead. Here's what the numbers actually look like.
Infrastructure and bandwidth costs (self-hosted)
Based on published cost analyses, running self-hosted coturn on major cloud providers costs:
| Provider | Instance Type | Monthly Cost (150 GB bandwidth) |
|---|---|---|
| AWS EC2 | t3.xlarge | ~$154/month |
| Google Cloud | c3-standard-4 | ~$202/month |
These numbers cover a single region only. They don't include:
- Multi-region replication (multiply the base cost by region count)
- DDoS protection (starting from thousands of dollars per month)
- Monitoring and alerting tools
- Load balancing and failover
- Backup and disaster recovery
Engineering time costs (self-hosted)
This is where self-hosting gets expensive. At 15-20 hours per month of senior engineering time for TURN operations, and senior WebRTC engineer compensation of $180-250K/year, the engineering cost alone ranges from $36-50K per year.
That estimate covers routine maintenance. Incident response -- debugging a relay failure during a customer demo, tracing a connectivity issue across time zones, or emergency-patching a CVE -- adds unplanned hours on top.
Total cost comparison
| Traffic Level | Self-Hosted Coturn (Single Region) | Self-Hosted Coturn (3 Regions) | Metered Growth ($99/mo) | Metered Business ($199/mo) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 150 GB/month | $154-202 + engineering | $462-606 + engineering | $99 | -- |
| 500 GB/month | $200-280 + engineering | $600-840 + engineering | -- | $199 |
| 2 TB/month | $500-800 + engineering | $1,500-2,400 + engineering | -- | $499 (Enterprise) |
Engineering cost not shown in self-hosted column: Add $3,000-4,200/month ($36-50K/year) for the engineering time.
The math is clear. At moderate traffic volumes with multi-region requirements, a managed TURN service is comparable or cheaper than self-hosted coturn -- even before factoring in the engineering time you reclaim.
At very high traffic volumes (10+ TB/month), self-hosting can become cost-competitive on a pure bandwidth basis. But that's the point where you also need a dedicated team for TURN operations, which changes the equation again.
How to decide if a coturn alternative is right for you
Not every team should migrate. Here's a framework for making the decision.
Stay with self-hosted coturn if:
- You have dedicated DevOps capacity with TURN/WebRTC expertise
- You require absolute control over every layer of the stack
- You operate at extreme scale (10+ TB/month) where bandwidth costs dominate
- Your traffic is concentrated in a single region
- You have an existing monitoring, alerting, and incident response pipeline for coturn
A managed coturn alternative makes sense if:
- Your engineers are spending significant time on TURN operations instead of product work
- You need multi-region coverage (3+ regions) for global users
- You need SLA-backed uptime guarantees for enterprise customers
- You want a credential management API without building custom tooling
- You need compliance features like region pinning for data residency
- You don't have or don't want to hire engineers with TURN-specific expertise
- You've been burned by a coturn CVE or outage and want to offload that risk
Start with the Open Relay Project if:
- You're in early development and don't need production SLA
- You want to validate that a managed TURN service works for your use case before committing budget
- You're building a hackathon project or proof of concept
- You want to eliminate coturn from your local development setup
Step-by-step: migrating from coturn to a managed alternative
Here's the good news about TURN servers: they're loosely coupled to your application. Your WebRTC code doesn't depend on coturn-specific features or APIs. It depends on a TURN server URL and credentials. That means migrating is straightforward.
Step 1: Audit your current coturn usage
Before migrating, understand your current TURN footprint:
- Bandwidth: How many GB/month of TURN relay traffic do you generate? Check your coturn logs or monitoring dashboard.
- Regions: Where are your coturn servers deployed? Where are your users?
- Protocols: Are you using UDP, TCP, TLS, or DTLS? Most managed services support all four.
- Credential model: Are you using static credentials, time-limited credentials, or a custom rotation scheme?
-
Configuration specifics: Do you use any coturn-specific features like
--denied-peer-ip,--static-auth-secret, or custom relay address ranges?
The audit gives you a baseline for choosing the right managed plan and validating the migration afterward.
Step 2: Set up your managed TURN service
For the Open Relay Project (free, development/testing):
- Visit openrelayproject.org
- Sign up for a free API key
- Note your API endpoint for credential requests
For Metered (production):
- Visit metered.ca/stun-turn
- Create a free trial account (500 MB, no credit card)
- Create a project in the dashboard for your application
- Note your API key and credential endpoint
Both services provide credentials via REST API, so integration follows the same pattern.
Step 3: Update your ICE server configuration
This is the core of the migration. In your WebRTC application, you're currently passing coturn credentials to the RTCPeerConnection constructor. You'll replace those with credentials from your managed service.
Before (self-hosted coturn):
const pc = new RTCPeerConnection({
iceServers: [
{
urls: "turn:your-coturn-server.example.com:3478",
username: "your-static-username",
credential: "your-static-password"
}
]
});
After (managed service via REST API):
// Fetch fresh credentials from the managed service API
const response = await fetch(
"https://your-service.metered.live/api/v1/turn/credentials?apiKey=YOUR_API_KEY"
);
const iceServers = await response.json();
// Pass the credentials to your peer connection
const pc = new RTCPeerConnection({ iceServers });
That's the entire code change. The managed service returns a properly formatted iceServers array with multiple TURN URLs (UDP, TCP, TLS), temporary credentials, and automatic geo-routing. Your application code doesn't need to know anything else about the underlying infrastructure.
Step 4: Run a parallel test
Don't cut over all traffic at once. Run both your self-hosted coturn and the managed service in parallel:
- Feature flag: Route a percentage of connections (start with 5-10%) to the managed service
- Monitor: Compare connection success rates, relay latency, and call quality between the two paths
- Validate: Ensure the managed service handles your specific scenarios -- corporate firewalls, symmetric NATs, mobile networks, VPNs
- Ramp up: Gradually increase the percentage (25%, 50%, 75%, 100%) over one to two weeks
This approach de-risks the migration. If anything unexpected happens, you roll back to coturn by flipping the feature flag.
Step 5: Test with a TURN server testing tool
Before going to 100% traffic, validate your managed TURN configuration using a TURN server testing tool. This confirms:
- Credentials are valid and properly formatted
- UDP, TCP, and TLS relay paths are working
- Geo-routing directs you to the nearest server
- Latency is within acceptable bounds
- Relay allocation and data transfer succeed end-to-end
Run the test from multiple network environments -- office WiFi, mobile tethering, a VPN, and if possible, a corporate firewall. These edge cases are exactly why you need TURN in the first place.
Step 6: Decommission coturn
Once you've validated 100% traffic on the managed service:
- Remove coturn infrastructure: Terminate the EC2 instances, delete the Docker containers, remove the DNS records
- Update documentation: Remove coturn setup guides and runbooks from your internal docs
- Reclaim on-call: Take coturn out of your on-call rotation and incident response playbooks
- Redirect engineering time: Your senior engineers now have 15-20 hours per month to spend on your actual product
This last step is the real payoff. The migration isn't just about TURN infrastructure -- it's about getting your best engineers back to the work that differentiates your business.
Common coturn alternative migration concerns
"Will latency be worse with a managed service?"
Unlikely. Self-hosted coturn typically runs in 1-3 cloud regions. Metered operates across 31+ regions with 100+ PoPs and a private high-speed backbone between servers. For users outside your self-hosted regions, latency will likely improve because they'll connect to a closer relay.
"What about vendor lock-in?"
TURN is a standard protocol defined by RFC 5766. Your application talks to TURN servers using standard ICE server configuration. If you ever want to switch providers or move back to self-hosted, you change the URL and credentials again. There's no proprietary SDK, no custom protocol, no lock-in.
"Can I pin traffic to specific regions for compliance?"
Yes. Metered supports region pinning, which lets you restrict TURN relay traffic to specific geographic regions. This is critical for data residency requirements under regulations like GDPR, HIPAA, or industry-specific compliance mandates. Self-hosted coturn gives you implicit region control (you choose where to deploy), but managed services with region pinning give you the same control without the operational overhead.
"What if the managed service goes down?"
Check the SLA. Metered offers up to 99.999% uptime on their Enterprise plan -- that's less than 26 seconds of downtime per month. Compare that to the uptime you're actually achieving with self-hosted coturn, including unplanned outages, maintenance windows, and the time it takes to respond to incidents.
No infrastructure is 100% reliable. The question is whether you want your own team responsible for uptime or a team of TURN specialists.
"Is the free tier enough to evaluate a coturn alternative?"
The Open Relay Project provides 20 GB/month free -- more than enough for development and testing. Metered's free trial includes 500 MB with no credit card, which is sufficient to validate integration and run connectivity tests across network environments.
Evaluating a managed coturn alternative: what matters
If you're evaluating managed TURN providers, here are the criteria that matter most for a production deployment:
Infrastructure quality:
- Number of regions and PoPs (more regions = lower latency for global users)
- Uptime SLA (99.9% vs 99.99% vs 99.999% is the difference between 8 hours and 26 seconds of downtime per month)
- Network quality (premium bandwidth with direct peering vs settlement-free bandwidth that degrades during congestion)
- Private backbone between TURN servers (reduces cross-continent relay latency)
Developer experience:
- REST API for credential management
- Dashboard with real-time metrics
- Project isolation for multi-tenant applications
- Webhooks and quotas for operational control
Compliance and control:
- Region pinning for data residency
- Custom domain support for white-label
- Named, verifiable regions (not opaque anycast)
Support:
- 24/7 availability (phone, email, or chat)
- TURN-specific expertise (not general platform support)
- Dedicated account management for enterprise deployments
Pricing transparency:
- Published pricing (not "contact sales" on every page)
- Clear overage rates
- Free tier or trial for evaluation
Metered checks every box on this list. That's not a casual claim -- visit the product page and verify each capability yourself.
Frequently asked questions
Is coturn dead? Do I need a coturn alternative?
No, coturn is not dead. Coturn released v4.8.0 in January 2026 with meaningful improvements: faster DDoS packet validation, configurable socket buffer sizes, memory leak fixes, and the CVE-2025-69217 patch. The project has 143 contributors and 13,500+ GitHub stars.
But "not dead" isn't the same as "thriving." The project has 343 open issues, no corporate backing, and no dedicated full-time maintainer. For hobbyist and small-scale deployments, coturn remains a viable option. For mission-critical production use, the sustainability risk is a factor.
Can I switch to a coturn alternative without changing my application code?
Almost. The only change is your ICE server configuration -- the TURN server URL and credentials. Your WebRTC application logic, signaling server, and media handling remain untouched. If you currently use static coturn credentials, switching to a REST API for credential fetching adds a few lines of code. The migration is measured in hours, not weeks.
How much bandwidth does a typical TURN relay use?
A one-on-one video call at 720p resolution relays approximately 1-3 GB per hour through TURN. Audio-only calls use roughly 100-200 MB per hour. Your actual consumption depends on video resolution, number of participants, call duration, and what percentage of connections require TURN relay (typically 15-20%).
What if I need TURN for a Jitsi, Nextcloud Talk, or Matrix deployment?
These platforms all use standard TURN/STUN ICE configuration. You can point them at a managed service the same way you'd configure coturn. Refer to the coturn setup guide for context on how these platforms integrate TURN, then substitute the managed service credentials.
Making the switch
Choosing a managed coturn alternative is one of the highest-leverage infrastructure decisions a WebRTC team can make. You eliminate an operational burden that consumes senior engineering time, reduce security exposure, and gain global coverage that would take months to build yourself.
The migration path is straightforward:
- Audit your current coturn usage
- Sign up for a managed service
- Update your ICE server configuration
- Run a parallel test
- Validate with a testing tool
- Decommission coturn
Start with the Open Relay Project if you want to test the concept for free. When you're ready for production, visit metered.ca/stun-turn to explore the full managed TURN infrastructure with 31+ regions, 99.999% uptime, and 24/7 support.
Your engineers have better things to build than TURN server infrastructure. Let them.
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