Sanity video hosting in 2026: Mux vs Cloudinary vs Bunny Stream

Choosing sanity video hosting is not the same decision as choosing Sanity CMS itself. Sanity stores your video asset reference; a separate vendor actually transcodes, stores, and streams the file. In 2026 three vendors come up repeatedly when teams evaluate this: Mux, Cloudinary, and Bunny Stream. They differ sharply on upload UX inside Sanity Studio, adaptive streaming support, how they handle poster images (which directly affects LCP), and — most visibly — cost once you scale past a demo.

What the comparison covers

Each vendor is evaluated on four axes:

1. Studio upload workflow — does a first-party or community plugin exist, or do you wire a custom input?
2. Adaptive streaming — HLS/MPEG-DASH with per-resolution renditions, or a single progressive download?
3. Poster and thumbnail handling — server-generated frame URLs you can feed to next/image for LCP optimisation?
4. Pricing structure — what the free/starter tier covers and what triggers the first meaningful bill.

I am not going to recommend one unconditionally. The right pick depends on whether you need signed playback, how much you care about Studio editor UX, and whether your traffic is predictable.

Mux

Upload workflow. Mux has the most mature Sanity integration. The sanity-plugin-mux-input package (actively maintained, on v5 at the time of writing) adds a drop-in custom input that uploads directly to Mux's upload URL API without routing files through your own server. Editors get a progress bar and a playback preview inside Studio. Schema wiring is around ten lines.

// schemas/video.ts
import { defineField, defineType } from 'sanity'

export default defineType({
  name: 'videoPost',
  type: 'document',
  fields: [
    defineField({
      name: 'video',
      type: 'mux.video', // registered by sanity-plugin-mux-input
      title: 'Video',
    }),
  ],
})

The field stores a reference to a mux.videoAsset document that holds the playbackId and assetId. You dereference it in GROQ (video.asset->playbackId) and construct the HLS URL client-side: https://stream.mux.com/{playbackId}.m3u8.

Adaptive streaming. Full HLS with automatic per-title encoding. Mux generates renditions at multiple bitrates per asset; the player selects the right one per viewer. This is the most production-ready adaptive streaming option of the three.

Poster handling. Mux generates thumbnail URLs from any frame: https://image.mux.com/{playbackId}/thumbnail.webp?time=3. That URL is a real image you can pass directly to next/image with priority to hit LCP. Width and height are predictable from your Mux asset metadata.

Pricing. Mux bills per minute of video, not per GB. At list prices at the time of writing: basic on-demand encoding is free, storage is about $0.003 per stored minute per month, and the first 100,000 delivered minutes each month are free, with delivery around $0.001 per minute after that (higher resolutions and premium quality cost more). A site with 200 minutes of video in its library and 2,000 minutes streamed a month pays well under a dollar for storage and nothing for delivery. Costs only become meaningful with large libraries or six-figure monthly viewing minutes. Check mux.com/pricing for current rates.

Cloudinary

Upload workflow. Cloudinary has an official sanity-plugin-cloudinary package that opens Cloudinary's media library from Studio. The pattern stores a Cloudinary public_id on the document. Alternatively you can build a custom input with Cloudinary's upload widget (JavaScript, loaded client-side in the Studio), but that means more glue code. Either way, editors work through Cloudinary's media library UI rather than a native video input, so it feels less integrated than Mux.

Adaptive streaming. Cloudinary supports HLS adaptive streaming but it is not on by default. You must request it via transformation parameters (sp_hd/ prefix on the URL or via a named transformation). Out of the box you get a progressive MP4 delivery, which works but does not adapt to bandwidth. For most video-light sites (hero clips, explainers under 3 minutes) this is fine. For long-form it is a real limitation.

Poster handling. Cloudinary's transformation API is strong here. A poster URL looks like:
https://res.cloudinary.com/{cloud}/video/upload/so_3,f_webp,q_auto,w_1280/{public_id}.webp
You get frame extraction at any second (so_ parameter), automatic format negotiation, and quality tuning — all without a separate image CDN. That flexibility is genuinely useful if you also serve images through Cloudinary.

Pricing. Cloudinary uses a credit system. The free tier gives 25 credits/month (1 credit ≈ 1 GB of storage, 1 GB of image bandwidth, or 1,000 transformations). Video transformations consume credits faster than image transformations. A realistic video-heavy site — 10 videos averaging 200 MB, regular re-transcoding for new formats — can exhaust the free tier quickly. The Plus plan (around $89/month billed yearly, $99 month-to-month at the time of writing) is the first meaningful paid tier. If you are already paying for Cloudinary for images, adding video has marginal incremental cost until you exceed your credit ceiling.

Bunny Stream

Upload workflow. There is no official Sanity plugin for Bunny Stream at the time of writing. You write a custom input or a Sanity action that calls Bunny's REST API to create a video object, retrieve an upload URL, and store the Bunny video GUID on the document. It is maybe 60–80 lines of TypeScript and not difficult, but it is not a packaged install. Editors upload from Studio but the integration is yours to maintain.

Adaptive streaming. Bunny Stream transcodes to HLS with multiple renditions automatically on upload — 240p through 1080p (4K on higher plans). It matches Mux's adaptive streaming quality and is the main reason Bunny is worth considering at all despite the missing plugin.

Poster handling. Bunny generates a thumbnail at https://vz-{zone}.b-cdn.net/{guid}/{frame}.jpg. Frame extraction is available but less flexible than Cloudinary — you select from pre-generated thumbnails or upload a custom one via the API. For LCP purposes it works: you get a stable URL to pass to next/image. You will want to set explicit width and height to avoid CLS.

Pricing. Bunny bills per GB rather than per minute, with no encoding fees. Storage starts around $0.01/GB/month (more if you replicate to extra regions) and delivery starts around $0.005/GB, with a $1/month minimum. For a site streaming 100 GB/month, Bunny's delivery bill is roughly $0.50–$1.50. At that volume Mux would likely still be inside its 100,000 free delivery minutes, so Bunny's price advantage really shows at high delivery volumes, after Mux's free minutes run out. The trade-off is you are owning more integration code.

Side-by-side summary

	Mux	Cloudinary	Bunny Stream
Sanity Studio plugin	Official, maintained	Official (media-library picker)	None — custom input required
Adaptive HLS	Yes, automatic	Optional (transformation param)	Yes, automatic
Poster/thumbnail URL	Yes (image.mux.com)	Yes (transformation API)	Yes (pre-generated frames)
Free allowance	100k delivery min/month; free basic encoding	25 credits/month	14-day trial; then from $1/month
Indicative cost at modest scale	$0–10/month (mostly storage)	$0–99/month (credit-dependent)	$1–8/month
LCP-friendly poster	Yes	Yes (best transformation control)	Yes (limited frame selection)
Signed/private playback	Yes (signed tokens)	Yes (signed URLs)	Yes (token auth)

Which to pick

If editor experience in Studio is a priority and your client or team expects a polished upload UI without custom code, Mux is the least friction option. The plugin is solid, the HLS delivery is reliable, and the poster URL is a first-class feature. Pricing is per minute and predictable, and small sites often stay within the free delivery allowance.

If you are already running Cloudinary for image delivery and your video library is small (under 20 videos, short clips), Cloudinary avoids adding another vendor. The credit model gets expensive fast on large video catalogues, and adaptive streaming needs deliberate setup.

If delivery cost is the deciding constraint — you have high bandwidth, predictable load, and a developer who can write 80 lines of custom integration — Bunny Stream is hard to beat on price. Adaptive HLS works well, thumbnails are usable, and at high delivery volumes its per-GB bandwidth is typically several times cheaper than Mux's per-minute delivery at list prices.

None of these vendors is wrong. The Mux-specific tutorials elsewhere on this site (signed HLS, upload and playback) remain valid if you pick Mux. But picking Mux as a default without evaluating Bunny's cost curve is a decision worth making explicitly, especially on projects where video volume is high and editor-facing upload UX is a secondary concern.