Nabby vs cobalt.tools
A paste-and-grab comparison for people choosing a video downloader.
The short version
cobalt.tools is a sleek hosted service built on its own extractors. Nabby is a self-hostable web UI for yt-dlp. The two overlap in audience but differ in nearly everything else that matters.
At a glance
| Nabby | cobalt.tools | |
|---|---|---|
| Self-hostable | Yes | No |
| Extractor engine | yt-dlp | Custom (cobalt) |
| YouTube support | No (by design) | Varies by instance / jurisdiction |
| Account required | No | No |
| Open source | Yes | Yes |
| Ads | Hosted instance only | No |
| File retention on server | 1 hour | Pass-through |
| Supported sites breadth | yt-dlp's full catalog (if self-hosted) | Hand-curated list |
Choose cobalt.tools if…
- You want a single hosted site, no setup, and don't care about running your own instance.
- You specifically need cobalt-supported sites that aren't in yt-dlp's catalog.
- You value cobalt's minimal, zero-ad hosted UI (which it has, and it's good).
Choose Nabby if…
- You want to run your own instance — on a homelab server, inside a container, or behind a tunnel — and keep your downloads on your own infrastructure.
- You want yt-dlp's breadth of site support (TikTok, Reddit, X, Vimeo, SoundCloud, Twitch, and thousands more on a self-hosted instance).
- You prefer a general-purpose tool stacked on a mature library (yt-dlp has thousands of contributors and years of maintenance) over a custom extractor codebase.
- You're an archivist, journalist, or researcher who wants the files to stay on your box, not pass through a third-party service.
Honest notes
cobalt.tools is excellent at what it does. The teams behind the two projects are not competing — different philosophies, different trade-offs, different users. If you can run both, you'll probably reach for cobalt for quick one-offs and Nabby for self-hosted or sites cobalt doesn't support. On the hosted instance of Nabby, we deliberately do not support YouTube; cobalt's YouTube support changes over time based on their own legal and technical situation.
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