Nabby vs MeTube
Both wrap yt-dlp. They want very different things from your box.
The short version
MeTube is a popular self-hosted yt-dlp frontend focused on queueing downloads to a persistent archive. Nabby is a self-hosted yt-dlp frontend focused on grabbing a file and getting out — no queue, no archive, no state.
At a glance
| Nabby | MeTube | |
|---|---|---|
| Workflow | Paste → format → download | Paste → queue → persistent archive |
| Backend | Python / Flask | Python / aiohttp |
| Persistent storage | None (1-hour TTL) | Yes (downloads folder) |
| Queue / history | No | Yes |
| Multi-user | No (single-user) | No (single-user) |
| Docker image | Coming | Yes, mature |
| YouTube support | No (allowlist excludes) | Yes (default) |
| Browser extension | No | Yes (community) |
Choose MeTube if…
- You want a queue that persists across restarts and a visible history of what you've downloaded.
- You're building a long-running local archive and want files to accumulate in a folder you manage.
- You need YouTube support out of the box.
- You want the most battle-tested self-hosted yt-dlp UI with years of community use.
Choose Nabby if…
- You want the lightest possible UI — paste, pick, download, leave no trace on the server.
- You deliberately don't want a queue, history, or local archive — this is just a convenience layer over yt-dlp.
- You want files auto-deleted after use for privacy or disk-space reasons.
- You want the "no YouTube" policy baked in for legal cleanliness on a public-facing instance.
Honest notes
MeTube is excellent and more feature-complete today. Nabby trades features for simplicity: there is no job history page, no bulk-import tools, no file manager. If you need any of those, MeTube is the right answer. If what you want is "a web form that calls yt-dlp and hands me the file," Nabby is deliberately smaller.
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