Comparison of server-side rendering options
This page compares 3 options for rendering videos in the cloud:
These options are deliberately distinct with different tradeoffs, so that you can choose the one that best fits your use case.
Overall recommendation
We recommend Remotion Lambda for most people as it has the best tradeoff for speed, ease of setup, maturity, total cost and scalability.
The Remotion customers with the highest amount of videos rendered use the Remotion Lambda solution.
Speed
Remotion Lambda is the fastest option, because it implements distributed rendering - the video gets divided into smaller chunks and rendered in parallel across multiple Lambda functions.
Cloud Run does not support distributed rendering, so rendering happens on one physical machine.
Implementing a custom distributed rendering solution from scratch is challenging and we do not yet provide documentation.
Cost
Compute on Remotion Lambda is more expensive than other options.
However, costs are only incurred when you actually render videos.
Depending on the amount of videos you render, the total cost might be lower or higher with Lambda.
Cloud Run is cheaper than Lambda because there is no distributed rendering and no overhead that comes with it.
You also don't pay for the time that the Cloud Run instance is idle.
Running a server has by far the cheapest compute cost.
However, you also pay for the time that the server is idle.
Conclusion: The more videos you render, the more a long-running server might be worth for you.
Ease of setup
Remotion Lambda and Cloud Run are fast to set up.
Remotion Lambda is built into our SaaS templates, so you can get started very quickly.
Using the Node.JS APIs requires you to set up a server yourself and manage certain things yourself:
- Queueing renders
- Dealing with a spike in traffic
- Progress reporting and error handling
- Setting up logging
- Provisioning of servers
This is a big effort overall and is only recommended for teams who are committed to using Remotion and want the most flexibility.
Feature set
Remotion Lambda currently has the following features that Cloud Run does not have:
- Distributed rendering
- Webhooks
- Apple Emoji
- Polling progress
- Cost estimation
- Renders with expiration date
- Rendering from PHP, Go and Python
Rendering with the Node.JS APIs does not come with these features either, but you may build them based on top of the low-level APIs that are provided.
GPU
Most renders do not become faster with GPU acceleration. See: Which content benefits from a GPU?.
We have guides for configuring a server with GPU acceleration, but it is not yet supported by Remotion.
Remotion Lambda does not have a GPU. You are limited to CPU-only rendering.
We have not tested Cloud Run with GPU acceleration. It is possible add a GPU to the Cloud Run instance - we are curious to hear your feedback.
Stability
We are happy with the architecture of Remotion Lambda and Node.js APIs and are committed to it in the long-term.
Cloud Run is in Alpha and we are considering moving it to a model which re-uses the code of Remotion Lambda.
This would allow us to better match the features of Remotion Lambda and enable distributed rendering.
Currently, the development of Cloud Run is hindered because a new Docker image needs to be built for each change, making testing slow.
Therefore, we are currently only making essential changes to the current Cloud Run product.
Conclusion
We recommend to start with Remotion Lambda, as it is the quickest way to get started and leaves less room for error.
As you scale up and increase the sophistication of Remotion renders and want to become more cost-efficient, we recommend looking into other options as well.