StreamPilot vs PureWeb

Not exactly. PureWeb is a managed cloud platform with global GPU pools, smart routing, elastic scaling and SOC 2 compliance — capabilities that genuinely matter for enterprise 24/7 deployments serving hundreds of concurrent users. StreamPilot does not try to replace that. StreamPilot is a self-hosted companion app that wraps Epic's underlying Pixel Streaming pipeline so you can run it on your own Windows machine in minutes, share globally through Cloudflare tunnels, and pay once instead of monthly. The two products target genuinely different use cases. If your project is one of the 80% of UE Pixel Streaming use cases where you don't need always-on cloud scale (client review, archviz, interactive product demos, education, design walkthroughs), StreamPilot saves you the monthly bill. If your project does need cloud scale, PureWeb is the right choice.

As of June 2026, PureWeb Reality CORE starts at $750 USD/month (billed annually), and PureWeb Extended Reality (VR streaming) CORE starts at $1000 USD/month. Both are annual commitments. The Enterprise tiers for both products use custom pricing that isn't disclosed publicly. The CORE plans have limited models, limited concurrent user caps, and limited streaming minutes — Enterprise plans remove those caps. For comparison, a 12-month PureWeb CORE subscription is $9,000 USD; StreamPilot Pro is a $225 one-time licence. The economic difference favours self-hosted for any use case under always-on enterprise commercial scale.

Yes. Both StreamPilot and PureWeb use Epic's native Pixel Streaming pipeline under the hood, so any packaged UE5 build that works for Pixel Streaming will work on both platforms. StreamPilot is tested on UE 5.3 through 5.6. PureWeb supports both Unreal Engine and Unity. The difference is operational — StreamPilot runs your build on your own machine; PureWeb runs your build on their cloud GPUs after you upload it.

Yes, and it's actively recommended. StreamPilot Free costs $0 forever and includes the full local + LAN + global Cloudflare Quick Tunnel sharing flow. You can package your Unreal Engine build, run it on your own machine, and share a public link within 5 minutes. If you find that Pixel Streaming is genuinely the right approach for your project, you then have two upgrade paths: StreamPilot Pro ($225 one-time, if you stay self-hosted) or a managed cloud platform like PureWeb (if your project actually needs elastic scale). Either way, the Free tier of StreamPilot is a no-risk way to validate the workflow before committing budget.

Both use WebRTC under the hood, so the underlying streaming protocol is identical. Latency depends mostly on geographic distance between the rendering GPU and the viewer. PureWeb advantages this for global audiences — they have 8 distributed GPU pools with smart routing, so a viewer in Singapore will hit a Singapore-region GPU and see roughly the same latency as a viewer in Frankfurt hitting Frankfurt-region GPU. StreamPilot's Cloudflare tunnel adds about 5 to 15 milliseconds over the underlying network path to your local machine. Practically: if your viewers are all on the same continent as your rendering machine, the difference is imperceptible. If you're rendering in Kerala and showing to a client in California, PureWeb's regional routing will measurably outperform StreamPilot's single-host setup. Stream quality (resolution, bitrate, encoder settings) is comparable on both — PureWeb's CORE plan uses NVIDIA T4 and RTX 5000 GPUs; StreamPilot's quality matches whatever your local GPU outputs (an RTX 4090 will exceed cloud T4 tier quality).

Yes, in both directions, and there's no migration friction in your build. Both tools consume the same packaged Unreal Engine .exe — so you don't have to rebuild or re-export anything. To switch from PureWeb to StreamPilot, you install StreamPilot on a Windows machine, point it at your existing UE build, and start streaming. To switch from StreamPilot to PureWeb, you upload that same build to PureWeb's platform. The "lock-in" cost in either direction is operational, not technical — you'll change your share URLs (so anyone bookmarked to the old stream needs to update) and you'll change how your team manages the streaming infrastructure. Many studios use both at different stages: StreamPilot for prototyping and small client reviews where one-time cost wins, then PureWeb when the project goes to commercial launch and elastic cloud scale becomes necessary.