Best free video downloaders

Nothing in this ranking watermarks. It's a video-editing SaaS habit and it's rare among downloaders, since a downloader doesn't re-encode on the way out and stamping one on costs extra processing.

If you do hit a downloader that watermarks its output, it almost certainly transcoded server-side, and the quality probably suffered for it. Those tools aren't in here.

Free just means it costs nothing. Open source means the code is public and auditable. That distinction is very practical here: these tools handle your links and sometimes your logged-in session, so being able to verify what they do matters.

The open-source ones in this list: yt-dlp, Cobalt.tools, Seal, Media Harvest for X. Stacher is free but not open source, though the yt-dlp engine underneath it is.

yt-dlp, no argument: 1,800+ sites, 8K, subtitles, bulk, resumable incremental runs, and the most frequent updates of the bunch. Its only real barrier is the command line.

Don't want a terminal? Take Stacher— same engine, graphical, just as free and just as unlimited. Between those two you've covered almost every free use case.

Because parsing and transcoding on a server costs real money in hardware, bandwidth and upkeep. Give it away free and you have to earn it back somewhere, and ads are the shortest path. So ad density roughly tracks how much the server side costs.

The exception is Cobalt.tools, which pushes file transfer to your browser wherever it can and barely eats bandwidth itself, which is how it gets away with zero ads.