Radarr tracks films, watches indexers for releases, hands matches to a download client and files the result under a name your media server understands. It is Sonarr's sibling for movies and replaces the manual work of finding, upgrading and renaming a film library.
Our verdict on Radarr#
Sonarr's hard problem is which episode a release is. Radarr's is which copy of one film you want, and that is a scoring problem, not an identity problem. A single title has a remux, a Blu-ray encode, a WEB-DL from four services, HDR10 and Dolby Vision variants, x265 rips and an Atmos track, and Radarr picks between them with additive custom format scores layered on a quality profile. Getting that wrong is how people end up with a 60 GB remux on a device that transcodes it. The structural limitation is that Radarr models one movie as one file, so extended cuts and director's cuts are a naming token rather than separate entities: collectors of multiple versions end up running a second instance. v6.0 (2026) bumped to .NET 8, removed basic auth, dropped linux-x86, removed movie file tokens from the Movie Folder Format, and changed the default wanted language on quality profiles to Original. Current line is 6.4.x, August 2026.
Who Radarr is for#
Choose it if
- You are rebuilding a film library and want a consistent quality standard applied to hundreds of titles.
- You want automatic upgrades: take the WEB-DL now, replace it with the Blu-ray remux when one appears.
- You want Radarr Lists to auto-add from a Trakt, IMDb or TMDB collection rather than adding films by hand.
- You already run Sonarr and want the same workflow, notifications and download client for movies.
Look elsewhere if
- You keep multiple cuts of the same film, because Radarr's one movie, one file model fights you on that.
- You are not willing to learn custom formats, in which case a default profile will happily grab releases you do not want.
- You have no indexer or download client, since Radarr is only the decision layer.
What running it actually looks like#
One container on 7878 with a /config volume plus media and downloads mounted under a single shared parent such as /data, so imports hardlink instead of copying: a copied 40 GB remux is the difference between an instant import and a stalled queue. Radarr needs an indexer (normally synced from Prowlarr) and a download client with a matching category before it does anything. First run means setting a root folder, picking a quality profile and adding films or a list. Real setup time goes into custom formats, and most people import a TRaSH Guides profile through Recyclarr rather than building scores by hand. Upgrading into v6 requires reading the notes: basic auth is gone, movie file tokens in Movie Folder Format are gone, and the default wanted language changed to Original.
Resource profile#
- Memory
- 200 MB idle, around 400 MB in ordinary use. The .NET process and its database; the growth is from RSS parsing across indexers and full refreshes of large film catalogs, not from the number of concurrent downloads.
- CPU and acceleration
- Idle most of the time. The load comes from RSS sync, TMDB metadata refreshes and evaluating custom format rules against every release in a search result, which is noticeable when you run dozens of formats against dozens of indexers.
- Storage growth
- The database and artwork cache stay modest; the disk risk is import behavior, where a broken hardlink path means every 40 GB remux is copied rather than linked.
- Operational load
- 3 of 5, Moderate. One container and one SQLite file on its own, but it only works alongside an indexer source and a download client with identical path mapping. Major versions have carried real breaking changes (v6 removed basic auth, dropped linux-x86 and changed a quality profile default), so upgrades need reading rather than pulling.
Figures describe a small single-household install and are the working assumptions behind our stack planner. Your numbers will differ with library size, user count and hardware. See methodology.
Data and backup surface#
Back up /config. radarr.db holds the movie list, file history, quality profiles, every custom format and score, plus indexer and download client credentials, and config.xml holds the API key and auth settings. The scheduled backups Radarr writes into /config/Backups/scheduled/ are the consistent snapshot and the easiest thing to ship off-box; a copy of an open SQLite database is not. logs/ and MediaCover/ are regenerable, and MediaCover is usually the biggest directory in the volume. A restore is only meaningful alongside the media tree it describes: restoring the database against a different file layout leaves every movie showing as missing until a rescan corrects paths. PostgreSQL installs need pg_dump instead, with no supported route back to SQLite.
Derived backup shape
SQLite backup. sqlite3 <db> ".backup out.db" while running, or stop the container and copy. A live cp of a WAL-mode SQLite file can restore corrupt.
Traps and surprises#
v6 silently changed the quality profile language
Radarr v6.0 changed the default wanted language on quality profiles to Original. Existing profiles carried forward can start rejecting or accepting different releases than they used to, and the symptom is releases being filtered out for language with no obvious cause. After upgrading, open each quality profile and confirm the language setting rather than assuming it came across unchanged.
One movie means one file
Radarr's data model has a single file per movie, so theatrical and extended cuts of the same title cannot both be tracked properly. Edition is a naming token, not an entity. The common workarounds are running a second Radarr instance with its own root folder, or keeping alternate cuts outside Radarr's management entirely. Decide before you import a collection built around multiple versions.
Custom format scores are additive and unbounded
Scores stack, and a profile with a high Upgrade Until value plus several positive formats can keep grabbing progressively higher-scoring releases of the same film indefinitely, burning indexer hits and disk. Set Upgrade Until to a real ceiling and set a Minimum Custom Format Score so nothing below your standard is grabbed at all. Import a known-good profile before hand-tuning.
Split download and media mounts break hardlinks
Mounting downloads and movies as two separate volumes means separate filesystems inside the container even on one physical disk, so Radarr copies instead of hardlinking. With film-sized files this is immediately painful: doubled disk use and long import times that block the queue. Mount a single parent directory containing both and check Activity, History to confirm imports report a hardlink.
v6 dropped 32-bit Linux and basic auth
Support for linux-x86 was removed in v6.0, so older 32-bit hosts stop at v5. Basic authentication was also removed in favour of forms auth, which breaks any reverse proxy config or script that was passing basic credentials to the UI. Movie file tokens in the Movie Folder Format were removed too, so a folder naming scheme using them needs rewriting before renaming runs.
Specifications#
- Category
- Media servers and libraries
- Licence
- GPL-3.0 (Copyleft)
- Written in
- C# / .NET
- First release
- 2017
- Maturity
- Mature
- Datastore
- SQLite (PostgreSQL optional)
- Default ports
7878- Ships as
- docker, deb package, native binary, windows installer
- arm64 builds
- Yes
- Identity
- Local accounts only. Local forms login only; v6 removed basic auth entirely, there is no LDAP or OIDC, and the API key bypasses the UI login for anything holding it.
- Replaces
- CouchPotato, Netflix, iTunes movie rentals
- Project site
- radarr.video
- Source
- github.com/Radarr/Radarr
- Documentation
- wiki.servarr.com/radarr
Alternatives to Radarr#
Everything else in media servers and libraries, closest in operational weight first.
| Tool | Ops load | Idle RAM | Licence |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sonarr | 3, Moderate | 200 MB | GPL-3.0 |
| Audiobookshelf | 2, Light | 200 MB | GPL-3.0 |
| Calibre-Web | 2, Light | 120 MB | GPL-3.0 |
| Emby | 2, Light | 350 MB | Proprietary |
| Jellyfin | 2, Light | 280 MB | GPL-2.0-only |
| Jellyseerr | 2, Light | 220 MB | MIT |
Where Radarr comes up elsewhere#
Head to head
Migration guides
Sources#
Facts on this page were checked against the project's own material. Where a number is our own estimate rather than a published figure, the text says so.
Published . Last reviewed . Found something out of date? Tell us and we will fix it and log the change.