Library Manager: Sonarr VS pyMedusa, I tried both so you don’t have to

so I’m curious about what would work better for anime, I’ve seen people use both.

so WTF is Sonarr and pyMedusa?

• both is an Automatic Video Library Manager, it monitors sets of indexes which can be anything, nyaa, sp, etc. Then when it finds new episodes it can automatically download them, it can also run a backlog search to grab releases (this usually doesn’t work for anime)

• Medusa has quite a steep learning curve, there are a lot of hidden menus, and setting things up is a complicated process compared to Sonarr, it also picks up my library right away, but there are a lot more wrong titles it picked up during the import process but it’s as simple as clicking a button to fix it

how well it works with anime?

• Both will work with anime out of the box, but Medusa allows setting up alternative titles without visiting another site, which is a great Quality Of Life improvement Sonarr does not allow that and so far I don’t think the devs will be adding it,

Why are alternative titles so important?

• for anime, there are a lot of titles, season titles, Japanese titles, and English titles, I have Sonarr refuse to pick up season 2 of “My Wife is a student council president” because the Season 2 alternative title isn’t in the index it uses, on the other hand, medusa picked up the series and sort it right away, if it doesn’t I can just go into settings and add the title and set it to the season title

How Fast Does it pick up new episodes,

• both have a limit on how often you can pull an update from your index (10 minutes), after the scheduled time, it will attempt to run a search every 10 minutes you can go higher than 10 minutes but not lower
• qBittorrent + RSS will go down to 1 minute so this is very slow, but there’s a way to force Sonarr to run a search every minute by using cronjob and curl to force API sync every minute, so far I don’t know a way to do the same for MedUSA

How it manages new episode

• Medusa allows you to set EXACTLY what you want, hardlink/copy/move/symlink, meanwhile sonarr just hardlink by default and I don’t see an option for move/symlink

Wrapping up

• if you just want it to work, pick Sonarr, while it lacks some features, it does the job
• if you want more flexibility, Medusa will be better for you

I personally won’t be moving to Sonarr, for now, until I can get the alternate title figured out

Edit: For anyone who wanted a real-time release grab solution that works with Medusa, check out my latest work on GitHub, its simple, easy to set up, and not a PITA like autobrr is
https://github.com/ChokunPlayZ/release-grabber