Prebid Server

Industry-standard open-source server-side header bidding solution with the largest ecosystem of bidder adapters and broad adoption among premium publishers globally.

Prebid Server is the server-side component of the Prebid open-source header bidding ecosystem, governed by Prebid.org — a consortium-style organization supported by major industry players including AppNexus (Xandr), Rubicon Project, and others. It allows publishers to offload header bidding auction logic from the browser to a server environment, dramatically reducing page latency while maintaining access to a broad range of demand sources. Prebid Server is available in two primary implementations: Go (originally developed by AppNexus) and Java (originally developed by Rubicon Project), both maintained by the open-source community. Prebid Server sits at the heart of modern programmatic advertising infrastructure for publishers who want the benefits of header bidding without the client-side performance penalties. It supports hundreds of demand-side bidder adapters, enabling publishers and their technology partners to connect to a wide range of SSPs, DSPs, and ad exchanges through a single, standardized integration. It is widely used by large-scale publishers, app developers, and CTV/OTT platforms seeking scalable, low-latency auction capabilities. As a community-governed open-source project, Prebid Server has no direct revenue model of its own — it is free to use and deploy. Its significance in the AdTech ecosystem is substantial: it underpins header bidding infrastructure for thousands of publishers globally and is considered the industry-standard open-source solution for server-side header bidding. Hosting and managed service offerings around Prebid Server are provided by various commercial vendors, but the core software itself remains free and open.