JustWatch vs OTTASIA: Which Streaming Finder Is Better for Asian Content?

If you've ever tried to find out where a specific movie is streaming, you've probably ended up on JustWatch. It's been the default answer to "where can I watch this?" for nearly a decade, especially in the US, UK and Western Europe, and it deserves the credit it gets. The product is well-built, the coverage is wide, and most viewers in Western markets get a usable answer in two clicks.

OTTASIA is much newer. It started in 2026 as a focused answer to a problem JustWatch is structurally less suited to solve: discovering streaming content across the 33 Asian markets where local OTTs, regional cinema and country-specific licensing make global tools feel thin. This post compares the two honestly, with the goal of helping you pick the right tool for the job rather than convincing you everything on one side is better.

What JustWatch is genuinely good at

Three things stand out. First, the catalog depth in Western markets is hard to beat. If you're in the US, UK, Canada, Germany or France and you want to find out which streamer has a Hollywood film from 1998, JustWatch usually has it correctly mapped. The data relationships with Netflix, Hulu, Max, Disney+ and Prime Video are mature.

Second, the filtering tools are excellent. You can slice the catalog by genre, decade, rating, runtime and provider in combinations that few other tools support. If you specifically want "sci-fi movies from the 2010s on Netflix US with an IMDb rating above 7," JustWatch handles it. That kind of structured discovery is genuinely useful when you know what you're in the mood for.

Third, the mobile apps are mature and stable. JustWatch has been building them since 2015 and they show.

Where JustWatch starts to thin out

In Asia, the picture changes. JustWatch covers India, Singapore, Indonesia, Philippines, Malaysia, Thailand, Hong Kong and a handful of Gulf countries, but the depth in any of those markets is shallower than in the West. A few specific gaps stand out.

Regional Indian cinema is sparsely covered. Try searching for a Malayalam or Kannada film and you'll often find either nothing or only one provider listed when the film is genuinely on three. The dedicated South Indian OTTs - Sun NXT, aha, Hoichoi, Planet Marathi, Chaupal - are either missing or incompletely represented.

Middle East and North Africa coverage is incomplete. Shahid, OSN+, STARZPLAY and TOD are the four services that actually matter for Arabic content across the Gulf and the Levant, and JustWatch's data on them tends to lag the actual catalogs.

Turkish drama outside Turkey is a particular weakness. Turkish dizi are one of the most-watched TV exports on earth, with massive followings in MENA, South Asia, Latin America and the Balkans, but BluTV, Exxen and the Turkish slate on Shahid rarely show up cleanly on JustWatch.

These aren't criticisms of JustWatch as a product. They're a structural consequence of where the company is based, where its commercial relationships are strongest, and where it has invested in data partnerships. Building deep coverage in 33 Asian markets is a different business than building deep coverage in 15 Western ones, and OTTASIA exists precisely because that gap is real.

Where OTTASIA wins

OTTASIA is built specifically for Asian markets. 33 of them, with coverage that prioritizes services like JioHotstar, ZEE5, SonyLIV, Sun NXT, aha, Hoichoi, Viu, iQIYI, WeTV, Shahid, OSN+, BluTV, Vivamax, iWantTFC, Vidio, RCTI+, Vidio, TVer, ABEMA and more. Several of these are essentially absent from Western discovery tools.

Country-aware discovery from the start. Every page on OTTASIA carries a country selector and the entire catalog updates based on what you pick. If you're a Bengali family in Manchester, you select India when you want to see Hoichoi's catalog and the UK when you want to see what's on Prime Video UK. The product handles the diaspora case natively.

Regional Indian cinema in eleven languages. Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Kannada, Marathi, Bengali, Punjabi, Gujarati, Bhojpuri, Odia and Assamese all have dedicated browse pages, each one pulling live data from TMDB across the regional OTTs plus the global streamers. Sun NXT, aha, Hoichoi, Planet Marathi, ShemarooMe and Chaupal are first-class providers, not afterthoughts.

Email alerts on out-of-region titles. If a film isn't available in your country yet but might come to streaming later, you can leave your email and OTTASIA will tell you the moment it becomes available where you are. JustWatch has watchlist functionality but currently doesn't do per-title availability alerts at the country level.

Episode tracking for ongoing shows. Mark which episode you're on for a long-running K-drama or Turkish dizi and OTTASIA emails you when a new episode drops. See the Currently watching dashboard for how it works.

No ads, no upsells, no paid tier. Everything on OTTASIA is free to use. There is no premium plan to upgrade to, no affiliate disclosures dominating the listings, no programmatic ads on the pages. The product's incentive is to be useful, not to sell you a subscription.

A concrete side-by-side

To make the comparison real, here are four specific searches the two tools should handle, and what each one actually returns in practice.

Test 1: a Malayalam film in the UAE

Search for "Manjummel Boys" from a UAE IP. Both tools find the title. JustWatch typically shows one or two providers and may not surface Sun NXT cleanly. OTTASIA shows the full provider list for the UAE market including the dedicated regional OTT, links to related Malayalam films, and the option to email you if it moves to a different service.

Test 2: a Turkish drama in Pakistan

Search for a recent Turkish dizi from a Pakistan IP. JustWatch may return limited results or show coverage gaps for Tabii and Shahid's Pakistani availability. OTTASIA returns the live Pakistan catalog across the four services that actually carry Turkish content in that market (Shahid, Netflix, Prime Video, TOD) plus a link to the broader Turkish Dramas catalog.

Test 3: a K-drama in India

Search for the latest viral K-drama from India. JustWatch handles the major streamers (Netflix, Viu, Prime Video) and JioHotstar well. OTTASIA adds depth on which specific Korean-content rail each service is running in India this month, plus curated lists like Best K-Dramas 2026 and an episode tracker for ongoing series. For this specific test, the two tools are closer than for the regional-Indian or Turkish-in-Asia cases.

Test 4: a Bollywood classic in the US

Search for an older Hindi film from a US IP. JustWatch and OTTASIA both find it. JustWatch's US-side data is mature here. OTTASIA's differentiation in this case is the related-content navigation - clicking through to the Bollywood category surfaces a deeper catalog than JustWatch's provider-based filtering, and you'll find cross-references into Tamil, Telugu and Malayalam cinema in ways JustWatch doesn't.

Which one should you use?

The honest answer is: both, for different jobs.

Use JustWatch when you're in the US, UK, Canada, Australia or Western Europe and you're looking for Hollywood, mainstream Western TV or anything with deep multi-decade coverage. JustWatch is still the best general-purpose tool for that audience and catalog.

Use OTTASIA when you're in any of our 33 Asian markets, when you want regional Indian cinema in eleven languages, when you need Korean, Chinese, Japanese, Thai, Filipino, Indonesian, Vietnamese or Turkish content, when you care about MENA streaming, or when you're part of the diaspora looking for content from "home" from wherever you actually live now. The product was built for those specific cases.

And use OTTASIA when you want a tool that doesn't monetize your attention. We don't run programmatic ads, we don't sell premium subscriptions, we don't put affiliate tags on provider links. We're a small team (one founder, a lot of help from Claude) and we've kept the product deliberately simple. The whole thing is free at ottasia.com.

What we'd like to learn from JustWatch

To close this honestly: JustWatch does some things really well that OTTASIA hasn't got to yet. Their structured filtering (genre + decade + rating + provider) is excellent and we should match it. Their mobile apps are a level of polish we're years away from as a one-founder project. Their data partnerships with the major Hollywood studios are deeper than anything we can replicate.

If you're building a streaming-discovery tool, JustWatch is the reference standard. If you're a viewer trying to find Asian content, OTTASIA is now the more thorough answer. Pick the right one for what you're looking for and don't feel bad about using both.