In the spirit of writing blog posts during working hours (don’t tell my boss), I thought I’d write a post talking about the streaming services I use for anime, and which ones I think are the best.

3. Hulu

I’m currently using Hulu to watch One Piece, and it’s decent. If you’re already paying for Hulu and are watching some of their other shows, Hulu is a decent place to watch a number of anime shows. It has a lot of major titles such as Bleach, Naruto, Dragon Ball Z, and newer popular anime shows such as One Punch Man and Attack on Titan. They’re also adding new anime shows as time goes on – they have a Slice of Life section, for example, that they’re constantly updating (although I don’t know if the shows they have are popular or not). The only downside is the presence of ads, although you can get rid of it with Hulu Premium. There’s also a chance that your anime won’t have a complete set of seasons; for example I partially watched Fairy Tail on Hulu before switching to Crunchyroll (if I remember – Hulu had all the seasons for dub, but not subbed Fairy Tail).

2. Netflix

Netflix beats out Hulu because they have a number of Netflix originals, and because I think that their anime collection is more extensive. They have more anime shows suited for intense anime fans that Hulu doesn’t have yet; I remember watching Soul eater and JoJo on there (although I believe JoJo is on Hulu now as well). Netflix has the benefit of not having any ads; and of course, if you’re already using Netflix anyway, might as well put that subscription to use and watch anime there too. The only problem is – like Hulu, Netflix might not have all seasons available. I began watching One Piece on Netflix, but had to switch to Hulu for that reason.

1. Crunchyroll

It should be no surprise that Crunchyroll is the best site for streaming anime. Their anime library is the most exhaustive out there, and it’s free (if you are fine with ads). I ended up using Crunchyroll to watch Fairy Tail since it wasn’t all on Hulu or Netflix, but otherwise, I personally didn’t use Crunchyroll that much. Since I’m already paying for Netflix and Hulu, I thought I might as well use those platforms for streaming anime. However, using Crunchyroll for only a couple of anime shows, I already saw a huge jump in quality and quantity of anime, especially subbed episodes. The only downside is their auto-play feature makes you watch the credits, so I have to manually skip episodes. But that’s such a first world problem, isn’t it?

Well, outside of any illegal websites, those are my top recommendations for anime streaming platforms. Let me know what you think!