Are there others that are newer on the market that I should checkout?
Not really looking to pirate because I don’t really know what to look for, so I feel I need a service to help with recommendations and finding new shows.
Also, I’m using ‘best’ to mean most accessible to a casual viewer, and largest library of English-dubbed shows.
AFAIK they bought their only real competition (funimation). Regarding recommendations: I personally find piracy streaming sites have the best recommendations, I mostly use them just for recommendations and don’t even watch there, also you could take a look at [email protected], specifically the recommendation threads
Other way around, funimation bought them and now it’s wearing crunchyroll’s skin while refusing to honor all the digital copies funimation had previously sold people because “crunchyroll doesn’t have that feature”.
Technically it may be, in terms of library.
However there are a few alternatives to look into that, while not matching the scale of their library, still have enough to consider.
For older anime there’s Retrocrush, which offers a fair amount of shows to watch for free (but with ads), no account required. Some are only accessible via subscription, however.
Interestingly though, some of those shows are available on other services no subscription required, like Tubi or Pluto.
Speaking of, it turns out Crunchyroll apparently cut a deal with Pluto, so there’s a Crunchyroll channel on there where you can catch some of their anime freely (again, with ads though). Besides that there’s also a separate anime channel and a few dedicated marathon channels to more popular series like Naruto, One Piece, Sailor Moon, etc.
There’s also lower amounts still to be found on the other general streaming services like Netflix or Hulu, but it obviously doesn’t fully compare.
Also while not newer and their library is way smaller, for some anime movies you might see if your local libraries offer digital services like Hoopla or Kanopy. With those you may be able to check out some great anime movies.
The only other one I know is hidive. It carries some different shows than Crunchyroll.
Unfortunately hidive’s user experience is complete garbage. It doesn’t even have functional “continue watching” that will show you when new episodes are added
