There are thousands of free documentary movies available online in every category imaginable. You'll find biographies, mysteries, comedies, and documentaries covering everything from sports, activism, and animals to travel, performing arts, and more.
Among all the best places to watch free movies online, below are the top sites that have free documentaries, specifically.
Looking for other kinds of movies? Check out our top picks for websites where you can download free movies and sites that have free films for kids.
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Top Documentary Films
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What We Like
Documentaries in many categories.
Easy to search and sort.
Subscribe for free email alerts.
What We Don't Like
Media embedded from other sites.
Some movie links don't work.
Top Documentary Films has tons of free documentaries online that are available from the public domain. Most are linked directly from YouTube.
These docs are available in categories like Religion, Society, Crime, Media, Conspiracy, Biography, and Nature.The thousands offilms available can be viewed in a sortable list, or viewed by the date added, rating, votes, title, and shares.
An account is unnecessary, so you can start streaming these movies right away. The Top 100 Documentaries list is a good place to start.
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Documentary Heaven
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What We Like
Easy to sort.
Browse, check out lists, or search for titles.
Thousands of movies.
Option to report broken links helps keep these streams online.
What We Don't Like
All films embedded from other sources.
Some links don't work.
There are thousands of free documentaries at Documentary Heaven that can be viewed by category, popularity, Top 100, and best of the year. Movies can also be sorted by rating, newest to oldest, comments, or title. The videos are submitted by anyone, which means there are loads of public documentaries.
There's also a single, one-page list of all the documentaries you can watch here, which makes it easy to read through the categories and titles. Some of the dozens of categories include Mystery, Science, Philosophy, Atheism, Religion, Countries, Business, Drugs, Celebrity, Archaeology, 9/11, Performing Arts, Space, Music, and Spiritual.
Streaming is open to anyone, but you'll need to make a free account to post comments andtag videos as favorites. You can provide your email address to get new documentary alerts sent to you over email, or subscribe to their RSS feed.
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Freevee
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What We Like
Several sub-genres.
Over 10 caption languages are supported.
Also has TV show docs.
What We Don't Like
Easy to accidentally run into paid movies.
Requires an Amazon account.
Amazon Freevee (formerly IMDb TV) is a great place for free movies, and there's an entire section dedicated just to documentaries. All are 100 percent free and supported by ads.
After selecting the documentary genre, there's a filter for subtitles so you can ensure that the movies will have captions in the language you prefer. Subgenres are supported, too, so you can find documentaries about something really specific, like music, religion, travel, history, or crime.
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Documentary Tube
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What We Like
Dozens of categories.
Trending titles listed.
Shows view count for every video.
Updates often with new docs.
What We Don't Like
Cluttered appearance.
Documentary Tube has more than 40 categories of free documentaries, including Disaster, Health, Aliens/UFO, Technology, Media, Gambling, and Strange.
Documentaries can also be browsed by Top 100 and by thousands of doc-related tags, including Genetics, Terrorism, Death, Poverty, World, Surgery, Sea, Gravity, and Ancient. Sort these videos by popularity or trending status, or use the random button to have a genre picked for you.
There's an RSS feed to stay up to date on additions.
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Tubi
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What We Like
App available.
Works with many streaming devices.
No account required.
What We Don't Like
Can't sort or filter the list.
Documentaries are among Tubi's thousands of free movie and TV show offerings, aiming to present groundbreaking, bizarre, and inspiring true-life stories.
The documentaries are in a one-page format you can scroll through. Some examples include No Excuses, TMZ No BS: Harry & Meghan, The Phenomenon, Bob Lazar: Area 51 & Flying Saucers, Just Girls, The Magic Pill, and Missing 411.
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Films For Action
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What We Like
Films in dozens of categories and languages.
Create your own list of your favorite films that you can share.
Unique categories.
What We Don't Like
Most films are hosted on YouTube.
Films For Action has thousands of free documentaries available for viewing. The site frequently adds new features and content, including opportunities for social activism.
Sort videos to find the best documentaries, andsign up for weekly email alerts to get notified about new content. Subscribe to the RSS feed for daily updates.
Some of the categories these movies are organized in include cities, big ideas, gender, police and prisons, transition, vision, human rights, empire, and consumerism.
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Plex
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What We Like
Live and on-demand movies.
Watch now; no user account necessary.
Includes easy access to trailers.
What We Don't Like
Can't sort or filter the movie list.
Hundreds of additional documentary films can be streamed from Plex. This service serves as a home media server, but there's also live TV and on-demand movies.
Since Plex is more than just a movie streaming service, it does a great job with additional details and functions. For example, on every movie page is a cast list, from which you can find other movies those people are in.
You can make a user account if you want to build a watchlist. The below link is for on-demand films, but there are also live channels that serve documentaries, like Documentary+.
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Filmzie
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What We Like
No user account needed.
Watch a trailer before you start the full movie.
What We Don't Like
Can't sort the list of docs.
Filmzie is built for independent filmmakers and small studios. It has shorts, indie films, and more, in several categories, including the documentary genre.
To jump right in to just the docs, see the documentary section (linked below). It's accessible from their website and the mobile app. There's also a Last Chance to Watch section that could have some good titles you don't want to miss.
Every movie page has the runtime, a Watch Later button (it works if you log in), related movies you might also like, and general data like cast and crew information.
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Documentary24
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What We Like
Multiple categories.
Suggests random and popular picks.
What We Don't Like
Some videos embedded from other sites are unavailable.
Outdated social media accounts are unhelpful for staying updated.
Documentary24 has several categories of free documentaries, such as War, Business, Religion, Nature, Lifestyle, and Culture. Or, browse videos by tags like Internet, Ships, BBC, Asia, Banks, Africa, Sport, TED, WWE, Terror, and others. There's a section for the most popular documentaries as well as newly added films.
The portal notes that it strives to offer only prejudice-free and unbiased films.
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Free Movies Cinema
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What We Like
Documentaries from the past are available.
Movies verified as free to watch.
What We Don't Like
Some films are lower quality.
Smaller selection than similar sites.
Can't sort or filter the list.
Some movies linked from others sites don't work.
More documentary streams are available in high definition at Free Movies Cinema. Videos are mainly hosted on YouTube, but they're embedded and cataloged on this site to make finding them easy. You'll find old and new documentaries here.
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Popcornflix
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What We Like
No account required.
Provides related films.
Subtitles for most movies.
What We Don't Like
Poor user interface.
No sorting options.
Tons of videos in all sorts of categories are found at Popcornflix, with hundreds listed specifically as documentaries. There doesn't seem to be a way to browse the documentaries by category or popularity, but the one-page listing is easy to scroll through and peruse.
There are also series' listed under a documentary section, but they're separate from the movies.
Because no account or registration is needed, you can start enjoying free documentaries in seconds.
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Pluto TV
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What We Like
Works with streaming boxes and smart TVs.
No user account required.
What We Don't Like
Search not user-friendly.
Pluto TV streams free TV shows and movies through a computer, smart TV, or mobile device. Get started right away without creating a user account.
To stream docs, open the On Demand page or browse the live movie channels, like this one that's dedicated to documentaries.
Pluto TV also has a mobile app for iPhone, iPad, and Apple TV, so you can watch while on the go.
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Yidio
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What We Like
Feature-rich service.
Finds free docs from around the web.
Several filtering options.
What We Don't Like
Not all resources are free.
Yidio gathers free documentaries from around the web, and provides you with the link to watch them. Videos can be filtered by source, release date, MPAA rating, decade, and other criteria.
There's an app you can use to find documentaries on your phone, but you'll most likely need to install other apps because most if not all the movies on Yidio are actually hosted on other sites.
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