Open source alternatives to Google Meet

What Google Meet does

Google Meet runs video meetings in the browser and in mobile apps, with a Google account needed to host. It is part of Google Workspace and tied into Calendar and Drive. Paid editions add recording to the organizer’s Drive, larger meetings (from 100 up to 1,000 participants depending on the edition, with view-only participants beyond 500), breakout rooms, polls, Q&A, live streaming, and Gemini note-taking. Live captions, transcripts and noise cancellation are also part of the product.

Why people look for an alternative

• Data handled by Google. Meetings are encrypted in transit to Google’s data centers with DTLS and SRTP, which Google calls cloud encryption, but they are not end-to-end encrypted by default.
• Client-side encryption is limited. Encryption with keys held by the organization requires Enterprise Plus, Education Standard or Education Plus, an external identity provider and a key service. In those meetings it disables recording, breakout rooms, captions, transcripts, polls, live streams and Gemini note-taking.
• Time limit for free group meetings. With a personal account, meetings with three or more participants end after 60 minutes on a computer; one-to-one calls can last up to 24 hours.
• Features tied to paid plans. Recording is not available on free personal accounts, needs an eligible Workspace edition or a Google One plan with at least 2 TB, and works only from a computer or an Android device.
• Ecosystem and hosting. Hosting requires a Google account and links meetings to Calendar and Drive, which makes moving away harder, and there is no way to run Meet on your own infrastructure.

What to compare in an alternative

1. Joining experience. Whether guests can join from a link in the browser without an account, and whether mobile apps exist.
2. Encryption. Default or optional end-to-end encryption, the browsers it supports, and the features it disables.
3. Login and room creation. Integration with your identity provider through OIDC, SAML or LDAP, and control over who may open rooms.
4. The Meet features you use. Recording, captions and transcripts, breakout rooms, polls, live streaming and calendar invitations.
5. Self-hosting effort. The services you need to run, bandwidth and hardware, and what happens as meetings grow.

Which one to choose

Jitsi Meet is the closest match for link-based meetings with mobile apps, optional end-to-end encryption and a public instance at meet.jit.si. La Suite Meet has a similarly simple browser interface on LiveKit, and suits organizations that already run an OIDC identity provider. For encrypted calls between organizations, Element Call encrypts every call end to end and federates across Matrix homeservers.

For small private calls, MiroTalk P2P connects browsers directly and needs almost no server, while MiroTalk SFU handles larger groups in a single Node.js app. Galene is the lightest server for meetings and lectures. Universities with SAML federations can look at eduMEET. To add meetings to your own site or product, compare plugNmeet and OpenVidu.