BigBlueButton

What BigBlueButton does

BigBlueButton is a virtual classroom rather than a general meeting app. A presenter uploads slides (PowerPoint, Word, PDF or images), annotates them on a whiteboard that participants can also draw on, and runs the session with polls, a timer, raise hand, shared notes and breakout rooms. Audio, webcams, screen sharing, and public and private chat cover the usual meeting basics. Moderators get a Learning Analytics Dashboard that shows who took part and how, including inside breakout rooms.

Sessions can be recorded and played back in the browser, which matters for courses where students review a lecture later. Participants can also dial in by phone through FreeSWITCH. The project began at Carleton University in Ottawa in 2007, and it is built into several learning management systems: Moodle, Canvas, Sakai, D2L, Schoology and Jenzabar, with LTI for others.

Rooms, accounts and integrations

BigBlueButton itself has no user directory or room list. You either put the Greenlight front end in front of it, which handles accounts, rooms and OpenID Connect login, or you start meetings from an LMS or your own application through the BigBlueButton API. Greenlight is a separate Rails and React project under the same LGPL-3.0 license. The documentation does not describe end-to-end encryption, so media is protected in transit but processed on your server.

Self-hosting BigBlueButton

BigBlueButton expects a server of its own. For version 4.0 the documented minimum is a dedicated machine running Ubuntu 24.04 64-bit with Docker, 16 GB of RAM with swap, 8 CPU cores with high single-thread performance, 500 GB of free disk for recordings (50 GB if recording is off) and 250 Mbit/s of symmetrical bandwidth. It needs a hostname for TLS, both IPv4 and IPv6, TCP ports 80 and 443 and UDP ports 16384 to 32768. A TURN server is configured separately for users behind restrictive networks.

The bbb-install.sh script installs the whole stack and can add Greenlight and LTI support. Under the hood it combines a Scala and Java backend, a React and TypeScript HTML5 client, FreeSWITCH for audio, PostgreSQL with Hasura GraphQL, Redis, Nginx, HAProxy and coturn. Version 4.0 moved to Ubuntu 24.04 and Java 21 and made LiveKit the default media server, with mediasoup still available as an option.

Hosted version

bigbluebutton.com presents itself as official hosting by the founders of BigBlueButton. Many LMS vendors and hosting companies also offer BigBlueButton as part of their own services.

Limitations

The hardware requirements are high compared with other meeting servers, and the installer is tied to a specific Ubuntu release, so upgrades follow the project’s schedule. The interface is shaped around a presenter and an audience, which feels heavy for quick one-to-one calls. Without Greenlight or an LMS there is no way for users to create rooms. End-to-end encryption is not part of the documented feature set.

Who it suits

BigBlueButton suits schools, universities and training providers that teach live online classes and want slides, whiteboard, polls, breakout rooms and recordings in one place, especially if they already use Moodle or Canvas. For everyday team calls on lighter hardware, Jitsi Meet or Galene are simpler to run.