Jitsi Meet

What Jitsi Meet does

Jitsi Meet is a video meeting app built around links. Each meeting is a URL, and guests open it in a browser or the mobile apps and join without an account. Beyond video, audio and screen sharing it covers most of what teams use in Zoom or Google Meet: chat with private messages, polls, raise hand and reactions, virtual backgrounds, a lobby where moderators admit guests, room passwords and breakout rooms.

Jitsi Meet is the web front end of a larger stack. Prosody (an XMPP server) handles signaling, Jicofo manages conferences, and Jitsi Videobridge forwards media between participants. Optional components add server recording and live streaming (Jibri), phone and SIP access (Jigasi), shared documents (Etherpad), a whiteboard (Excalidraw) and live transcription through an external speech-to-text provider. The IFrame API and the mobile SDKs let other products embed Jitsi meetings.

Security and encryption

Audio and video are encrypted between each participant and the videobridge with DTLS-SRTP. The bridge removes that layer to route packets. According to the project, the media stays in memory and is never written to storage. For stronger protection, a moderator can switch on end-to-end encryption in the security options. It relies on insertable streams, so it works in Chromium-based browsers (Chrome, Edge, Brave, Opera) and the Electron desktop app. It protects audio, video and screen sharing, but not chat or polls.

On the public meet.jit.si service, whoever creates a room has had to sign in since August 2023, and other participants still join without an account. That service uses third-party analytics (Amplitude, Datadog, Crashlytics). The Jitsi team says it does not keep names, email addresses or avatars once a meeting ends.

Self-hosting Jitsi Meet

The handbook offers a quick install from Debian packages on Debian 12 or Ubuntu 24.04 and newer, an official Docker Compose setup, and builds from source. You need a domain name, OpenJDK 17 for the Java components, and open ports TCP 80 and 443 and UDP 10000. For hardware, the handbook usually suggests 8 GB of RAM (4 GB can handle small meetings), 4 dedicated cores for a basic server and about 20 GB of disk. Prosody can only use one core. Bandwidth matters most: a 720p stream takes about 2.5 Mbit/s.

On a default install, anyone who can reach the server can create rooms. The handbook explains how to require a login with JWT tokens, LDAP or Keycloak. Server recording is the most demanding part. Each Jibri instance records one meeting at a time, needs at least 8 GB of RAM for 1080x720, and should run on its own machine. Larger installs add more videobridges.

Hosted version

meet.jit.si is a public instance run by the Jitsi team, free to use with a Google, Facebook or GitHub sign-in to start a meeting. For businesses and developers, 8x8 sells Jitsi as a Service (JaaS), a managed platform for branded and embedded meetings.

Limitations

Recording on your own server needs extra machines because each Jibri handles one meeting, which adds up when many meetings run at once. End-to-end encryption leaves out Firefox and Safari users and does not cover chat. Running Jitsi well means operating several services and keeping an eye on bandwidth, and you must set up authentication yourself if you do not want strangers creating rooms on your server.

Who it suits

Jitsi Meet suits organizations that want a familiar, link-based meeting tool on their own servers, with mobile apps and no installation for guests. It also suits developers who want to embed video calls in a product under a permissive license. For classes with slides, polls and a learning dashboard, see BigBlueButton. For a lighter server, see Galene.