OpenVidu

What OpenVidu does

OpenVidu is a self-hosted real-time video stack built on LiveKit and mediasoup, and it now ships two products. OpenVidu Meet is a finished meeting app: you create rooms, hand out links with different permission levels, and participants join in the browser with chat, screen sharing, virtual backgrounds, raise hand, breakout rooms, recordings and live captions. OpenVidu Platform is for developers who want to build their own video features: its server is compatible with the LiveKit API, so LiveKit client and server SDKs work against it.

The same project serves both as a Zoom-style tool for staff and as a component inside another product. OpenVidu Meet can be embedded with an iframe or the <openvidu-meet> web component and controlled through a REST API and webhooks, and its branding (name, logo, colors) can be changed. RTMP ingress brings in streams from broadcast software, and egress sends meetings out to streaming platforms.

Security and access

OpenVidu Meet lists end-to-end encryption among its features, alongside user accounts, granular roles, per-room permissions, secure room links and locked rooms that require a moderator to admit people. Recordings have their own access control. Live captions use a speech-to-text provider you choose, so check where that provider processes audio before turning them on.

Self-hosting OpenVidu

The Community edition installs on a single Linux node (Ubuntu is recommended), on your own hardware or on AWS, Azure, GCP, DigitalOcean or Oracle Cloud. The installer sets up Docker Compose services managed by systemd: the OpenVidu server, OpenVidu Meet (an Angular front end with a Node.js backend), Redis, MongoDB, MinIO for S3-style storage, Caddy as reverse proxy, and an optional Grafana, Mimir, Alloy and Loki observability stack. The documented minimum is 4 CPU cores and 4 GB of RAM, with about 100 GB of disk recommended for recordings and a public IP. Ports include TCP 80 and 443, UDP 443 for TURN, TCP 1935 for RTMP, UDP 50000 to 60000 for media, and TCP 7881 and UDP 7885.

The documentation is clear that Community runs on one node. Scaling across several servers and fault tolerance need the Elastic or High Availability deployments, which are part of the proprietary PRO edition licensed by usage.

Hosted version

There is none. The README states that OpenVidu is self-hosted only and has no SaaS tier; the company behind it sells PRO licenses, support and consulting.

Limitations

The single-node limit of the open source edition is the main constraint: growing beyond one server means paying for proprietary software. The installer runs several supporting services you will need to back up and update. OpenVidu Meet is young, as its repository was created in March 2025, and the GitHub figures shown here come from the main OpenVidu repository. Without a hosted option, someone has to operate the servers.

Who it suits

OpenVidu suits software teams that want to add meetings or custom video features to their own product under the Apache-2.0 license, with LiveKit compatibility as a path for custom development. Organizations that just want an internal meeting tool can use OpenVidu Meet on one server, but should compare it with Jitsi Meet, whose open source stack scales by adding videobridges, and with plugNmeet, another LiveKit-based platform built for embedding.