Open source video conferencing tools

Meeting apps, virtual classrooms and embeddable platforms

The tools in this category do the same basic job, a call with video, audio and screen sharing in the browser, but they are built for different situations.

• Ready-to-use meeting apps give people a link to open in a browser or app, much like Zoom or Google Meet. Jitsi Meet is the best-known example and has mobile apps; La Suite Meet, MiroTalk SFU, MiroTalk P2P, Galene and eduMEET also fit here. Element Call is the calling layer of the Matrix ecosystem.
• Virtual classrooms and collaboration servers add presenter tools: slides with a shared whiteboard, polls, shared notes, breakout rooms and LMS plugins. BigBlueButton is the reference for teaching, plugNmeet offers similar tools with a focus on embedding, and Apache OpenMeetings combines meetings with file drives and a calendar.
• Embeddable platforms put calls inside another product through iframes, web components, REST APIs and SDKs. OpenVidu and plugNmeet are designed for this, and Jitsi Meet and MiroTalk also offer embedding.

How the media travels

The architecture explains most differences in capacity and privacy. In a peer-to-peer mesh, as in MiroTalk P2P, every browser sends its stream directly to every other browser. The server stays tiny, but each participant’s upload bandwidth limits the meeting to a few people. Most tools instead use a selective forwarding unit (SFU): each participant sends one stream to the server, which forwards it to the others. Jitsi uses its own Jitsi Videobridge; eduMEET and MiroTalk SFU use mediasoup; La Suite Meet, Element Call, plugNmeet, OpenVidu and BigBlueButton 4.0 use LiveKit; Galene uses the Pion library; OpenMeetings uses Kurento.

Encryption

WebRTC, the browser technology all of these tools use, does not allow unencrypted media: RFC 8827, the IETF’s WebRTC security architecture, requires media to be protected with SRTP. That protection is hop by hop, however. An SFU removes it to route packets, so whoever runs the server can in principle access the media. Self-hosting puts that server under your control.

End-to-end encryption adds a second layer that the SFU cannot remove, using browser APIs for encoded frames. RFC 9605 (SFrame, 2024) standardizes this kind of frame encryption, and RFC 9420 (Messaging Layer Security, 2023) defines group key agreement; eduMEET’s design combines both. Element Call encrypts every call end to end; Jitsi Meet and plugNmeet offer it as an option, and OpenVidu Meet lists it among its features. Check what it disables or excludes: in Jitsi it works only in Chromium-based browsers and does not cover chat, and in Zoom and Google Meet the stronger encryption modes switch off cloud recording and transcripts.

What to check before you choose

1. Meeting style. Quick team calls, lectures and webinars, or calls embedded in your own product.
2. Encryption. Transport encryption only, or optional or default end-to-end encryption, and which features stop working with it.
3. Self-hosting effort. Galene is one binary with no database; Jitsi, BigBlueButton, La Suite Meet and OpenVidu are multi-service stacks with an SFU, TURN, databases and sometimes an identity provider.
4. Bandwidth and hardware. SFU servers need generous symmetric bandwidth and open UDP port ranges. Server recording is often the most expensive part: a Jitsi Jibri recorder handles one meeting at a time.
5. Accounts and access. Who can create rooms, and whether OIDC, SAML or LDAP login is supported. A default Jitsi install lets anyone who reaches the server open a room.
6. Recording, streaming, dial-in and AI. Several tools send transcription or summaries to external AI or speech providers; check where that processing happens.
7. License and editions. AGPL or permissive, and whether scaling needs a paid edition. OpenVidu PRO is proprietary, while MiroTalk and Element Call also sell commercial licenses alongside the AGPL.

Moving from Zoom or Google Meet

Meetings leave little data behind, so switching is mostly about habits and integrations: calendar invitations, LMS plugins, dial-in numbers and mobile apps. Test with real participants on the networks they use, including corporate firewalls, before you retire the old service, and make sure a TURN server is in place.

Projects not listed here

We only list projects whose main repository is on GitHub under an OSI-approved license. OpenTalk is published under the EUPL on Open CoDE rather than GitHub, and Jami is developed on its own GitLab and Gerrit servers and is closer to a peer-to-peer calling app. Nextcloud Talk and Rocket.Chat include video calls but appear in our team chat category. We did not find a notable source-available video conferencing server; the main open-core case is OpenVidu, covered above.