You will find several video conferencing tools available online. Some are tailored for professional use and some for daily casual conversations.
However, with hundreds of options to choose from, security and privacy is often a concern when picking a video conferencing app or service. Among the list of options, what’s usually the best and the most secure service?
Well, all (or most of them) claim to provide the best possible security and privacy. But you know that this cannot be taken at face value.
Fortunately, at It’s FOSS, we focus on open-source solutions and privacy-friendly options. So, let’s take a look at a list of open-source video conferencing tools that you can utilize.
Top Open Source Video Conferencing Solutions
Most of the video conferencing solutions can be installed on your own servers if you are a small business or enterprise.
For normal, non-sysadmins, some of these solutions also provide ready-to-use, free, web-based video conferencing service. I’ll mention this information in the description of each item on the list.
Note: The list is in no particular order of ranking.
1. Jitsi Meet
Jitsi Meet is an impressive open-source video conferencing service. You can easily find out more about it on our separate coverage on Jitsi Meet.
To give you a head start, it offers you free official public instance to test it and use it for free as long as you need it.
If you need to host it on your server while customizing some options for your requirements, you can download it from its official website for your server.
Even though they offer an electron-based app on Linux, you don’t need to download an app on your desktop to set it up. All you need is a browser and you’re good to host a group video call. For mobile, you will find apps for both Android and iOS.
2. Jami
Jami is a peer-to-peer based open-source video conferencing solution. It’s good to see a distributed service that does not rely on servers but peer-to-peer connections.
Of course, a distributed service has its pros and cons. But, it’s free and open-source, that’s what matters.
Jami was previously known as Ring messenger but it changed its name and is now a GNU project.
Jami is available for Linux, Windows, macOS, Android, and iOS, So, it’s a pure cross-platform solution for secure messaging and video conferencing. You can take a look at their GitLab page to explore more about it.
3. Nextcloud Talk
Nextcloud is undoubtedly the open-source Swiss army of remote working tools. We at It’s FOSS utilize Nextcloud. So, if you already have your server set up, Nextcloud Talk can prove to be an excellent video conferencing and communication tool.
Of course, if you don’t have your own Nextcloud instance, you will require some technical expertise to set it up and start using Nextcloud Talk.
4. Element
Previously known as Riot.im was rebranded to Element. While Element is already one of the best open source alternatives to slack, it gives you the ability to create communities, send text messages, and start video conferences in a group/community. You can use it for free by using any of the public Matrix servers available.
If you want your own dedicated decentralized Matrix network, you can also opt for paid hosting plans on Element Matrix Service.
5. BigBlueButton
BigBlueButton is an interesting open-source video conferencing option tailored for online learning.
If you are a teacher or running a school, you might want to try this out. Even though you can try it for free, there will be limitations for the free demo usage. So, it’s best to host it on your own server and you can also integrate it with your other products/services, if any.
It offers a good set of features that let you easily teach the students. You can explore its GitHub page to know more about it.
Additional mention: Wire
Wire is a quite popular open-source secure messaging platform tailored for business and enterprise users. It also offers video calls or web conferencing options. And, all of that is completely end-to-end encrypted.
If you wanted a premium open-source option dedicated for your business or your team, you can try Wire and decide to upgrade it after the 30-day trial expires.
Personally, I love the user experience, but it comes at a cost. So, I’d recommend you to give it a try and explore its GitHub page before you decide
Wrapping Up
Now that you know some popular open-source web conferencing options, which one do you prefer to use?
Did I miss any of your favorites? Let me know your thoughts in the comments below!
jitsi really sucks with more than 3 users. Easy to use and install tough
My experience with Jitsi is a bit bittersweet.
On the plus – opensource, can use without needing to sign up/no need for email address etc.
I have downloaded it an installed it on ubuntu server in a VM.
Some suggestions though
– jitsi does NOT work well when even one user in the conference doesn’t have a fast internet connection, sorry Jitsi! seems that Zoom handles that situation better – however much I hate to have to admit this!
I think with Jitsi you have multiple streams while Zoom bundles all streams into one if I understand correctly. So one ‘slow’ person slows down everyone. Most people’s internet obviously upload speed much lower than download speeds; I can’t give you exact figures but we had several times problems running Jitsi with a relatively small group (3-5 participants only) with one participant who had actually a 30MBps internet connection (download, not sure re their upload speed) which usually seems to be adequate, but another 1-2 people in the household also using the internet at the time and Jitsi essentially didn’t work for that participant and then for the rest of us; while Zoom worked for us with no problems in that situation!
Someone said that typical bitrates for running jitsi are 3-5Mbps per participant (both up and down) even though it seems one can get reasonable video/sound quality probably with 1Mbps up and down.
I have tried to submit a link to some some bandwidth estimates for Jitsi but my comment was marked as spam.. so if you google bandwidth estimates for Jitsi you might find it on google documetns!
you can see that bandwidth really increases quite significant with number of participants.
– however there are suggestions on setup including how to reduce bandwidth (again, have removed links as was marked as ‘spam’)
a suggestion to Jitsi developers – why not have 2 install versions, one for normal and one for low bandwidth, eg reduced video quality etc
– also… use Chrome/chromium and not firefox; while Firefox supposed to be working people on forums describe that if someone joins a Jitsi meeting with Firefox sometimes it crashes the entire meeting.
I only use jitsi on Firefox, and I had no problem until now. But the part about one participant with low bandwidth screwing entire meeting seems to be true for me too… But in general my meetings with jitsi always work better than zoom (perhaps because of participants I use to meet with zoom, the only and specific group I meet with zoom).
Thanks for the list.
Maybe I missed something but clicking the link for riot matrix takes me to a page that has a tryit that suggests I need to install the riot web client. There isn’t a client for linux yet?! How did you get it working to test for this article ?
As mentioned in the article, Riot was soon to be rebranded at the time of publishing this and what you’re seeing is the new Riot called “Element”.
They’re still working on the Linux client for “Element”. If you had the Riot.im client installed, you can continue using it. But, if you don’t, I’m afraid you will have to wait for them to launch the Linux client.
I’ll soon update the article with more details :)