> Source: https://meetrix.io/blogs/plugnmeet-jitsi-jibri-replacement/
> Markdown copy of that page. Cite the URL above, not this file.

Collaboration

# Jitsi + Jibri Replacement: plugNmeet on LiveKit (2026)

[By Shalomi Umeshika](https://meetrix.io/blogs/authors/shalomi-umeshika/) • October 21, 2026 • 12 min read

English[Deutsch](https://meetrix.io/blogs/plugnmeet-jitsi-jibri-replacement-de/)[Español](https://meetrix.io/blogs/plugnmeet-jitsi-jibri-replacement-es/)[Français](https://meetrix.io/blogs/plugnmeet-jitsi-jibri-replacement-fr/)[Italiano](https://meetrix.io/blogs/plugnmeet-jitsi-jibri-replacement-it/)

## One Stack Instead of Eight

A production Jitsi deployment is rarely just Jitsi Meet. It's Jitsi Meet, Prosody, Jicofo, and a videobridge. Then Jibri for recording, Jigasi for phone dial-in, Etherpad for shared notes, and an Excalidraw backend for the whiteboard. Each one is its own service with its own config, and Jibri needs a whole Chrome instance per recording: one Jibri, one recording, full stop. **plugNmeet** is the open-source alternative that puts all of that in one stack, on top of [LiveKit](https://livekit.io/).

This is a look at what plugNmeet replaces, piece by piece, where it's genuinely better than the Jitsi stack, and where Jitsi still wins. If you've already hit the "one Jibri, one recording" wall, start with [the recording section](#recording).

The Quick Verdict

Switch

You record a lot of meetings

One plugNmeet recorder handles several sessions at once. With Jibri, ten recordings means ten Jibri machines.

Switch

Classes and webinars

Breakout rooms, quiz polls, a waiting room, a whiteboard with office files, and a Moodle plugin, all in the box.

Stay on Jitsi

Plain meetings that already work

If nobody records, dials in, or uses a whiteboard, a migration buys you very little.

Run both first

Heavy Jitsi customisation

Custom front ends, JWT flows, and iframe embeds need rework. Run plugNmeet beside Jitsi before you move users.

## What Is plugNmeet?

[plugNmeet](https://www.plugnmeet.org/) is an open-source video conferencing system made by MynaParrot and released under the MIT licence. It's a finished meeting product, not a toolkit: you install it, open the URL, and start a meeting. Under the hood it's a Go server, a React client, and a dedicated recorder, with LiveKit as the SFU that moves the audio and video. The source is on [GitHub](https://github.com/mynaparrot/plugNmeet-server).

That's the gap our [LiveKit vs Jitsi comparison](https://meetrix.io/blogs/livekit-vs-jitsi/) left open. LiveKit is excellent infrastructure, but it ships no meeting room, so choosing it used to mean building your own front end. plugNmeet is that front end and everything around it, already built.

### What it does

Meetings

-   HD audio and video, screen sharing, and virtual backgrounds
-   Simulcast and Dynacast, with H264, VP8, VP9, and AV1
-   Runs in modern desktop and mobile browsers, Safari on iOS included, with no download

Recording and streaming

-   MP4 recording on the server
-   RTMP and RTMPS out to YouTube or Facebook
-   RTMP and WHIP in, so you can broadcast from OBS into a room

Collaboration

-   A whiteboard that opens PDF, DOCX, and PPTX files for annotation
-   A shared notepad, synced video playback, and embedded web apps
-   Breakout rooms, polls with a quiz mode, raise hand, and a waiting room

Integration and security

-   An API with PHP and JavaScript SDKs, webhooks, and a BigBlueButton-compatible API
-   Plugins for WordPress, Moodle, and Joomla, plus LTI for Canvas, Chamilo, and others
-   WebRTC encryption by default, with optional end-to-end encryption

### What's new in v2.5.0

The release that landed on September 10-12, 2026 is a big one. The plugNmeet team ripped out three collaboration engines and rebuilt them from scratch.

**CRDT whiteboard.** The whiteboard now runs on CRDT sync, which means multiple people can edit the same board without stepping on each other's changes. The practical result is smoother collaboration on lesson files, faster updates, and no jarring jumps when someone else draws.

**BlockNote notepad with AI.** The old Etherpad-based notepad is gone, replaced by BlockNote. It now has built-in AI that can continue writing, summarise notes, or help draft content during a session.

**Rebuilt breakout rooms.** The breakout room architecture got a complete overhaul. You can now share whiteboard pages, notepad content, and polls into child rooms, so groups don't start from a blank page.

**Quiz polls and anonymous voting.** Polls now support quiz mode with correct answers hidden until close, anonymous voting, multi-select, and auto-close timers up to 60 minutes.

**Push polls from your backend.** There's a `POST /room/createPoll` endpoint that lets you inject a poll into a live room from your own system, which is useful for integrations and automated workflows.

**WHIP support.** Live broadcasting now supports WHIP alongside RTMP, which opens up more production workflows.

## The Jitsi Stack It Replaces

Here's the whole mapping in one table. The left column is what a fully featured Jitsi deployment runs; the right is the plugNmeet piece that covers the same job.

| Job | plugNmeet | Jitsi |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Meeting app in the browser | plugNmeet client (React) | Jitsi Meet web |
| Signalling, rooms, and auth | plugNmeet server (Go) | Prosody (XMPP) and Jicofo |
| Media routing (SFU) | LiveKit | Jitsi Videobridge |
| Recording and RTMP streaming | plugNmeet-recorder | Jibri |
| Phone dial-in | Built-in SIP gateway | Jigasi |
| Shared notes | Built-in notepad (BlockNote) | Etherpad, installed separately |
| Whiteboard | Built in, with office file support | Excalidraw, plus its own backend service |
| Captions and transcripts | Built-in AI captions, translation, transcripts, and summaries | Jigasi routed to a speech-to-text engine |

Nothing in the Jitsi column is bad software. But it's eight things to install, configure, and keep in step on upgrade, and most of the "Jitsi is hard to self-host" complaints come from the bottom half of that table, not the top. Our [Jitsi architecture explainer](https://meetrix.io/blogs/jitsi-architecture/) walks through how those services talk to each other.

## Jibri vs the plugNmeet Recorder

This is the part that pushes most teams to look for a Jibri replacement. A Jibri runs one Chrome and one ffmpeg process, so it records exactly one meeting at a time. Ten simultaneous recordings need ten Jibri instances, each waiting in the brewery room for Jicofo to hand it a job. Our explainer on [how Jibri recording works](https://meetrix.io/blogs/how-jibri-recording-works/) covers why.

Here's the honest part: plugNmeet's recorder captures meetings the same basic way. Its [requirements](https://github.com/mynaparrot/plugNmeet-recorder) are Google Chrome, Xvfb, PulseAudio, and FFmpeg. What's different is everything around the capture.

Jibri

-   One recording per instance, full stop
-   Scaling means more machines, kept idle until a recording starts
-   Capture and encoding run on the same box
-   Needs the snd-aloop kernel module and a matching ChromeDriver

plugNmeet-recorder

-   Records multiple sessions simultaneously on a single instance
-   Run several recorders, and plugNmeet picks one by load
-   You can split recording and transcoding onto separate nodes with three operational modes: `both`, `recorderOnly`, and `transcoderOnly`
-   Outputs MP4 and RTMP from the same service

The `recorderOnly` mode captures the session and publishes a transcoding job to a queue. `transcoderOnly` instances pick up those jobs and run ffmpeg one at a time, which keeps CPU-heavy post-processing off the box doing the live capture. That decoupling is the real architectural win: it means a burst of recordings doesn't slow down the sessions still in progress.

**The win is density, not magic.** Each recording still costs a browser's worth of CPU and memory. But you size a few bigger recorder servers instead of a pool of single-use Jibris, and the transcoding load moves off the box doing the capture.

## Jigasi vs SIP Dial-In

On Jitsi, phone access means installing Jigasi, configuring its brewery and XMPP control user, and pointing it at a SIP account. Our [Jigasi setup guide](https://meetrix.io/blogs/add-sip-gateway-jitsi-meet-jigasi/) shows how fiddly that config gets.

plugNmeet includes a SIP gateway, so guests can join a meeting's audio from any phone. It uses the `livekit/sip` project under the hood. The provider side doesn't go away: you still need a SIP trunk or a phone number from a telephony provider like Twilio or SignalWire, and the firewall has to allow SIP and RTP. What goes away is the separate gateway service with its own XMPP plumbing.

Participants get a standard phone number and a PIN. They dial in, enter the PIN, and they're connected to the meeting audio. Moderators can enable or disable dial-in per session, view the active number and PIN, and share them into the chat with one click.

One thing worth knowing: the SIP leg cannot be end-to-end encrypted, because the gateway has to process the audio to bridge it into the PSTN. The connection between the gateway and your SIP provider can be encrypted with SRTP, but the phone-network side is plain old telephony.

Transcription moves too. Jigasi doubles as the route to a speech-to-text engine on Jitsi. plugNmeet does live captions, spoken translation, transcripts, and AI summaries inside the product instead.

## Beyond What Jitsi Ships

A few plugNmeet features have no direct Jitsi equivalent, and they're the reason it shows up in education and webinar shortlists. Our roundup of [self-hosted Zoom Webinars alternatives](https://meetrix.io/blogs/self-hosted-zoom-webinars-alternatives/) puts it next to Jitsi, BigBlueButton and others.

Office files on the whiteboard

Open a PDF, Word, or PowerPoint file on the whiteboard and annotate it live. Jitsi's whiteboard is a blank Excalidraw canvas.

Quiz polls and a waiting room

Polls can run in quiz mode, and a waiting room holds guests until a moderator lets them in.

LMS plugins and a BBB-compatible API

Moodle, WordPress, and Joomla plugins, LTI for other LMSs, and an API that speaks BigBlueButton's dialect, which eases migrations from BBB too. The Moodle plugin supports scheduling with calendar integration, guest access, moderator-controlled starts, and a webhook/events API that rebroadcasts plugNmeet events as standard Moodle events.

If you're running classes on Jitsi today through our [Moodle and Jitsi integration](https://meetrix.io/blogs/moodle-jitsi-integration/), the plugNmeet Moodle plugin is the closest like-for-like swap. Teams also weighing BigBlueButton can read our [BigBlueButton vs Jitsi Meet comparison](https://meetrix.io/blogs/bigbluebutton-vs-jitsi-meet/) first.

## Install plugNmeet

The project's [installation guide](https://www.plugnmeet.org/docs/installation) uses one script that sets up the whole stack, recorder included, on a clean server.

### What you need

| Item | Requirement |
| --- | --- |
| Server | A clean Ubuntu or Debian server with a public IP, and no Apache or Nginx already running |
| Testing | 2 CPU cores, 2-4 GB RAM |
| Production | At least 4 cores and 4 GB RAM; 8+ cores and 8 GB+ if you run the recorder |
| Bandwidth | At least 100 Mbit/s |
| DNS | Two subdomains pointing at the server, one for plugNmeet and one for TURN |
| Email | A valid address for the Let's Encrypt certificate |

### Run the installer

1.  Point two subdomains at the serverFor example `plugnmeet.example.com` and `turn.example.com`. Wait until both resolve.
2.  Open the firewallFollow the project's firewall guide, or let the installer configure UFW for you with `--ufw yes`.
3.  Download and run the scriptGet `install.sh` from the installation guide, then run it with your own domains and email:

```bash
sudo bash install.sh --domain plugnmeet.example.com --turn-domain turn.example.com --email admin@example.com --recorder yes --ufw yes
```

Run `sudo bash install.sh` with no arguments if you'd rather answer the questions interactively. When it finishes, two systemd services run the stack: `plugnmeet` and `plugnmeet-recorder`. The script prints your Server URL, API Key, and API Secret at the end, and you can recover them later from `/opt/plugNmeet/config.yaml`. Recorder logs live in `/opt/plugNmeet/recorder/logs/recorder.log`, which is the first place to look when a recording doesn't appear.

TURN is not optional

The installer asks for a TURN domain for a reason. Without TURN, people behind strict corporate firewalls connect fine on Wi-Fi at home and fail at the office. That's the same lesson as [running TURN for Jitsi Meet](https://meetrix.io/blogs/setting-up-a-turn-server-for-jitsi-meet/).

Running on AWS? The same sizing and port lessons from [self-hosting LiveKit on AWS](https://meetrix.io/blogs/self-host-livekit-aws/) apply, because LiveKit is doing the media work underneath.

## Moving Off Jitsi

There's no export button from Jitsi to plugNmeet, and you don't really need one: Jitsi doesn't hold much state beyond its config and your recordings. The work is in what points at Jitsi.

1.  Stand plugNmeet up beside JitsiUse its own subdomain. Nothing on the Jitsi server has to change.
2.  List everything that creates Jitsi meetingsCalendar links, iframe embeds, JWT login flows, Moodle activities. Each one needs to create rooms through plugNmeet's API, SDKs, or plugins instead.
3.  Move recordings storageCopy existing Jibri recordings to wherever plugNmeet's recordings will live, so users find old and new in one place.
4.  Pilot with one teamPick the group that records the most. They'll feel the recorder difference first and find the rough edges for everyone else.
5.  Switch the links, then retire JitsiKeep the Jitsi server running for a few weeks so old links and bookmarks don't break overnight.

## What You Give Up

What gets easier

-   One install instead of eight services
-   Several recordings per recorder server, with recording and transcoding that scale independently
-   Dial-in, whiteboard, notes, and captions with no extra components
-   An MIT licence, which is about as permissive as it gets

What you lose

-   Jitsi Meet's app-store apps for iOS and Android. plugNmeet is browser-first, with a hybrid native integration model for developers who need a native media layer.
-   Jitsi's far larger community. Jitsi has roughly 30,000 GitHub stars; plugNmeet sits around 572. That's not a measure of quality, but it is a measure of how many answered questions you'll find when something breaks.
-   Anything custom built against Jitsi's iframe API or XMPP.
-   A project backed by a big sponsor. plugNmeet is mainly one company, MynaParrot.

Weigh that last point honestly. An MIT licence means the code can't be taken away, but the pace of fixes depends on a small team. If you want to see the wider field first, our roundups of [open source video conferencing software](https://meetrix.io/blogs/open-source-video-conference-software/) and [LiveKit alternatives](https://meetrix.io/blogs/livekit-alternatives/) cover the other options.

## plugNmeet Bundles From Meetrix

We've spent years running Jitsi, Jibri, and Jigasi for customers, and we're now putting together plugNmeet bundles for teams who want the same features with fewer moving parts. If you're planning a move, tell us how many people join at once, how much you record, and whether you need dial-in, and we'll come back with what fits.

## Is Switching to plugNmeet Worth It?

If recording is what makes your Jitsi setup painful, yes. Swapping a pool of single-use Jibris for a couple of recorder servers is the biggest operational win here, and dial-in, notes, and a whiteboard come along without three extra services. The v2.5.0 rebuild of the whiteboard, notepad, and breakout rooms also means the classroom features aren't an afterthought: they're being actively developed. Classrooms and webinars gain the most, because quiz polls, office files on the whiteboard, and the Moodle plugin are things Jitsi doesn't do out of the box.

If your Jitsi server runs plain meetings and nobody complains, leave it alone. A migration costs real work on integrations and user habits, and plugNmeet's advantages mostly live in features you aren't using. Still deciding on cost? Our breakdown of [what self-hosting Jitsi Meet costs](https://meetrix.io/blogs/jitsi-meet-self-hosting-cost/) is the baseline to compare against.

## Frequently Asked Questions

What is plugNmeet?

An open-source, MIT-licensed video conferencing system built on LiveKit. It's a finished meeting product (install it, open the URL, start a meeting) rather than a toolkit you assemble yourself.

Can plugNmeet replace Jitsi Meet?

For most uses, yes. It covers the meeting app, recording, SIP dial-in, shared notes, whiteboard, and captions in one stack. The main gaps are Jitsi's mobile apps, its much larger community, and anything custom built against Jitsi's iframe API or XMPP.

What replaces Jibri in plugNmeet?

plugNmeet-recorder. It records multiple sessions simultaneously on a single instance, and you can deploy multiple recorder nodes with load-based selection. The v2.5 recorder also supports separate recorderOnly and transcoderOnly modes, so capture and CPU-heavy transcoding can run on different machines.

Does plugNmeet support SIP dial-in like Jigasi?

Yes. A SIP gateway is built in, powered by the livekit/sip project. Guests can join by phone with a number and PIN. You still need a SIP trunk or phone number from a provider, and the firewall has to allow SIP and RTP.

Is plugNmeet free?

Yes. It's released under the MIT licence. You pay for the server and any telephony provider costs. There's also a hosted Cloud option starting at €11.90/month if you'd rather not run it yourself.

What server do I need for plugNmeet?

2 cores and 2-4 GB RAM for testing. At least 4 cores and 4 GB RAM for production, or 8+ cores and 8 GB+ if you run the recorder. Bandwidth of at least 100 Mbit/s.

Does plugNmeet work with Moodle?

Yes. There's a Moodle plugin with course-integrated rooms, scheduling and calendar integration, guest access, moderator control, and a webhook/events API that rebroadcasts plugNmeet events as standard Moodle events.

Can Meetrix set up plugNmeet for us?

We're putting together plugNmeet bundles for teams replacing Jitsi, Jibri, and Jigasi. Tell us your user numbers and recording needs, and we'll come back with what fits.

## Planning a Move Off Jitsi and Jibri?

We're putting together plugNmeet bundles for teams replacing Jitsi, Jibri, and Jigasi. Tell us your user numbers and recording needs.

[Talk to Meetrix](https://meetrix.io/contact-us/)

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