Pick the platform
Jitsi for meetings, BigBlueButton for teaching, LiveKit or Janus when video is a feature of your own app.
Video conferencing service
Video meetings on servers you own, built on open source. We pick the platform, set it up in your cloud or data centre, and keep it running. No per-seat licence, and no meeting data on someone else's servers.
Most companies land here for one of three reasons. The Zoom bill grew faster than the team. Legal wants meeting data to stay in the EU, or in the building. Or the product needs video inside it, and a rented SDK with per-minute pricing does not add up.
Open source covers all three. Jitsi Meet, BigBlueButton and LiveKit are mature and free to run. What they do not include is anyone to install them properly, size the servers, get video through corporate firewalls, and answer the phone when a bridge falls over. That is the part we do.
Jitsi for meetings, BigBlueButton for teaching, LiveKit or Janus when video is a feature of your own app.
In your AWS, GCP or Azure account, or on your own hardware. Your domain, SSL, recording and secure rooms.
Upgrades, monitoring and a named team to call. Or a clean handover if you would rather run it yourselves.
Keep it small. A startup does not need a cluster. One Jitsi Meet server, sized for your largest call, on your own domain with password or JWT-protected rooms, handles a team of up to about 100 people. Our Jitsi Meet marketplace images get that running on AWS or Google Cloud without us at all.
Where we come in for startups is usually the product side: video calls inside your app, branded as yours. That is Jitsi customization or a custom WebRTC build, and it is far cheaper than paying per minute to a video API once you have real traffic.
For enterprises the question is less about cost and more about control. Where do recordings live? Who can open a room? Does it work with our single sign-on? Can it pass an audit?
Want to see what locking a server down involves? Our Jitsi security checklist is public.
Some teams cannot use a public cloud at all. Jitsi Meet runs fine on your own hardware and on networks with no internet connection. The hard parts are certificates, since Let's Encrypt cannot reach a closed network, and getting media to remote staff through a VPN or a TURN server. Recording works offline too: see our guide to Jibri on a private LAN. Teams with stricter needs can read how Jitsi fits military communication.
| Rented (Zoom, Teams, Meet) | Self hosted with Meetrix | |
|---|---|---|
| Pricing | Per host or per seat, every month | Server and bandwidth costs, plus our setup or support fee |
| Where data lives | The vendor's cloud | Your cloud account or your own hardware |
| Branding | Vendor logo and app | Your domain, logo and UI |
| Who fixes outages | The vendor | Us, or your team after handover |
| Best for | Small teams, occasional calls | Large teams, regulated data, video inside a product |
If you are still choosing software, our comparison of seven open source video conferencing servers covers how each one works and how far it scales.
Past a few hundred regular users, usually yes, because you pay for servers instead of per host. For a small team it is often not, once you count the time to run it. Our Jitsi cost breakdown shows real numbers.
Hosted means a vendor runs the servers and you rent seats, like Zoom or Teams. Self hosted means the software runs on servers you control, in your cloud account or data centre. We set up and run the second kind.
Jitsi Meet for most meetings, BigBlueButton for classrooms, and LiveKit or Janus when a product needs its own video features. The choice depends on your use case, not our preference.
Yes. Jitsi Meet runs on a private network with no outside connection. You need your own certificates, since Let's Encrypt cannot reach a closed network, and a VPN or TURN server for remote staff.
Usually one Jitsi server sized for your biggest call, your domain, and secure rooms. That handles up to about 100 people. Add recording and scaling later, when real usage tells you it is needed.