open source video conferencing

Like ‘photoshop’, ‘zoom’ has become the quasi-official verb for online video conferencing ^[1]. Video conferencing is dominated by commercial proprietary desktop software like Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Google Meet and proprietary phone software like FaceTime and WhatsApp. These applications are not only proprietary but they’re all proven to be insecure: with the exception of Zoom which wasn’t founded at the time of the Edward Snowden disclosures, every other product mentioned above is owned by a company that was a commercial partner in the NSA’s PRISM program of global internet surveillance. They all willingly gave their customers’ data—your data if you were using the internet prior to 2010—over to the NSA for surveillance and monitoring.

In this post, I’ll outline some open source (and more secure) alternatives to proprietary video conferencing tools. I’m indebted to my Copim colleague Toby Steiner for his 2020 blog post (updated in 2023) which collates a lot of these alternatives and I can heartily recommend for more detail on any of these options ^[2].

desktop video conferencing

Jitsi Meet is a free and open source video conferencing application distributed under the Apache 2.0 license and developed by 8x8, Inc.. Installing Jitsi Meet on your own server requires a fairly robust server and some degree of technical expertise but fortunately Jitsi also provides a free version that they host for community use. It requires registration but is otherwise free, browser-based, and easy-to-use.

To lessen the load on Jitsi Meet however there is a whole community of people and teams hosting Jitsi instances that are free to use. Toby maintains a huge list in his aforementioned blog post but you can also use Timo Osterkamp’s jitsi.random-redirect.de which will redirect you to a random Jitsi Meet instance that you can use.

kMeet is an open source video conferencing platform from the Swiss cloud provider infomaniak. It's a fork of Jitsi focused on security, encryption, and ethical hosting. It has good moderation options and boasts end-to-end encryption of most meetings through their secure servers in Switzerland though it's worth noting that meetings are only encrypted on web browsers using Chromium (Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Opera, Brave, etc.).

eduMEET is an open source video conferencing platform supported by GÉANT and co-funded by the European Union. Like Jitsi Meet, it can be installed on a robust server but there are also several community installations available to use:

• edu.meet.garr.it
• letsmeet.no
• usually.in
• mm.cedrc.cnr.it
• lets.teamjoin.de

We use eduMEET for project meetings of approx. 20-30 team members on the Open Book Futures project and tend to favour letsmeet.no which is run by Sikt, a company owned by the Norwegian Government that operates their National Research and Education Network ^[3].

BigBlueButton is a free and open source video conferencing platform built for teaching and education. It is distributed under the GNU LGPL license and developed by BigBlueButton Inc.. We used BigBlueButton extensively on the COPIM project for everything from catch-up chats to group meetings to large online and hybrid conferences. BigBlueButton requires a fairly robust server to self-host your own version but there are several European community-run instances listed in Toby’s blog post.

Nextcloud Talk is an online meeting and video conferencing platform that comes packaged with Nextcloud which I talked about in the last post. If you’re running a Nextcloud for your project team or activist group as a replacement for Microsoft SharePoint, then Nextcloud Talk is a good option to integrate into that environment and essentially act as your Microsoft Teams.

Unhangout is an open source platform for running large-scale participant-driven events like online conferences. It’s developed by MIT, it requires installation on a Virtual Private Server, and I’ve never actually used it.

phone video calls

Phone video calls is a different prospect to desktop video conferencing. First, phone video calls are a more reciprocal endeavour. It's easy to switch your Zoom or Microsoft Teams link for a Jitsi link and to have the person you're calling run the call in the browser that they already have. To call someone on a phone app, both parties need to have the app and it becomes a social rather than technical problem to get someone to install an app that they don't have and start using it. This is magnified when the app is tied to a messaging platform like iMessage or WhatsApp: moving an entire group chat from WhatsApp to Signal is a social problem requiring you to persuade all your friends or family members to move too. Second, I don’t know anyone who uses their phone for video calls on a regular basis but that might just be the circles I run in.^[4] Nonetheless…

Signal is the gold standard for open source, encrypted messaging and video calls. You should be using Signal as your messaging app even if you’re not using it for calls. It’s available from Google Play or Apple’s App Store with desktop versions that sync with your mobile device. Signal is distributed under a AGPL-3.0 license and developed by the Signal Technology Foundation whose mission is to "protect free expression and enable secure global communication through open source privacy technology." I recommend all the software in this post but Signal is the only platform I would trust with a conversation I actually wanted to stay private and free from any form of government or corporate surveillance.

Jitsi Meet also has Android and iOS clients available on F-Droid, Google Play, or Apple’s App Store.