Overview

Jitsi Meet is the most compelling argument in video conferencing that you do not need to spend a dime to get a secure, functional, and genuinely private meeting experience. Backed by the 8x8 open source team and a global community of contributors, Jitsi is a fully free, fully open source video conferencing platform with no paid tiers, no feature gates, and no user limits. You can use the hosted version at meet.jit.si without creating an account — just open a browser, name a room, and share the link — or you can self-host the entire stack on your own infrastructure for complete data sovereignty.

The trade-offs are real and worth stating plainly. There are no AI features whatsoever: no transcription, no meeting summaries, no action item extraction. The hosted version starts degrading in quality once you push past 35-50 participants. And if something breaks, your support options are GitHub issues and community forums, not a ticketed helpdesk. But for privacy-conscious users, open source advocates, and organizations with the technical capacity to self-host, Jitsi Meet delivers an extraordinary amount of value for a price that cannot be beaten.

Features Deep-Dive

Security and Privacy

Jitsi Meet earns its 9.0 Security and 8.0 Privacy scores through a combination of architecture and philosophy that most commercial platforms cannot match at any price. End-to-end encryption is supported via Insertable Streams, meaning your media is encrypted on the sender's device and only decrypted on the receiver's device — the server never has access to the plaintext content of your calls. This is not enabled by default (it requires toggling on per meeting, and disables some server-side features like recording), but it is available and functional.

The self-hosting option is where the privacy story becomes truly compelling. When you deploy Jitsi on your own servers, you control every byte of data. Meeting metadata, chat logs, recordings — none of it touches a third-party server. For organizations in healthcare, legal, government, or any sector where data residency and sovereignty are non-negotiable, self-hosted Jitsi eliminates the need to evaluate a vendor's privacy policy, audit their sub-processors, or worry about foreign government data requests. The data stays where you put it, full stop.

Being open source adds an additional layer of trust. The entire codebase is publicly auditable on GitHub. You do not have to take anyone's word about what the software does with your data — you can read the source code yourself.

Zero-Friction Meeting Experience

Jitsi Meet scores 8.5 on Ease of Use, and it earns every bit of that through radical simplicity. There is no account creation. There is no app to download (though native apps exist for iOS and Android if you prefer them). You open a browser, type in a room name or generate one, and share the link. Your guests click the link and they are in the meeting. That is the entire workflow.

This frictionless approach makes Jitsi exceptionally well-suited for ad hoc conversations, quick syncs with external collaborators, and scenarios where asking someone to create an account or install software is a non-starter. Teachers, community organizers, journalists working with sources, open source project maintainers coordinating with contributors across the globe — these are the people for whom Jitsi's zero-barrier entry is not just convenient but essential.

The in-meeting experience covers the fundamentals solidly. Screen sharing works across platforms, the chat function handles text communication during calls, and virtual backgrounds provide basic privacy for home office environments. You get lobby mode for meeting security, speaker statistics for understanding participation patterns, and the ability to record meetings locally or via integration with Dropbox. The interface is clean, responsive, and unburdened by the feature sprawl that plagues larger platforms.

Collaboration and Integration Ecosystem

This is where Jitsi's limitations become most visible. The collaboration toolset is functional but sparse compared to commercial competitors. There are no breakout rooms in the default deployment (though community forks have implemented them). Polling, Q&A, and shared whiteboards are not part of the core experience. If your workflow depends on dividing a 50-person meeting into small groups for parallel discussions, you will need to look elsewhere.

The integration story follows a similar pattern. Jitsi offers a basic integration with calendar systems and can be embedded into other applications via its IFrame API, which is well-documented and widely used by projects like Moodle, Nextcloud, and Rocket.Chat. However, there is no equivalent of Zoom's 2,500-app marketplace. You will not find native Salesforce, HubSpot, or Asana integrations. The ecosystem that does exist is community-driven and open-source-focused, which is powerful in its own way but requires more technical effort to leverage.

The 5.0 Integrations score reflects this reality honestly. Jitsi integrates well with the open source ecosystem and provides solid developer tools for embedding, but it does not offer the plug-and-play connectivity that business users expect from commercial platforms.

Pricing Analysis

Jitsi Meet's pricing analysis is the shortest in this entire category: it is free. Not freemium with a paid upsell, not free-with-ads, not free-for-now-until-we-change-the-terms. It is open source software released under the Apache 2.0 license, maintained by 8x8 and a community of contributors. There are no paid plans, no per-seat fees, no feature tiers, and no participant limits baked into the software itself.

The hosted version at meet.jit.si is provided as a free public service. The self-hosted version is free to download, deploy, and run on your own infrastructure. This earns a perfect 10.0 Value score — the highest in the video conferencing category — because you are getting a complete, functional video conferencing platform for zero recurring software cost.

The honest caveat: self-hosting is not free in practice. You need server infrastructure (a capable VPS or dedicated server costs $20-100+/month depending on expected load), someone with Linux administration skills to deploy and maintain it, and the time to keep the installation updated. For a small business without in-house IT, these costs can add up to more than a basic Zoom or Google Meet subscription. But for organizations that already maintain server infrastructure, the marginal cost of adding Jitsi is negligible. And for any organization at scale, the per-user economics of self-hosted Jitsi are unbeatable compared to $13-22/user/month for Zoom or Teams paid plans.

Who Is This For?

• Privacy-first organizations with self-hosting capability — if your security posture requires that meeting data never leave your infrastructure, self-hosted Jitsi is the only free option that delivers complete data sovereignty with full-featured video conferencing
• Open source advocates and communities — if you build, contribute to, or philosophically support open source software, Jitsi is the video conferencing platform that aligns with those values, and it is widely used by open source projects, Linux user groups, and free software communities for exactly this reason
• Budget-constrained teams that need unlimited meetings — nonprofits, educators, community groups, and small organizations that cannot justify per-seat SaaS fees get a complete platform with no time limits, no participant caps on the software level, and no feature restrictions

Who Should NOT Use This

• Organizations that rely on AI meeting intelligence — Jitsi has zero AI features: no transcription, no summaries, no action item extraction, no noise cancellation. If your team depends on AI Companion-style features to process meeting content, Jitsi cannot serve that need today
• Teams running large-scale meetings or webinars — the hosted meet.jit.si service degrades noticeably past 35-50 participants, and while self-hosted deployments can be scaled higher with proper infrastructure, achieving reliable 200+ participant meetings requires significant server engineering that most organizations are not equipped to handle
• Companies without technical staff who need commercial support — when something goes wrong with Jitsi, your options are community forums, GitHub issues, and your own debugging skills. There is no SLA, no ticketed support, and no account manager to call. Organizations that need guaranteed response times and vendor accountability should look at commercially supported platforms

Bottom Line

Jitsi Meet proves that open source video conferencing is not a compromise — it is a legitimate choice. The security model is strong, the privacy guarantees under self-hosting are unmatched by any commercial platform at any price, and the zero-friction meeting experience rivals the simplicity of platforms that charge $20/user/month for similar functionality. The absence of AI features and commercial support are genuine limitations, not minor footnotes. But for the audience Jitsi serves — privacy-conscious users, open source communities, and organizations with the technical capacity to self-host — this platform delivers remarkable value. The price, after all, is free.

FAQ

Can Jitsi Meet realistically replace Zoom or Teams for a small team?

For basic video meetings — daily standups, 1-on-1s, team syncs with screen sharing — absolutely. The meeting experience is clean and reliable for groups under 35 participants, and the zero-account requirement actually makes it easier to invite external guests than Zoom or Teams. Where you will feel the absence is in AI features (no meeting summaries or transcription), deep calendar integration, and the broader ecosystem of business tool integrations. If your meetings are straightforward conversations rather than heavily automated workflows, Jitsi handles them well.

How difficult is it to self-host Jitsi Meet?

If you have experience administering Linux servers, the quick-install guide gets a basic deployment running in under an hour on a Debian or Ubuntu server. The Jitsi community also maintains Docker-based deployment options that simplify the process further. The complexity increases when you need to scale for larger meetings, configure TURN servers for participants behind restrictive firewalls, or set up load balancing across multiple video bridges. A single-server deployment suitable for a team of 50 or fewer is straightforward; a production deployment for an organization of 500+ requires genuine infrastructure engineering.

Is the end-to-end encryption in Jitsi Meet reliable?

The E2EE implementation in Jitsi uses Insertable Streams, which is a WebRTC standard supported in Chromium-based browsers. When enabled, media is encrypted client-side before transmission, and the server handles only encrypted data it cannot decrypt. The limitation is that E2EE disables server-side features like recording and live streaming, since the server cannot process media it cannot read. For meetings where confidentiality is paramount and you do not need server-side recording, the E2EE implementation is functional and has been reviewed by the security community. For meetings where you need recording, you trade E2EE for that capability.