Video Conferencing

Last reviewed Aug 26, 2026 · 432 words

Six of the ten most-starred projects in this category are not video conferencing apps. LiveKit, mediasoup, Janus, coturn, OpenVidu, and Jitsi Videobridge are infrastructure: media routers, SDK platforms, and NAT-traversal servers you build a product on top of, not something your family clicks a link to join. If you want a self-hosted Zoom, the real shortlist is two products, Jitsi Meet and BigBlueButton, and the rest of the choice is about what you are willing to operate.

How to choose a meeting server

Three axes decide it. First, product versus building block: Jitsi Meet and BigBlueButton ship a complete experience with join links and a lobby, while LiveKit is a WebRTC stack with SDKs, aimed at developers replacing Twilio rather than Zoom. Second, hardware: Jitsi wants 4 GB of RAM and BigBlueButton wants 8 GB on a dedicated Ubuntu server, because its installer is Ubuntu-specific and unhappy sharing a box. Third, audience: drop-in meetings versus teaching. BigBlueButton's whiteboard, polling, breakout rooms, and LMS integrations are dead weight in a weekly stand-up and indispensable in a classroom.

The port that eats your first afternoon

WebRTC media does not travel over your HTTPS reverse proxy. Jitsi's videobridge, for example, moves audio and video over its own UDP port (10000 by default), and the classic failure is a call that connects, shows the room, and then delivers black video or silence because that port never got forwarded. Test from a phone on cellular data, not just your LAN. For participants stuck behind networks that block UDP entirely, a TURN relay like coturn is the fallback; it runs happily in 64 MB of RAM but its config file deserves a careful hour.

Where to start

Jitsi Meet is the general-purpose answer: no accounts, browser-based, 29,810 GitHub stars, and its Docker Compose setup is the least painful path through an architecture with genuinely many moving parts. BigBlueButton wins for anyone teaching online, since recording, playback, and per-student interaction are built around lessons rather than meetings. LiveKit is for developers only, but the right pick if video is a feature of your app rather than the app itself.

For a first-timer I would deploy Jitsi Meet via Docker on a 4 GB VPS, open the UDP media port before testing anything else, and skip both classroom features and custom SFUs until a real need shows up. It is the only option here that gets non-technical guests into a working call with nothing but a link.