At a glance — how these 3 alternatives compare
Our read on each project's adoption, maintenance activity and commercial-use risk, derived from GitHub signals and SPDX license terms rather than star count alone. Sorted by stars. How we score.
| Project | Adoption | Maintenance | Commercial use |
|---|---|---|---|
| ★ 29,514 · TypeScript | Mainstream | Active | Low risk Embed in a proprietary product with no copyleft obligation |
| ★ 19,454 · Go | Mainstream | Active | Low risk Embed in a proprietary product with no copyleft obligation |
| ★ 9,169 · JavaScript | Mainstream | Active | Medium risk Changes to the licensed files themselves must stay open |
The alternatives
jitsi-meet
Jitsi Meet - Secure, Simple and Scalable Video Conferences that you use as a standalone app or embed in your web application.
jitsi/jitsi-meet Updated 2026-06-27 livekit
End-to-end realtime stack for connecting humans and AI
livekit/livekit Updated 2026-06-27 bigbluebutton
A complete web conferencing system for virtual classes and more!
bigbluebutton/bigbluebutton Updated 2026-06-27 Editor's take
Yusuke Morinaga · last revisited
The three open-source Zoom replacements aren't competitors — they answer three different questions, and picking wrong is expensive.
The common mistake with self-hosted video is treating Jitsi, LiveKit, and BigBlueButton as three brands of the same thing. They’re not. Zoom bundles a meeting client, a media engine, and webinar scale into one product, and each project pulls out a different one of those threads. Decide which thread you need before reading a single star count.
Start with the question that breaks most pilots: scale. Jitsi Meet (29.5k stars, Apache-2.0) gives you a polished, ready-to-use meeting UI you can stand up today — but a single Jitsi Videobridge has finite headroom, and how far it stretches depends heavily on per-stream bitrate, server CPU, and network quality. There’s no universal “max participants” figure to quote; test your own worst-case room before relying on one bridge. Past that, you’re clustering JVB across dedicated infrastructure — a real project, not a config flag. For 6-person standups Jitsi is the obvious near-free win; for an all-hands, load-test first and budget for the cluster up front.
A second Jitsi trap: TURN. The classic “works on my laptop, not on the client’s network” failure comes from strict NAT and corporate firewalls; the fix is a separately configured Coturn server. Skip it and you’ll spend launch week debugging connectivity instead of running meetings.
BigBlueButton (9.2k stars, LGPL-3.0) is the one for any school or training org. It was built for the classroom — whiteboard, polling, breakout rooms — and its Scalelite load balancer fans webinar load across multiple BBB servers. Watch the license, though: LGPL-3.0 is more restrictive than the Apache-2.0 the others carry, which matters if you mean to embed it inside a closed product.
LiveKit (19.3k stars, Apache-2.0) is the odd one out, and the most misfiled. It’s a WebRTC media server for building real-time video into your own app — there’s no Zoom-style meeting client waiting for you. To replace Zoom it’s the wrong tool; to put live video inside your product, it’s the only one of the three even trying.
So before committing, run one honest load test under the conditions you’ll actually ship in: real worst-case room size, real per-stream bitrate (HD costs far more than thumbnail video), and one tester on a locked-down corporate network rather than office Wi-Fi. Those three — room size, bitrate, hostile network — decide whether Jitsi survives on one bridge, whether you need BigBlueButton’s Scalelite, or whether you were quietly building a feature with LiveKit. Test them first; the project picks itself afterward.
Comparison notes
Jitsi Meet self-hosted covers basic video meetings with screen sharing and recording but struggles to scale beyond 10–15 simultaneous video participants without a properly configured Jitsi Video Bridge cluster running on dedicated infrastructure. LiveKit is a WebRTC-native media server designed for embedding real-time video into applications rather than replacing meeting software — it has no ready-made meeting UI comparable to Zoom's client experience. BigBlueButton is purpose-built for online education with whiteboard, polling, and breakout room features aligned to Zoom's educational use cases, but is not designed for general business meeting workflows.
Migration tips
- Deploy Jitsi Meet using the official Debian/Ubuntu installer script on a server with at least 4 CPU cores and 4GB RAM for small-scale deployments under 15 participants.
- Configure a Coturn TURN server separately to ensure connectivity for users behind strict NAT or corporate firewalls — this is the most common source of Jitsi connection failures.
- For webinar-scale use, BigBlueButton's Scalelite load balancer distributes load across multiple BBB servers, but requires more infrastructure coordination than Zoom's fully managed auto-scaling.
Which alternative should you pick?
Replacing Zoom isn't a single call — it's a trade between license terms, team size, and how much early-stage roughness you can absorb. The 3 projects above split along those lines:
- You want the most active community and the lowest risk of abandonment → jitsi-meet. 29,514★ — the largest user base in this list, which usually means more StackOverflow answers, more plugins, and more deployment runbooks online.
- You want a strong-copyleft project that resists vendor capture → bigbluebutton. LGPL-3.0 licensed — downstream forks must stay open, which is what some teams explicitly want.
- You need a project that has shipped a release in the last few weeks → livekit. Last commit 2026-06-27 — the freshest activity in this list.
License & commercial-use notes
With a Zoom replacement the license usually decides more than the feature list — whether you can modify it, ship it inside a product, or host it as a service. The 3 projects here fall into:
- Permissive (jitsi-meet, livekit) — MIT / Apache / BSD / ISC — modify and embed inside a commercial product with no copyleft obligation. The safest bucket for shipping in a proprietary codebase.
- Weak copyleft (bigbluebutton) — LGPL / MPL — you can use them inside a larger work, but changes to the licensed files themselves must stay open.
License fields come from the GitHub API's SPDX classification and can lag a relicense. The repository linked on each card is authoritative — confirm its LICENSE file before any license-sensitive deployment.
Maintenance health of these 3 projects
Of the 3 projects listed, 3 shipped at least one commit in the last 12 months. See how we rank for the full criteria and our self-hosting cost reality check, which apply across every comparison on this site.
Frequently asked questions
How do these 3 alternatives compare on maintenance health?
3 of 3 have shipped a commit in the last 12 months. At least one project here has 5,000+ GitHub stars, which usually correlates with sustained maintainership. Always check the last-pushed date in the cards above and read the latest 5 closed issues — those two signals together catch 80% of abandoned-project cases.
How this page was compiled
- Repository facts (stars, license, language, last commit) come straight from the GitHub public API and are linked on each card as the primary source.
- Editorial analysis is drafted from Zoom's use case and the alternatives' repository metadata, then reviewed by hand.
- Maintenance signal: 3 of 3 projects shipped a commit in the last 12 months as of the latest rebuild (most recent activity: ).
- Last editorial review: by Yusuke Morinaga.
- Spotted an error? Email mori7ga2222@gmail.com with the page URL (subject prefix
[correction]) — we ship corrections within 14 days.