Zoom

Zoom became the default video conferencing platform during the pandemic, but its pricing ($13.33/user/month for Business) and recurring privacy controversies have pushed security-conscious organizations toward self-hosted alternatives. When your video calls run on your own infrastructure, no third party sees your meeting content.

Jitsi Meet is the most mature open source video conferencing platform — it supports video calls, screen sharing, chat, recording, and breakout rooms with no account required for participants. You can self-host it on a single server and handle dozens of concurrent participants. BigBlueButton focuses on virtual classrooms with built-in whiteboards, polling, shared notes, and recording — it's widely used by universities and training organizations. Element, built on the Matrix protocol, adds encrypted video calling to its federated messaging platform, making it ideal for organizations that need both chat and video in a single privacy-first tool.

For organizations handling sensitive discussions — legal firms, healthcare providers, government agencies — self-hosted Jitsi eliminates the risk of data passing through third-party servers. End-to-end encryption is available, and you control the server logs, recordings, and metadata.

The trade-off is scale. Zoom handles thousands of participants with its global CDN infrastructure. Self-hosted Jitsi typically supports 75-100 participants per server comfortably, and scaling beyond that requires a multi-server Jitsi cluster with JVB (Jitsi Videobridge) load balancing. For most team meetings and webinars under 100 people, self-hosted Jitsi performs well. For large all-hands or public events, Zoom's infrastructure still has an edge.