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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| ★ 30,055 · TypeScript Apache-2.0 | Flagship | Active | Low risk Embed in a proprietary product with no copyleft obligation |
| ★ 21,326 · Go Apache-2.0 | Mainstream | Active | Low risk Embed in a proprietary product with no copyleft obligation |
| ★ 9,238 · JavaScript LGPL-3.0 | 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 2026-10-08 livekit
End-to-end realtime stack for connecting humans and AI
livekit/livekit Updated 2026-10-08 bigbluebutton
A complete web conferencing system for virtual classes and more!
bigbluebutton/bigbluebutton Updated 2026-10-07 Editor's take
Yusuke Morinaga · last revisited · star counts quoted in the text (≈) are as of that date; the cards above are refreshed daily
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 (≈29.9k★, 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★, 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 (≈20.7k★, 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 project with the most GitHub stars in this list → jitsi-meet. 30,055★ — the most of the 3 projects here. Stars measure attention, not quality or maintenance; check the last-push date and the Editor's take before reading more into it.
- You want the project with the most recent push activity → livekit. Last push 2026-10-08 — the freshest activity in this list.
License & commercial-use notes
When replacing Zoom, 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. Always check the last-pushed date in the cards above and read the latest closed issues — those two signals are the fastest public check we know of.
How this page was compiled
- Repository facts (stars, license, language, last push) come straight from the GitHub public API and are linked on each card as the primary source.
- Editorial analysis (the intro, comparison notes and migration tips) is Claude-drafted from Zoom's use case and the alternatives' repository metadata — in Claude Code sessions or scheduled routines run under the operator's account. Samples are spot-checked against the upstream repositories; entries are not individually reviewed unless they carry a signature. See what Claude drafts and what the operator writes.
- Editor's take is signed by Yusuke Morinaga. It was drafted in a Claude Code session the operator ran, then read and confirmed by Yusuke Morinaga before publication, and carries the date it was last revised. It is written from each project's README, LICENSE, release history and issue tracker — not from running the project in production; where that distinction matters, the take says so.
- 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.
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