Open Source Zoom Alternatives
A curated collection of the 2 best open source alternatives to Zoom.
The best open source alternative to Zoom is Jitsi. If that doesn't suit you, we've compiled a ranked list of other open source Zoom alternatives to help you find a suitable replacement. Other interesting open source alternative to Zoom is Wire.
Zoom alternatives are mainly Collaboration & Communication but may also be Data Security & Privacy. Browse these if you want a narrower list of alternatives or looking for a specific functionality of Zoom.
A set of open source projects for running video conferences in the browser, self-hosted or on a free public instance.
Jitsi Meet lets an organization deploy video conferencing instead of subscribing to it. Meetings run in any current browser, and on the free public instance a Google, Facebook or GitHub account is all it takes to start one, which removes most of the friction in getting several people onto the same call.
The project is a set of components rather than one application. Web and native SDKs exist for building conferencing into other products, and mobile apps are published for Android on both Google Play and F-Droid and for iOS on the App Store, with open beta channels for anyone who wants features early.
The meeting itself covers what most teams expect from a call.
- HD audio and video: video quality is the stated focus of the platform.
- Content sharing: screens and content shared with everyone in the room.
- Chat: room chat with private conversations running alongside it.
- Polls, reactions and raised hands: lightweight signals that keep larger meetings orderly.
- Virtual backgrounds: background replacement handled in the client.
Running your own installation is documented in the handbook, with Debian packages and a Docker setup provided and a from-source build available to advanced users. Security is documented at length, including a whitepaper on the end-to-end encryption implementation. For teams that want their own branding without operating the infrastructure, 8x8 offers Jitsi as a Service on the same technology.
Wire is an end-to-end encrypted messaging and collaboration platform for organizations, with its clients and server components published as source.
Wire is a secure messenger aimed at organizations, and the whole of it is published: the mobile, desktop, and web clients, the encryption layer, the audio and video stack, and the server that ties them together. A team that needs to audit what its messaging tool does, or run the backend itself, can do both.
Each piece is written in the language its job calls for. Core Crypto, which holds the Axolotl protocol implementation along with the supporting cryptographic and utility libraries, is Rust cross-compiled for iOS, Android, and WebAssembly. The audio, video, and signaling library is ANSI C and C++, cross-compiled the same way, with Java and Objective-C wrappers for the mobile platforms. Protocol buffer definitions shared by every client govern both client-to-client and backend communication.
The server splits into services along the lines of what each one owns.
- brig: accounts.
- galley: conversations and teams.
- gundeck: the push notification hub.
- cannon: WebSocket push notifications.
- cargohold: storage for images, files, and other assets.
- spar: single sign-on.
- nginz: the public API reverse proxy, an Nginx build carrying a custom authorization module.
Self-hosting is documented for Kubernetes, with Helm charts in the repository and mirrored for use through a chart repository. Contributions require signing a contributor agreement and are limited to bug fixes and code improvements, since features and interface changes are decided by the Wire team. Translations are crowdsourced on Crowdin, and privacy and security whitepapers document the algorithms and protocols in detail.
