Video calls with nobody in the middle

What it is

Jitsi Meet is open-source video conferencing that runs in the browser. Someone picks a meeting name, shares the link, and everyone who opens it joins. There is screen sharing, chat, a raised-hand queue, and the option to lock a room with a password or a lobby so the host admits people one at a time.

Nobody needs an account to join. That sounds minor until you have watched a client spend the first ten minutes of a call installing software and resetting a password.

Why I run it instead of the SaaS alternative

Zoom, Microsoft Teams and Google Meet are mature and dependable. If your organisation already lives inside Teams or Google Workspace, with calendars, recordings and phone dial-in tied together, that is the sensible place for meetings. Large webinars are also easier on the big platforms.

I run Jitsi because most of my calls are small and I want them to be private. A meeting on my own server does not pass through a vendor's cloud, does not require the other person to sign up to anything, and does not depend on a free tier whose limits change. It also comes from my own domain, which matters when the person on the other end is deciding whether to trust the link.

How it is set up here

1. The web front end and the video bridge. Jitsi runs as a set of containers on the estate server: the meeting page, the signalling that sets calls up, and the video bridge that relays streams when a call has several people.
2. Peer-to-peer where it can. When only two people are in a meeting, the browsers connect directly to each other where the network allows, so the media does not touch the server at all.
3. Its own media relay otherwise. When a direct connection is blocked by a firewall or a strict office network, the call falls back to a relay I run, not a public one operated by someone else.
4. Behind the single edge. The meeting page is served through the same nginx edge and TLS certificates as every other service, and the certificate is in the daily expiry sweep.
5. Monitored by content. The uptime probe checks that the meeting page actually loads, every five minutes.

What it replaces

• Paid Zoom or similar licences for people whose calls are mostly small.
• Asking guests to install an app or create an account before a first conversation.
• Meetings routed through a vendor's infrastructure when there is no reason for them to be.

What it costs to run is server bandwidth and some care. Video is heavy, and a relay needs the right network openings to work through restrictive firewalls. The cost tracks how much you use it, not how many people are named on a licence.

What I would do for a client

For most organisations already paying for Teams or Google Workspace, I would not suggest replacing their meetings. I would look at whether external guests are struggling to join and whether recordings and chat logs are kept somewhere sensible.

Where privacy is the point, or where guests should never need an account, I would build Jitsi as it runs here: your domain, your relay, rooms that can be locked, and capacity sized to how many people meet at once. I would test it from the hostile networks your guests actually use, like hotel wifi and locked-down offices, before calling it done.

Questions people ask