2 Best Open Source Google Meet Alternatives

Why choose an open-source Google Meet alternative

Google Meet routes video and audio through Google's infrastructure under a Workspace subscription, tying every call to a per-user license regardless of how often that user actually joins meetings. Self-hosted video conferencing tools keep that traffic on your own network:

• Data ownership: video and audio streams and meeting metadata are routed through your own servers, not Google's infrastructure, which matters for calls involving confidential business discussions.
• Self-hosting: run video infrastructure entirely within your own network for privacy-sensitive calls, such as legal, healthcare, or internal HR conversations.
• Cost: no per-user licensing fees tied to a Google Workspace subscription, so external guests and occasional users do not add to a recurring bill.
• Customization: embed the video engine directly into your own application rather than sending users to an external meeting link.
• Avoiding lock-in: standard WebRTC-based infrastructure replaces a closed platform, so the underlying technology is not tied to one vendor's roadmap.

What to look for

Compare participant capacity per room against your typical meeting size, whether joining works entirely in the browser without an app install, recording and streaming support for meetings that need to be archived, whether the tool can be embedded into your own application, and whether the tool is built for general meetings versus classroom or webinar-style use with different feature priorities.

How the top Google Meet alternatives compare

• Jitsi Meet is a WebRTC-based video conferencing tool usable standalone or embedded into a custom web application, and is straightforward to self-host on a single server for small to mid-sized teams that mainly need reliable one-to-one and group calls.
• BigBlueButton is built specifically for virtual classrooms, with polls, breakout rooms, and a shared whiteboard aimed at education rather than general business meetings, and typically needs a more capable server given its recording and multi-user whiteboard load.

Neither tool matches Google Meet's built-in calendar integration or its tight coupling with a wider office suite, so teams switching away should plan for a separate scheduling workflow alongside either tool. Both are actively maintained projects with public issue trackers, which is worth checking before committing to either for a mission-critical use case.