Jitsi Meet vs Nextcloud Talk

Jitsi Meet

The published load tests stand behind the scale — 1056 streams at roughly 550 Mbps for about 20% CPU on one quad-core server, a selective forwarding unit that relays video rather than mixing it, and Last-N so large conferences distribute only the most recent speakers. Screen sharing, integrated chat and Etherpad are documented, but I found no public information on breakout rooms, waiting rooms or per-participant moderation: on the public instance all users are moderators and the controls are described as soft, with stronger host control available only by configuring your own instance.

Nextcloud Talk

Breakout rooms and webinar lobbies are evidenced, and I respect the honest capacity statement — a private setup handles 6-10 participants, up to 20 without video on good connections — but the evidence says nothing about screen sharing, mute-all or per-participant moderation, and no adaptive-bitrate or bad-connection behaviour is documented.

Jitsi Meet

End-to-end encryption is switchable from the overflow menu, its trade-offs are named plainly — audio, video and screen sharing are covered while chat and polls are not — and the pages say exactly what the server sees: the outer DTLS-SRTP layer is removed at the videobridge but packets live only in memory and are never persisted. With the code 100% open source I can inspect the cryptography myself, and retention of names, emails and chat is documented as lasting only the meeting; I found no public information on SSO-gated joining or per-participant identity verification, and the meeting key is one shared passphrase.

Nextcloud Talk

'Multi-layered encryption' is a slogan, not a mechanism, and access control is documented only as a lobby that requires the HPB. What is documented is architectural: no hosting is offered, employees never gain access to your data, and no user data is transferred to the vendor — the against-whom question answered by design rather than cryptography, with no E2EE or key handling anywhere in the evidence.

Jitsi Meet

Joining from a browser with no install and no account is the product's default — no need for an account, ever — though the captured pages give different figures for hosting, since the security page says the room creator has needed an account since August 24, 2023, and mobile apps ship on three stores including F-Droid. For the half of my class on a phone in a dead spot, I found no public information on an accessibility statement, keyboard or screen-reader testing, or live captions; transcription gets one line, and dial-in appears only as an endpoint address on the developer page with no numbers listed.

Nextcloud Talk

Phone dial-in via the SIP bridge, live transcription with translation, mobile apps and a web platform are evidenced — real inclusion tools. But the evidence is silent on guests joining without an account, has no accessibility statement, no keyboard or screen-reader evidence, and no low-bandwidth mode, and dial-in requires the HPB.

Jitsi Meet

The retention story is unusually clean: rooms are ephemeral, chat and speaker stats are destroyed when the meeting ends, names and emails are not kept, and cloud recordings leave the servers for your Dropbox within 24 hours or are deleted. But a recording is personal data about everyone in my room, and I found no public information on who may record, participant notification or consent, storage region, or organisation-wide policy — while on the public instance every user is a moderator.

Nextcloud Talk

Recording consent in meetings and configurable message expiration exist, and because the product is self-hosted the storage region is the organisation's own servers by definition. But there is no admin policy on who records, no retention rule for recordings and transcripts, no access logging, and the participant CSV export comes with no documented off-switch.

Jitsi Meet

Deployment is the customer's choice in a way few products match: full API documentation, an embeddable external API, control over XMPP and a REST interface, tenant-named rooms, managed JaaS hosting, and a self-hosted install documented at fifteen minutes on an Apache-2.0 codebase. The office plumbing is where the pages go quiet — I found no public information on calendar integration, single sign-on, SCIM provisioning, webhooks or room-system support.

Nextcloud Talk

Deployment is top of the class — fully on-premise, 100% open source, airgap-capable — which answers the own-infrastructure question outright, and webhook bots, Pexip bridging and an Outlook add-in round it out. But the evidence is silent on SSO, SCIM provisioning and any embeddable SDK.

Jitsi Meet

The hosted service contracts through 8x8, Inc. of Campbell, California, with disputes litigated exclusively in New York, analytics running through Amplitude, Datadog and Crashlytics, and I found no public information on where media or metadata are processed. What lifts it for me is that the same pages document running my own instance, which puts every packet on infrastructure my school chooses; nothing evidences EU operation of the vendor's own cloud.

Nextcloud Talk

The contracting entity is documented to the street — Nextcloud GmbH, Stuttgart, HRB 227086, German VAT — the vendor states no user data reaches it, and the on-premises and airgap options remove the media-routing question entirely. The only named touchpoints are a Nextcloud-hosted STUN server of unstated region and Matomo-cloud website analytics, and no certification is published in the evidence.

Jitsi Meet

The headline price is public and unusual — all day, every day, for free, with no account needed — and the self-hosted path carries no vendor invoice at all. But the free service is stated to be not meant for use in production applications, the managed JaaS offering shows only a start-now link with no figures, and the terms reserve the right to require a transition to a paid service at a usage limit that is never published, so I cannot compute the annual cost of a real deployment.

Nextcloud Talk

Per-user prices are public in EUR, net of VAT, with volume tiers from 100 users up — but the HPB that webinars and phone dial-in depend on appears only as a free 30-day trial with no published price, and there are no per-plan participant caps, minimum term or dial-in rates to compute an annual invoice from.