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Video Conferencing

Jitsi Meet

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Panel rating · 6 judges · How to read the stars

Category median

Sovereignty: 2 of 4 dimensions proven

0–5 in half steps. 5 means the rubric's top anchor is met on the evidence.

by 8x8, Inc. · jitsi.org

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Read this page as one judge. Each weighs the same scores by what they care about.

The Educator

Weighted verdict

Teaches thirty people who join from whatever they have, half of them on a phone in a dead spot. Cares that the browser works without an install, that guests need no account, that breakout rooms are usable, and that nobody is excluded by bandwidth or by a missing caption.

Same scores as the panel view — this lens weights them the way this judge cares.

Scored by The Educator

The meeting itself

How this is scored

Whether the call works: participant capacity, video and audio quality under load, screen sharing, breakout rooms, moderation, and what happens on a bad connection.

0 — Small meetings only, no screen sharing worth the name, no moderation controls, and the call degrades without telling anyone.

3 — Standard meetings with screen sharing and mute-all, but low participant limits, no breakout rooms and no bandwidth adaptation stated.

5 — Meetings at the scale most teams need with screen sharing, breakout rooms, host moderation, and documented behaviour on constrained connections.

8 — Large meetings and webinars with published capacity limits, per-participant moderation and waiting rooms, layout control, simulcast or adaptive bitrate stated, and reliable behaviour on mobile networks.

10 — Scale and control are engineering claims the vendor stands behind: capacity published per plan and per region, selective forwarding with adaptive quality documented, live streaming, hardware-room support, and diagnostics an admin can read after a bad call.

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The Educator

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. 7 6 2 3

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Encryption & meeting access

How this is scored

What is actually encrypted and against whom, plus who can get into a meeting. Judged on documented mechanism rather than on the word "encrypted".

0 — Transport encryption only, undocumented; meetings joinable by anyone with a link and no lobby.

3 — TLS in transit and encryption at rest, with the vendor holding all keys; access control is a passcode.

5 — The above plus a lobby or waiting room, host-controlled admission, per-meeting passcodes, and a clear statement that the vendor can technically access media.

8 — Optional end-to-end encryption for meetings with the trade-offs named (which features stop working), documented key handling, SSO-gated joining, and per-meeting access policies.

10 — End-to-end encryption available without surrendering the product — its cryptography documented or open source, key management explained, identity verification for participants, and the vendor stating plainly what it can and cannot see.

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The Educator

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. 8 3 2

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Reach & accessibility

How this is scored

Whether everyone who needs to join can: browser without an install, dial-in, low bandwidth, guests without accounts, captions and keyboard operation.

0 — A desktop client is the only way in; guests must create an account.

3 — Browser joining exists but is degraded, guests can join by link, and there is no dial-in and no accessibility statement.

5 — Full-feature browser joining without an install, guest access by link, mobile apps, and a stated accessibility posture.

8 — Telephone dial-in with numbers listed, live captions, keyboard-navigable and screen-reader-tested interface, and documented low-bandwidth behaviour.

10 — Reach is designed for: browser parity with the client, dial-in across the regions the customer operates in, live captions and translation, a published accessibility conformance report, and a usable experience on a poor mobile connection.

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The Educator

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. 2 3 9 10

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Recordings, retention & admin control

How this is scored

A recording is personal data about everyone in the room. Who may record, who is told, where it is stored, how long it lives, and what the works council can switch off.

0 — Anyone can record, storage location unstated, no retention rule, no admin policy.

3 — Host-only recording with a notification, but storage region unstated, retention manual, and no organisation-wide policy control.

5 — Admin policy over who may record, participant notification and consent prompt, stated storage region, and manual deletion that works.

8 — Automatic retention and deletion per policy, recordings encrypted at rest with access logged, transcription handled with its own retention rule, and attendance or analytics features that can be switched off for co-determination.

10 — Built for a works agreement: every recording, transcript and analytics feature independently switchable and documented, retention executed and evidenced, an audit trail of who accessed which recording, and no participant-level behavioural scoring at all.

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The Educator

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. 3 6 9

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Integrations & deployment

How this is scored

Calendar, identity and the wider stack — plus, in this category, whether the product can be run on the customer's own infrastructure at all.

0 — No calendar integration, no SSO, no API; cloud-only with no alternative.

3 — One calendar integration and basic SSO, no API worth building on, cloud-only.

5 — Calendar integration for the major suites, SAML or OIDC SSO, a documented API for scheduling, and room-system support.

8 — The above plus SCIM provisioning, embedding via SDK, webhooks for meeting events, and either a self-hosted option or a documented private-cloud deployment.

10 — Deployment is the customer's choice: a genuine on-premises or private-cloud option with the same features, open protocols or open source, embeddable SDKs, and identity integration that does not require the vendor's directory.

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The Educator

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. 10 6 3

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European sovereignty

How this is scored

Where media and metadata are processed, who the contracting entity is, which subprocessors carry the traffic. Independently sourced by the sovereignty pipeline; scored here as this buyer weighs it — which in this category is heavily.

0 — Non-EU vendor and contracting entity, media routed through unstated regions, subprocessors unnamed.

3 — EU data residency for storage while media relays or metadata remain non-EU, or the contracting entity sits outside the EU.

5 — EU hosting and an EU contracting entity, but parts of the chain — relays, analytics, support tooling, transcription — are non-EU without an explained safeguard.

8 — Media and metadata processed in the EU on named infrastructure, EU contracting entity, complete subprocessor list published, any non-EU processing named with its legal basis.

10 — Sovereign end to end and evidenced: media never leaves the EU, every subprocessor European, certification published, and an on-premises option that removes the question entirely.

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The Educator

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. 5 3 10

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Pricing transparency not rated — the vendor publishes no price

How this is scored

Whether a buyer can compute the annual invoice for their host count — including the capacity, dial-in and recording storage they actually need — from public pages alone.

0 — No public prices at all; every tier is a sales conversation.

3 — A per-host headline exists, but participant caps, dial-in minutes or recording storage are unpriced or unmentioned.

5 — Per-host prices public with billing period stated and capacity limits given, but at least one commonly needed piece (webinar capacity, dial-in, storage) sits in an unpriced add-on.

8 — Every tier and add-on priced publicly with per-host maths, capacity limits, dial-in rates, storage allowances, minimum term and VAT treatment stated.

10 — Complete price computability: a calculator producing the annual invoice for a given host count, meeting size and recording volume, including overage and per-region dial-in.

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The Educator

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. 2 10 5

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European sovereignty — proven facts

2 of 4 dimensions proven

Built only from facts shown on the vendor's own pages. A dimension we could not prove is left open, not scored as zero.

Ownership Foreign-controlled ⚠ unverified 0/2 pts 3 Report an error
Data residency Not determined — uncited Report an error
Subprocessors Not determined ⚠ unverified — uncited Report an error

Where this could be wrong

What we left out

A claim that does not survive our checks costs us the claim, not the page. This is what was taken off this one.

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Sources (10)

The pages every claim on this page was read from — each one checked, dated, and kept verifiable.

  1. 1 Project homepage jitsi.org Checked 21 Sep 2026 Details →
  2. 2 Product page jitsi.org Checked 21 Sep 2026 Details →
  3. 3 Security page jitsi.org Checked 21 Sep 2026 Details →
  4. 4 Source named in a correction jitsi.org Checked 21 Sep 2026 Details →
  5. 5 Terms of service jitsi.org Checked 21 Sep 2026 Details →
  6. 6 The meeting itself — found from sitemap jitsi.org Checked 1 Oct 2026 Details →
  7. 7 The meeting itself — found from sitemap jitsi.org Checked 1 Oct 2026 Details →
  8. 8 Encryption & meeting access — found from sitemap jitsi.org Checked 1 Oct 2026 Details →
  9. 9 Recordings, retention & admin control — found from sitemap jitsi.org Checked 1 Oct 2026 Details →
  10. 10 Integrations & deployment — found from sitemap jitsi.org Checked 1 Oct 2026 Details →