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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 IT Administrator

Weighted verdict

Gets the call when the board meeting will not start. Wants capacity published rather than promised, room systems that work, SSO, and diagnostics after a bad call. Judges a product by its worst meeting, not its demo.

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

Scored by The IT Administrator

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 IT Administrator

The published load tests are exactly what I want before a board call: over a thousand streams at roughly 550 Mbps for about 20% CPU on a quad-core Xeon, on a Selective Forwarding Unit that relays rather than mixes, with Last N mode for large rooms. What holds it back is the bad day — on the public service all users are moderators with soft controls, we found no public information on breakout rooms, waiting rooms, room-system support or behaviour on mobile networks, and the hosted demo carries no uptime commitment and is expressly not meant for production use. 6 7 3 5 10

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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 IT Administrator

This is documentation I can defend to security: DTLS-SRTP on all traffic by default, optional end-to-end encryption via a shared key with the trade-offs named plainly (chat and polls sit outside it), and the pages state outright that the outer encryption layer is removed at the videobridge while packets live in memory only and are never persisted — all under Apache 2.0, so the crypto is inspectable. We found no public information on SSO-gated joining, a lobby, or participant identity verification, which keeps it off the top. 3 8 6 5

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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 IT Administrator

Browser-first over WebRTC with end-to-end encryption and Picture-in-Picture working in the browser, guests join by link with no account, mobile apps ship on all three stores including F-Droid, a per-meeting dial-in information page exists, and speech-to-text transcription is published. But we found no public information on an accessibility statement, screen-reader or keyboard testing, listed dial-in numbers, or low-bandwidth behaviour, so I cannot put a worst-case guest in front of this with confidence. 8 9 3 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 IT Administrator

The destruction posture is unusually strong: rooms are ephemeral, chat and speaker stats are destroyed when the meeting ends, names and emails are not retained, and cloud recordings leave for the destination you indicate (currently Dropbox) with anything still on the servers deleted within 24 hours. What an organisation needs around that is absent from the captured pages — we found no public information on admin policy over who may record, participant notification or consent prompts, storage region, an access audit trail, or a retention rule for transcription. 3 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 IT Administrator

Deployment is genuinely the customer's choice — fully open source under Apache 2.0, a Docker or quick-install path in as little as 15 minutes, control over XMPP and a REST interface, an embeddable external API, and a hosted JaaS option with tenant domains. That side is as good as it gets; but for the daily stack we found no public information on calendar integrations, SSO, or room-system support, and the public server is explicitly for testing rather than production integrations. 3 6 10 5

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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 IT Administrator

For the vendor-run services the captured pages give me nothing to stand on: the contracting entity is 8x8 in the United States, disputes go to New York courts, data residency is unstated, and the named analytics services (Amplitude, Datadog, Crashlytics) come with no published regional safeguards. The one real answer is structural — the software is fully open source and self-hostable, so media and metadata can run entirely on our own EU infrastructure with no vendor in the chain — but we found no public information on EU hosting, certification, or subprocessor commitments for any 8x8-run offering. 5 3 2

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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 IT Administrator

For the self-hosted software the headline is unambiguous — completely free, no account needed — and the performance page even names the class of server it ran on, so my self-hosting invoice computes to zero. But the same pages advertise a managed JaaS offering for which we found no public information on prices, dial-in and recording costs are unmentioned, and the terms reserve 8x8's right to move excessive users to a paid service at its sole discretion. 1 2 5 7 10

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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.

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 →