You can use Jitsi for your workplace meetings, quick team calls and discussions, desktop-sharing, demos and tutorials, community meet-ups and so on.

BigBlueButton can also handle all of these same use-cases but is preferable for online learning, lectures, tutorials, training and such. Both the tools support private recordings, secure invitations to meeting rooms and zero-tracking.

You definitely can. The downside of doing that is:

•  They are public instances for general use and hence, are not optimised for your own use case
• In case you do recordings there, third-parties do get access to those recordings
• Many times, such public instances are hosted in EU, US or SE Asia. This adds to the network latency and hence, affects the experience of the service – especially for users in India.
• To prevent misuse, public instances impose arbitrary limits and sometimes, these limits might become a constraint for your use case.
• When you use a public instance, you can not get support or customisation or changes from the instance operators

Setting up and using your own instance is a great way to protect your privacy, have a certain quality of service and adapt the software to serve your needs.

Short answer:

We can help you evaluate these tools to assess if they serve you well.

Long Answer:

Both tools – Jitsi & BigBlueButton – are fairly capable of handling most business, educational and community use-cases that we have put them up to in the recent past. They are proven tools that have been developed over more than 10 years to serve their respective purposes. These are Free/Libre/Open Source Software projects — which means that while they release and share their source code, they also have large communities of users, developers and organisations that sponsor, support and contribute to them.

The best way to know really is to make a small list of essential features and then evaluate these tools from that perspective. We would be glad to help you with such an evaluation. Given time, clarity and a reasonable budget, it is possible to even extend or integrate these tools to fill-in any gaps that come up during evaluation.

Very simply, we offer the service of assessing, deploying, customising, integrating and managing Jitsi & BigBlueButton to serve your needs. We leverage on our extensive experience with managing GNU/Linux-based infrastructure to help you build a dedicated and private setup for your conferencing requirements.

It is true that Jitsi and BigBlueButton are available free-of-charge and under a free software license. Jitsi Meet is licensed under the Apache-2.0 license while BigBlueButton & Greenlightare licensed under LGPL-3.0.

This means that while the entire software (and its complete and corresponding source code) are available for download and use free-of-charge, considerable effort and skill is required to make the software usable. Hence, users of the software need to either learn how to setup and configure them (very possible and we would love to help with that – lets talk!) or find someone who does. We are that “someone” and that service of installing, configuring, scaling, fixing, updating, integrating, managing, monitoring and customising the software is exactly what we offer. And charge for.

We charge based on the scale of effort we put in and the level of hand-holding and support you require. Lets help you evaluate these tools quickly and then assess your requirements so that we can give you an overview of our charges.

We host these tools in various data centres in India (or elsewhere). We size the servers based on our assessment of your scale and requirements. We choose the data centre based on its suitability to your requirement and their cost structures.

While you can very well host these on your own network (and we usually encourage that), a critical challenge for video conferencing is the bandwidth that might be available. In case you have 100s of Mbps or Gbps of dedicated bandwidth (which a data centre does), we would be glad to help you select the hardware and deploy such a setup on your own network. Otherwise, its recommended that you deploy this at a reliable data centre that is close to you.

Listed below is a recommendation based on an average server sizing and default setup.

It is important to understand that these are not limits of the software or the service. With careful design and implementation, the software can indeed handle many more concurrent users and sessions.

Jitsi Meet

The recommended limit for Jitsi is around 20 to 30 participants with full audio and video. The audio quality dips as the data transfer and bandwidth requirements increase (both on the server and on each participant). If you are organising a meeting on Jitsi with one or two participants who broadcast their video and the rest just listen in, the maximum number of participants can be higher. The Jitsi Meet development team recommends upto 75 participants in a video call (given capable hardware and sufficient bandwidth).

BigBlueButton

A typical BigBlueButton server can handle around 200 concurrent users with a maximum of around 100 in a single session. In real terms, however, an optimum use case is with one or two presenters on full audio and video + slides and around 30 to 40 participants listening in (a typical classroom scenario). A BigBlueButton server can handle multiple sessions like this. To support 10s of such sessions with 1000s of concurrent users, a cluster needs to be built which will then load-balance the sessions between a number of such servers.

We make the Jitsi Meet recordings available to you via Nextcloud over a web-interface. BigBlueButton has its own built-in feature to access, share and view the recordings.

Let us discuss over email or a conference call. Please do tell us your requirements by filling in the corresponding form below.