*Free as in beer
In the vast sea of video conferencing tools, each one carries its own set of quirks and surprises. Some go all-in on scalability, others nail simplicity, and a few hand you the keys for full customization — if you’re up for the challenge. To keep things lively, let’s break these down into some neat categories
Free vs paid vs freemium
Truly free
Either open source code that you can deploy on your own infrastructure (talk about these in a bit) or very simple hosted services. Truth be told, top notch video conferencing needs innovation and uses up resources, none of which are free. If it’s free for you it’s either because it’s crappy (i.e. reduced feature set) or somebody else is paying for it.
Exaples: Jitsi Meet, MediaSoup, BigBlueButton, Talky, Briefing, Palava.tv
Freemium
If you’ve been on Zoom or Google meet a few times, you know what it’s like. Same product and mostly the same features for the free and paid, yet longer meetings and more participants/features for the latter. There’s also FreeConference, Microsoft Teams, GoToMeeting etc. These services are operated by major companies on their own infrastructure, so you’ll get good quality meetings even when using the free tier.
Paid
No free tier. They provide comprehensive features like advanced security, large-scale meetings, dedicated support, and deep integration with other business tools. They are geared toward enterprise-level use or large organizations.
In this category: Microsoft Teams, Webex, BlueJeans, AnyMeeting, Connect, Dialpad, Adobe Connect etc
Open source or not?
Ok, the opensource ones are just code. It’s only after you deploy it on a server (or more) that it becomes a platform. Jitsi Meet, BigBlueButton, LiveKit, Apache OpenMeetings are all part of this pool. You can tailor them to your liking and fit them into custom workflows, but that can take a bit or a lot of work. Some are lacking features and many are not straightforward to scale.
In turn, most closed-source solutions are already established platforms. Think Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Discord, Cisco Webex, GoToMeeting – they all exist as entities that you just use, not software that you host somewhere. There are a few exceptions to this (Cisco Meeting Server, TrueConf Server), but they tend to cater to very specific niches.
Branded vs White Label
When setting up a platform, you have the option to either prominently display the Zoom logo and make it clear that you’re using their service for the conference, or alternatively, you can create a fully integrated experience that mirrors Zoom’s functionality but showcases only your branding, without any mention of Zoom itself. The choice to go with white label or not is about deciding between keeping control of your brand or going for something quicker and easier to customize.
The branded choices we already mentioned, white label solutions include Daily.co, Agora, Twilio, LiveKit, Pexip, TrueConf, Whereby
It is all WebRTC already?
Kinda. Though you can’t communicate through other means from a browser, in the realm of native apps some just use a browser wrapper while others actually make use of proprietary protocols for enhanced performance.
I know, it’s a bit sad that WebRTC hasn’t quite become the magic bullet we were promised, and at this rate, we might be waiting a couple more decades for it to finally live up to the hype. Why so? Well, issues with standardization, leading to inconsistent browser support, combined with performance and stability challenges when scaling, and ongoing difficulties in managing latency and bandwidth, all of which make it hard to maintain a seamless experience across different networks and devices. It’s much easier to mitigate all these in the shadow of a proprietary protocol, especially if you’re a powerhouse like Zoom or Webex.
Why it’s hard to make videoconferencing flawless
For the most part, unpredictable unpredictable network connectivity. Not everyone has a connection fast enough to ingest the AV data others are pushing, may that be for the whole session or parts of it. When a slow user comes into the meeting, one of the following needs to happen
- lower the quality for everyone (not cool)
- find a way to send lower quality video to the slow user while still sending good quality video the others (cool)
Well the latter is complicated, requiring either serverside transcoding, SVC, or simulcast; coupled with complex logic to always be on the lookout for congestion and compensate; none of which are cheap, straightforward, or widely supported at the same time. And that’s where the big players make the difference – they can afford to pioneer and push the boundaries at higher costs and more sophisticated tech stack and infrastructure.
So what gives?
Among the many mentioned above, LiveKit stands a bit taller — and no, this isn’t a sponsored take! What sets it apart?
- It’s fairily new, so it got to learn from others’ mistakes.
- It’s open source, but without the fragmented progress seen in similar projects.
- Although it’s pure WebRTC, they stretched it to the limit and keep doing so;
- It’s still a commercial product, which allows it to finance fresh thinking; you pay if you want to use their infrastructure, otherwise you’re free to use yours
Ok, where’s the free conferencing platform?
Here. You can deploy it in a few minutes and play with it.
If don’t have the few minutes, play with this first – it’s the hosted demo of what you can deploy on your own infrastructure and adjust to your liking.
Why bother?
If you just found out about LiveKit, it’ll help you bypass the steepest part of its (still lean) learning curve. As you now have it set up and working, you can move on to have it fit your context. Or just use it as is, the defaults are very well suited for real-world use.
Also, now that you’re hosting it yourself (at some cost), you can get a rough idea of how much of what you’re paying Zoom goes toward operating costs and how much might be profit, possibly funneled back into innovation.
Not least, you can now experience first hand how a top-notch open source app stacks up against its commercial counterparts and decide if the added cost is worth it.
Does it scale?
Glad you’ve asked. While the demo is a single-server take, LiveKit itself supports distributed setup.
But… there had to be a catch. When using the OS product, there’s a limit (think hundreds) to how many can join the same meeting, dictated by the capabilities of the servers you’re deploying it on and the stated fact that “a room must fit on a single node”. The (paid) hosted service does not have this limitation 😊
Is it secure?
It is. Checks all boxes you’d expect from a mature product, including end-to-end encryption.
How free* is it really?
Once again, you’re only paying for the infrastructure, i.e. the servers you’re hosting it on.
Budget 1¢/user/hour and take it from there. Your mileage will greatly vary with app specifics and users’ traffic patterns. LiveKit provides a benchmarking tool.