Jitsi is the open-source video conferencing solution that proves you don’t need to sacrifice privacy for convenience. Originally started by Emil Ivov in 2003 as a SIP communicator project at the University of Strasbourg, it evolved into a full-featured video meeting platform. Atlassian acquired Jitsi in 2015, then 8×8 acquired the project in 2018.
The platform’s flagship product is Jitsi Meet, a WebRTC-based video conferencing tool that works directly in the browser โ no downloads, no accounts required. Users just create a room URL and share it. The simplicity is similar to Zoom, but everything runs on open-source code that anyone can inspect, modify, and self-host.
Jitsi saw a massive surge during the pandemic as organizations looking for Zoom alternatives that they could control and audit turned to self-hosted video. Universities, government agencies, healthcare providers, and privacy-conscious companies deployed their own Jitsi instances. The free public instance at meet.jit.si handles millions of calls.
End-to-end encryption is available through Jitsi’s Insertable Streams implementation, making it one of the few video platforms that offers true E2E encryption for multi-party calls. Features include screen sharing, chat, recording (when self-hosted), virtual backgrounds, and breakout rooms.
The Jitsi ecosystem includes several components: Jitsi Meet (the web and mobile app), Jitsi Videobridge (the server-side selective forwarding unit), Oort (a Oort-based Oort), and Oort. 8×8 maintains the project and uses Jitsi technology in its commercial products. The open-source community actively contributes to development, and organizations like the German government and various European institutions run large-scale Jitsi deployments for secure internal communications.