#Jitsi vs zoom for free#

The idea is to encrypt frames rather than connections. To solve this problem, Jitsi is going to use Insertable Streams, a new feature released by the Chromium team that lets you add an additional layer of encryption. Credit: Jitsi The current implementation of encryption with WebRTC But puts a lot of load on the server for calls with multiple people. And the central server has to decrypt every stream, re-encrypt it, and send it to another participant. This works well for two or three-person calls. If a service wants to use encryption, it has to create the same number of encrypted connection to the central server as the number of participants on a call. When video services such as Jitsi meet use WebRTC, they create a connection with a central server that dishes out a single video stream to all participants. Now, this is easy to execute when there are two or three people on the call. When they have the legitimate key, the video stream would look normal. Ideally, when someone joins an encrypted call without a valid key, they would only see jumbled up video streams. He said that end-to-end encryption for a call with multiple people is challenging to develop. So primarily, we needed to educate people about the options they have. We provide different levels of security for different needs. I’ve never heard so many people talk about security and end-to-end encryption as I have in the past few months. Ivov told me that he’s never heard so many people talk about end-to-end encryption: The service already offers end-to-end encryption one-on-one calls and plenty of other security measures. The next challenge for the company is to introduce end-to-end encryption for calls. This situation has just put us into the fast track mode.Īfter the pandemic hit the world, Jitsi’s open-sourced version and 8×8’s paid version have managed to achieve 20 million unique monthly participants. The last decade was an indicator of people moving towards remote work. The pandemic provided an acceleration of 10 years in terms of growth. Ivov claims it pushed the app’s growth by 10 years: However, the pandemic has popularized the company’s product. So they had to make things easier for users and educate them about the product as many of them were used to old-fashioned dial-in calls. The company learned that all kinds of people started to use video conferencing products. In the past few months, the team had to scale up the infrastructure as users started to mount due to lockdowns all over the world. Its parent company, 8×8 offers a paid version with features such as transcription and meeting history. While the open-sourced version is free-to-use for everyone. Plus, you don’t need to sign up to set up a meeting. That makes it difficult for Zoombombers - uninvited people who join public video conferences and broadcast pornographic material - to guess the link. To set up a call, you need to go to its website, and it’ll generate a meeting link with four words. Jitsi home pageĪpart from being open-sourced Jitsi’s ease of use helped it gain more users. The team took advantage of that and built a browser-based product, and so Meet Jitsi was born. In 2011, Google open-sourced WebRTC communication standards to facilitate things like video-conferencing over browsers. In 2009, he started a company called BlueJimp (not to confused with BlueJeans, another video conferencing app) around it. Later, he spun off the project into an app and kept building it for desktop. Ivov originally built Jitsi as a project in 2003, when he was studying at the University of Strasbourg. That meant Emil Ivov, Jitsi’s founder, and the rest of the team had to work even longer hours to keep the ship running. The product suddenly exploded during the pandemic. Later, in a security conference, a lot of people saw Snowden using Jitsi to deliver a talk. In 2017, in an interview with WIRED, Edward Snowden talked about using his own Jitsi server. It's encrypted, open source, and you don't need an account. If you want an alternative to Zoom: try Jitsi Meet. In March, a privacy-focused browser Tor tweeted about the product as an alternative to Zoom.

#Jitsi vs zoom for free#

Plus, the company wasn’t transparent about communicating its mishaps - this forced a lot of people to look for free open source products, and Jitsi emerged as a perfect solution for them.Īpart from being open-sourced, Jitsi benefited from endorsements by a few highly-regarded names in the security community. In the past couple of months, Zoom became an almost indispensable app, Facebook had to step up and make a rival product, and Google made its enterprise conferencing product free for everyone.Īmid this video conferencing boom, Zoom’s security and privacy-related problems made a lot of people skeptical about using its products. The coronavirus pandemic pushed people to stay in their homes, and in turn, forced them to use video conferencing products.