Differences Between Jitsi Meet vs Zoom Video Meetings (Comparison)
The Pandemic in 2020 saw the various industries adopt work from culture, and most of the industry workforce began to use the work from home setup. This phase also saw the rise of different video conferencing applications. These video conferencing applications have become the backbone of the present-day work-from-home culture. It is also equally important to select the best video conferencing application for maintaining the high productivity status. In this article, we will compare the quite popular Zoom app and the Jitsi Meet application.
Jitsi Meet - Open Source Video Conferencing
Jitsi is an open-source project, and initially, it was launched as a SIP communicator in 2003 by Emil Evov as a student project. Later on, it was maintained by Blue Jim Company and rechristened to Jitsi in 2011. In 2013 video bridge was launched to support multiparty video calling. In 2015, Blue Jim was acquired by Atlassian.
At the moment, the following projects are available under the Jitsi Umbrella:
- Jitsi Meet – A standalone video-conferencing application that can also be embedded into web applications.
- Jitsi Video Bridge – Jitsi server engine that powers all the video conferences
- Jigasi – It’s a gateway service connecting SIP to meetings.
- Jibri – Helps to broadcast, record, and stream live videos on YouTube and other video streaming platforms.
- Jidesha – A browser extension for screen sharing.
You can check out the this article on installing Jitsi Meet in the cloud.
Jitsi Features
Here are some of the features of the Jitsi application
- Stream any conference on Youtube.
- The conference room can be locked with a password.
- Allows sharing the screen.
- Allows sharing text documents.
- Hand gesture feature to grab attention during the meeting.
- It can be integrated with any application, be it desktop, android, or web.
- Youtube videos can be played to all the participants.
- Telephone dial-in and dial-out feature during the meeting.
- Provides overall talk time statistics of all the participants.
- Any participant’s video can be seen by clicking on the participant.
- Provides text based chatting (currently available only on web).
Zoom - Cloud Based Video Conferencing Service
Zoom is a proprietary video conferencing application, unlike Jitsi it was launched in 2012. So, it is a new kid on the block. But it has taken the market by surprise. Zoom Video Communications maintain it. During the pandemic, it was the fifth most downloaded video conferencing app.
Zoom offers its product as a freemium product which means that some of the features are available free. To gain access to full features, there are different subscription plans.
Zoom Features
Here are some of the features of the Zoom Video app:
- Immersive View – It is a virtual solution that recreates a meeting room similar to the physical meeting room and thus gives the feel and experience to the user as if they are attending in a real meeting room.
- Blurred Background – This feature allows the user to blur their background. With this feature, users can participate in a video meeting from the comfort of their bedroom and any other location.
- Enhanced Data Privacy – Informs the user about other users who can see and save content on zoom.
- Zoom Phone Power Pack – Allows the user to handle large volumes of calls with the ease of desktop.
- Powerpoint as virtual background – This feature allows the user to set PowerPoint as their background during the presentation.
- Live transcription- This feature transcribes the current session to the attendees.
Open Source vs Proprietary Project
It is an ardent task to choose between an open-source project vs. a proprietary one. Both of them have pros and cons. But it all rests on the requirements and the budget. The budget is highly constrained for startups, so they would prefer open-source projects for their startup projects. At the same time, the established players don’t mind spending some money on proprietary projects to get premium support. Open source projects, on the other hand, are maintained by open source communities. So for support, you have to rely on the communities, while that is not the case with proprietary projects.
JITSI - Pros and Cons
Pros
- As per organizational infrastructure requirements, it is possible to customize in JITSI Meet Server.
- It is possible to customize conference configuration, i.e., codecs, bandwidths, quality, etc.
- Provides private authentication such as CAS, LDAP, JWT.
- Control over QoS.
- Dashboards, management and statistics consoles can be customized.
- With Jitsi Meet Server private jigasi / PABX instance can be configured.
- Allows sharing of content
- Provides integration with google calendar, google docs and google sheets.
- Provides live streaming of conferences on social media platforms.
Cons
- Security issues. Jitsi conferences are not fully encrypted. This makes them susceptible to hacking.
- Large storage requirement. Although jitsi allows the organization to stream live videos and conferences, it is not suitable for confidential meetings. Thus organizations are required to maintain large storage for such meetings.
- Attendee limitation is 200 at a time.
- Quality deteriorates if more attendees join.
- Limited duration of the meeting. It allows only 3 hours of meeting.
- Not much option for sharing files in the messenger.
Zoom - Pros and Cons
Pros
- Provides unlimited one-to-one meetings
- For the subscribed user, the zoom can support a larger audience. For Webinars, it allows upto 10000 users to signup.
- It allows broadcasting live streams on social media platforms such as Facebook, youtube, etc.
- A free user can host 40 minutes of meeting with 100 attendees.
- Supports Google calendar. This ensures scheduling the meetings. It supports calendly and other calendar-based services as well.
- Scalable for every business. Zoom is suitable for a startup and also for a giant corporation. Startups can scale up the service as they expand their business without much trouble.
- The Zoom interface is much easy to use.
Cons
- Subscriptions can become pricey as the organization expands. To host a webinar monthly with 10000 attendees can cost a good fortune to the organization.
- Too many addons based subscriptions. If you are using additional addons, that can be another strain on the budget.
- Zoom download is required for a better experience. Though you can use zoom over the browser, it lags that enhanced user experience provided through zoom desktop clients.
- The mobile application does not come with full features as compared to desktop applications.
- It doesn’t work efficiently with low bandwidth.
- The chat and comments filter is not efficient.
- No feature to save after meeting information on third party platforms such as dropbox. At present, all the information related to the past meetings can be stored manually on the third-party storage platform.
Jitsi Vs Zoom - Comparison Table
Jitsi
Zoom
Type
Video conferencing, VOIP, Instant messaging
Video conferencing, VOIP, Instant messaging
Launch Year
2003
2012
Source Code
Open Source
Proprietary
License Type
Apache License 2.0
Freemium
Maintained By
Atlassian Inc
Zoom Video Communications
Support Type
Community Support
Support Team
OS supported
Mac,Windows, Linux, iOS and android
Mac,Windows, Linux, iOS and android
Platform Supported
Laptop, desktop, tablets, mobiles, smart television and smart screens
Laptop, desktop, tablets, mobiles, smart television and smart screens
Available In
Austrian, English, French, German, Bulgarian, Japanese, Spanish, Italian, Romanian, Greek and 25 more
Chinese (Simplified and Traditional), English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Vietnamese
source: wikipedia
Which is a Better Alternative?
Both the applications have sets of pros and cons. Zoom can become pricey, while Jitsi is all about being open source. For startups, both offer good features, but zoom has limited features in the free tier. If budget is not a constraint, then zoom can be used. Whereas with Jitsi you can customize, modify and also contribute to its development code. Customization and modification allow you to adapt Jitsi as per your organizational needs. You can read the article install jitsi meet, which would guide you through the installation of Jitsi on different cloud vendors.
