Jitsi

Jitsi is a family of open-source video conferencing projects that anyone can use in a browser or on a phone, run on their own servers or build into an app. It began in 2003 as SIP Communicator, a student project at the University of Strasbourg, took the Jitsi name in 2011, and has belonged to 8x8 since 2018 after a spell under Atlassian. Meetings need no account and calls are encrypted.

What Jitsi offers

• Jitsi Meet — the video meeting app for browsers and mobile devices.
• Jitsi Videobridge — the server piece that passes video streams among people on a call in self-hosted setups.
• JaaS (Jitsi as a Service) — a hosted version operated by 8x8 for companies that prefer not to run servers.
• Ongoing development — recent work includes picture-in-picture for browser meetings, distributed tracing across backend parts and a rebuilt transcription system.

Who it works with

Organisations named as users include 8x8, Comcast, Matrix.org, Rocket.Chat, Symphony, the Tor Project and WeSchool, whose platform served Italian schools for distance learning.

Key facts

• Owner: 8x8, Inc., since 2018
• First release: 2003, as SIP Communicator
• Licence: open source
• Usage: more than 20 million monthly active users reported in 2020