Another Video Conferencing Tool? Exploring Jitsi Meet
Tags: opensource, productivity
Published: 2024-02-16 17:58:17

---
title: Another Video Conferencing Tool? Exploring Jitsi Meet
published: true
description: There are many options for online video conferencing, but have you tried the open source Jitsi Meet? In this post, we'll explore the product and the community behind it.
tags: opensource, productivity
cover_image: https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/xbcjo364ih4vdikncfuy.png
# Use a ratio of 100:42 for best results.
# published_at: 2024-02-13 17:49 +0000
series: 29 Days of OSS Alternatives
---

*Today is day 16 of my 29 Days of Open Source Alternatives series, where I'll be exploring open source alternatives to proprietary software in the categories of Game Development and Multimedia, Development Tools and Platforms, Productivity and Collaboration Tools, and more. If you'd like to see the list of the open source alternatives I'll be covering this month, head over to my [29 Days of Open Source Alts Page](https://oss.fyi/oss-alts) or if you want more open source to learn-to-code programs, check out [this list](https://oss.fyi/learn-to-code). This is post is in the Productivity & Collaboration Category.* 

Recently, I gave a virtual talk, [Essential Skills for Open Source Contributors: Beyond Code](https://www.youtube.com/live/1iSi8kV2iew?si=4edq1HpGExKYQsz5), at the [Creative Freedom Summit 2024](https://creativefreedomsummit.com/). I've given quite a few virtual talks, and I'm familiar with Streamyard, CrowdCast, Zoom, and probably a couple of others, but this time, we were using Jitsi Meet. I'm not going to lie, I always get a little nervous using a new service for a virtual talk, because I'm not sure what to expect. And from a speaker's perspective, I found it to fulfill all my expectations. As a person who leads weekly virtual meetups, I wanted to know a little more about Jitsi Meet and the contributors behind it. 

> Jitsi Meet - Secure, Simple and Scalable Video Conferences that you use as a standalone app or embed in your web application. 

Get ready, because I'm going to take you down my rabbit hole. 

![the rabbit hole gif](https://media.giphy.com/media/v1.Y2lkPTc5MGI3NjExZ2gzaHY4amNlZGl1OHB2dGE0cDBrdnhrZTU5dzczNGN5bzQ3eGN0MSZlcD12MV9pbnRlcm5hbF9naWZfYnlfaWQmY3Q9Zw/swtiK9jRfE0zS/giphy.gif)

## Jitsi Meet - Features

For the conference, they sent us a link to join and more information in the [Jitsi handbook](https://jitsi.github.io/handbook/). But if you check out their site, you can also start your own meeting without an account. 

![Start an instant meeting image](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/9xj25fb09fvkdc346fme.png)

If you want to book a meeting URL in advance, then you can join with Google, Facebook, or GitHub. 

![Moderated meeting screen](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/nej3b4mvudxd3ci8zvh8.png)

I was actually pretty impressed with the features they offer and how simple it was to use. As a moderator, here are some features you have access to:

![features](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/s3pgagrteoahbuc196c0.png)

For participants, you have access to backgrounds, screensharing, chat, emojis and gifs, the handraise function (which is an important feature for me), participants list, and one that's really interesting, Participants Stats that let you know the total speaker time of each speaker, and more.

Overall, the experience was simple, and I mean that in the best way. It didn't take me long to get started, the UI was intuitive, and I didn't have to give them my credit card.

So then I started wondering, "Why haven't I heard about this before? What does the Jitsi Community look like?" And that's how I ended up checking out their GitHub.

{% embed https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-meet %}


## Open Source Stats

- :stars: 21.1k
- :eyes: 510
- **Forks**: 6.4k
- **License**: Apache-2.0
- **Commits**: 12,104
- **Contributors**: 456

They have a pretty great stars to forks ratio, and their contributors over the last 30 days are consistent. 

[![30 day contributor graph](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/tshp73pqr8uglusshhix.png)](https://app.opensauced.pizza/pages/BekahHW/1205/dashboard)

I decided to go a little further down the rabbit hole and compare jitsi-meet with the other active repositories in the Jitsi org.

**Jitsi-Meet**
![jitsi-meet dashboard](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/joashob4qk23yy59vmjv.png)

Overall, the Jitsi Meet repo shows consistency in everything but issue velocity. Scrolling through the issues, I saw that nearly all of them have/had a comments thread going, so it seems that communication is/was happening. 

I decided to zoom out and look at the other repositories to give me a better sense of the community of contributors. 

**Jitsi Org repos**
![org dashboard](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/qo2dve21ide5ssf5ny1l.png)

You can see here that Jitsi Meet is the most active repository, both by the activity level and the number of contributors. We do see an improvement in the Issue velocity, and they continue to maintain a really great stars-to-forks ratio. 

### Contributors

We're down to the last part of the rabbit hole: contributors. I created a list of contributors using the Insights page for all the active repos.

[![contributor insights](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/4y4z3qvp2t1iyqpj9z9m.png)](https://app.opensauced.pizza/lists/4b58e967-7e11-4e55-823a-4e7c4b9fdf47/overview)

It's no surprise that the most contributions are to Jitsi Meet. We do see 27.4% of the contributions coming from [@waja](https://github.com/waja), but if we look a little bit closer, we see the majority of that activity is coming from commits, so there is nothing I would worry about in terms of bus factor.  

![waja contributions](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/tjqqzuzfa3eh35kmgvin.png)

## Takeaways

Well, we've found our way out of that rabbit hole. Jitsi is definitely an alternative to the platforms I mentioned above. I really loved how easy it was to get started, and the contributor community seems to be well-established and consistent. If you're looking for an open source and secure way to host you're meetings, you might be interested in Jitsi!

Have you used it? If you want to test it out together to chat all things open source, let me know in the comments.