Zoom → Jitsi Meet
What it saves, what actually moves, what you rebuild — and the thing that catches people.
What it costs, and what it saves
Zoom Pro is about $15/host/month. Jitsi Meet self-hosted is a VPS — around $20/month for a server handling small meetings, and there is no per-host charge at all.
Moves cleanly
Nothing to migrate. It is a different meeting URL.
You rebuild
Calendar integrations and any recording workflow.
What Zoom costs you today
Free tier with a 40-minute limit on group meetings; paid plans are billed per licensed host per month (Pro starts around $13–16 per host/month), with webinars, larger rooms, and cloud recording storage costing extra.
What actually holds you in
Cloud-hosted service and per-host licensing; your meeting data, recordings, and scheduling all live on Zoom's cloud under Zoom's terms.
What you are moving to
Jitsi Meet is a mature, open-source video-conferencing platform you can use free on the public instance or self-host for full control. Participants can join from a browser with no account, which makes it one of the easiest Zoom replacements to adopt.
Free / open-source (self-host or use a public instance)
Jitsi Meet strengths
- No account needed to join
- Self-hostable for full control
- Mature and widely deployed
What you give up
- Large calls need a well-sized server
- Advanced features require self-hosting effort
The migration, step by step
- 1Deploy Jitsi Meet with the quick-install script on Debian or Ubuntu
- 2Size the server for concurrent participants — video is bandwidth-hungry and CPU matters for more than a handful
- 3Configure authentication so strangers cannot create rooms on your server
- 4Test with the actual number of people your meetings have, not two
- 5Set up Jibri separately if you need recording, which is its own service
The gotcha
Jitsi scales by participants, not meetings. A single server handles small calls comfortably and degrades noticeably past roughly 30 participants without a JVB cluster — and the degradation appears mid-meeting rather than at the door.
When to stay on Zoom
You run large webinars, need guaranteed call quality, or rely on Zoom's recording and transcription.
More Layer 5 migrations
Figures verified 2026-07-12 against vendor pricing pages. Prices change and migrations differ by estate — treat the cost delta as a starting model, not a quote. Rankings and recommendations here are merit-only; affiliate income never changes a verdict. See our methodology.