Open-source ON24 alternatives

BigBlueButton is an open-source web conferencing system designed for online learning, intended to help teachers teach and learners learn. Participants can share audio, video, slides (with whiteboard annotations), chat messages and their screen in real time, and can also be used for many other meeting types beyond education.

To keep remote students involved, instructors can use polls, emoji reactions, whiteboards that several people can draw on, shared notes and breakout rooms. During a session it generates analytics shown to moderators on a Learning Analytics Dashboard, and presenters can record sessions for later playback and sharing. The README lists online tutoring, flipped classrooms, group collaboration and online classes as the educational scenarios it was built for. Its topics reference WebRTC.

The current major release is BigBlueButton 3.0, which can be installed on Ubuntu 22.04 with the bbb-install.sh script, and full documentation covers architecture, features, the API and GreenLight, the default front end. The software is licensed under LGPL-3.0, while the name and logo are trademarks of BigBlueButton Inc. It suits schools, universities and training providers that want to host their own conferencing.

Plug-N-Meet is an open-source web conferencing system built on the WebRTC infrastructure of LiveKit, written in Go. It is designed to be scalable and easy to customize so that a self-hosted video conferencing experience can be integrated into any existing website, application or system.

Collaboration tools include HD audio and video, screen sharing, virtual backgrounds, a collaborative whiteboard with office file support for PDF, DOCX and PPTX, a shared notepad, polls and breakout rooms. Adaptive streaming uses simulcast and dynacast with H264, VP8, VP9 and AV1 codecs to keep calls stable on poor networks. WebRTC encryption is on by default, with optional end-to-end encryption for media and data channels, and a SIP gateway lets participants join the audio by phone. An AI agent adds live spoken translation, real-time transcription and automated summaries with action items, available through an Artifacts API.

Integration is done through an API and SDKs, including one for PHP, and webhooks. Plug-N-Meet is licensed under MIT and has a developer community on Discord.