What is Janus Gateway used for?

Janus Gateway is a general-purpose WebRTC server from Meetecho, published as open source and written in C, for developers building real-time audio, video and data services. It is a good fit for building video conferencing backends and adding real-time media to web applications.

Is Janus Gateway open source?

Yes. Janus Gateway is open source under the GPL-3.0 licence. Its source code is on GitHub at meetecho/janus-gateway and is written mainly in C.

Is Janus Gateway free?

Yes. Janus Gateway is open source, so the software itself is free to use.

Can I self-host Janus Gateway?

Yes. Janus Gateway can be self-hosted on your own server or infrastructure.

What is Janus Gateway an alternative to?

Janus Gateway is an open-source alternative to Agora and Daily. Other open-source alternatives to Agora include OpenVidu, LiveKit and Ant Media Server.

Is Janus Gateway actively maintained?

Yes. The most recent commit to Janus Gateway was on 1 October 2026. The project has 9.2k stars on GitHub.

Janus Gateway: open-source alternative to Agora, Daily

About Janus Gateway

Janus is a general purpose WebRTC server developed by Meetecho and published as open source. It is aimed at developers who need server-side support for real-time audio, video and data applications such as video conferencing, rather than at end users looking for a finished meeting product.

The server is written in C and exposes its API over several optional transports, including REST through libmicrohttpd, WebSockets through libwebsockets and RabbitMQ messaging. WebRTC data channels are available through the usrsctp library, and optional BoringSSL support is built with cmake. The main branch holds the multistream version of Janus, while the older 0.x line is kept as a separate legacy version.

Janus targets Linux and can also be compiled for macOS. Windows is not supported natively, although it is reported to work under the Windows Subsystem for Linux, and the maintainers warn against unofficial executable builds. It is released under GPL-3.0 and must be built from source with dependencies such as GLib, libnice, OpenSSL and libsrtp.

Key features

General purpose WebRTC server written in C
WebRTC data channel support
REST and WebSocket API transports
RabbitMQ transport option
Multistream version on the main branch
Runs on Linux and macOS

Good fit for

→Building video conferencing backends
→Adding real-time media to web applications

Built with: C
Tags: webrtc; video-conferencing; media-server; real-time; c-language; self-hosted; gpl

Janus Gateway: questions and answers

What is Janus Gateway used for?: Janus Gateway is a general-purpose WebRTC server from Meetecho, published as open source and written in C, for developers building real-time audio, video and data services. It is a good fit for building video conferencing backends and adding real-time media to web applications.
Is Janus Gateway open source?: Yes. Janus Gateway is open source under the GPL-3.0 licence. Its source code is on GitHub at meetecho/janus-gateway and is written mainly in C.
Is Janus Gateway free?: Yes. Janus Gateway is open source, so the software itself is free to use.
Can I self-host Janus Gateway?: Yes. Janus Gateway can be self-hosted on your own server or infrastructure.
What is Janus Gateway an alternative to?: Janus Gateway is an open-source alternative to Agora and Daily. Other open-source alternatives to Agora include OpenVidu, LiveKit and Ant Media Server.
Is Janus Gateway actively maintained?: Yes. The most recent commit to Janus Gateway was on 1 October 2026. The project has 9.2k stars on GitHub.