We've set up a Jitsi installation but our stakeholders are wary about the limits on number of participants -- they can't really do department meetings or let alone an all-hands type of meeting with ~1000 people on the call. Also, some parts of their org are invested in the zoom usage/meeting stats too, and so that is another piece we'd have to figure out. We've also had mixed results testing with team members far away on rough connections, where audio/video was workable in zoom but sometimes unworkable with our internal setup.
Has anyone scaled up to 1000 and beyond with any open source solution? Any stories of success or failure? Are there other options to consider than Jitsi? Why is there no one crushing it like GitLab or Mattermost in this space?
- Like 90% of the benefit of Zoom (and other large video & voice chat providers) is their backend infrastructure. You cannot justify replicating that for a small single-customer or small group installation. It'd be far too expensive. So your open-source solution is ~always going to be worse. ("We've also had mixed results testing with team members far away on rough connections, where audio/video was workable in zoom but sometimes unworkable with our internal setup.")
- "they can't really do department meetings or let alone an all-hands type of meeting with ~1000 people on the call." Those should be broadcast as one-way streaming video, anyway. Set it up like a live video "podcast" or twitch stream with text chat for questions from the audience, if needed.
It is targetting the virtual classroom market but it does general videoconferencing just right.
Our org switched from Google Meet to their streaming equivalent once we hit around 250 people, nothing worked well with that many participants.
Lucky for your org, streaming has been a solved problem since the 90s! It looks like Jitsi might support streaming by itself, or you can find online tutorials on Nginx + Varnish RTMP streaming and DIY if you prefer.
To answer your literal question, there is no enterprise grade open-source zoom alternative because it's incredibly difficult and hard to make work for free. You have seen how hard just in your N=1000 sample size. Adding in self-hosted STUN or TURN or building your own proxy and video muxer is only going to be harder. There's a reason YouTube, Twitch, Facebook, Instagram, Vimeo, etc. are good at it, because they're zillion dollar companies that can afford to invest in the massive infrastructure and engineering required to make it not-terrible.
"Chat" services of various kinds have been around on the internet since the 1990s, the one thing that they all have in common is that they burn out. For instance there was CUSeeMe, Paltalk, Tivejo, AOL Instant Messenger, ICQ, Skype, WebEx, Facebook Messenger, and many others. Google alone has made 11.
Some of them are still around, but there's a general pattern that a company does the work to create an application but doesn't do the work to keep it up. Then some new thing comes along, gets popular for a while, then deteriorates.
Unless Zoom breaks the pattern a few years from now there will be something new and people will be saying "It's like the way Zoom used to be back when Zoom worked".
I'd say open source alternatives would run into the same problem as commercial chat apps.
In most cases, I see little real, added value in a live video feed. What I find more generally useful is simple desktop/screen sharing with audio (i.e. GotoMeeting, TeamViewer)
If you must see the participants, allow a photo/avatar. Watching real lips moving in a stuttered video is quite chic and nouveau and all ... it's nice with family ... but it doesn't really add much value in a typical business setting IMO.
As with most things, there are exceptions but I use desktop sharing way more often.
I'm fiddling now and then on an alternative conferencing frontend(Pyrite - https://github.com/garage44/pyrite) for Galene(https://galene.org), which is a SFU that uses Pion.
- Webex supposedly does 1000 people.
- Google meet: No, only up to 500 with "business plus".
- MS Teams: Confusing numbers but 1000 for chat only, but 20(?) for audio/video.
- Bluejeans: 200 for enterprise; 500 "view-only"
- Anything else?
So the first answer that comes to mind is that there are no alternatives at all for 1000 participants. If you only need ~200 there are many more options.