Table of contents:
- Zoom, a professional and very complete tool
- Jitsi: free, free and with many options to make the most of the tool
The amount of video calls that are made has increased exponentially these days. Teleworking, the need to talk to people around you and confinement have made video calls the only way we can communicate while experiencing a certain closeness Video calls have become essentialthese days and with it, the use of applications to perform them has also increased.
When video calls became popular in the business world ( although they are not something new) the network gave Zoom a lot of voice, an application to make video calls professionally, with paid and free plans that allows us to enjoy a certain professionalism and quality.However, in recent days Zoom has suffered a lot of problems with the disclosure of all the privacy problems of the tool that go through Windows password theft, lack of reliable encryption and more. All these events have caused the company to lose more than 30% of its value on the stock market and people began to look for alternatives.
In this search for professional alternatives we can find many rivals such as Hangouts (which Google is about to exterminate in the midst of its boom ), Skype, etc. We are not going to suggest that you replace Zoom with any of these, but we are going to recommend a really powerful Open Source alternative called Jitsi Meets. We believe that it is, without a doubt, one of the best alternatives to Zoom due to its ability to make video calls without limit of participants (beyond the limit supported by the server that makes them). Let's talk a bit about them and put them to the test to see the differences.
Zoom, a professional and very complete tool
If we talk about Zoom we must emphasize that it is a professional tool, which has a free version in which you can do video calls up to 100 participants. If we want to extend this limit, we will have to go through the box with subscriptions that start at €13.99 per month for the host of the video call. With Zoom we will be able to hold unlimited 1-on-1 meetings and group video calls will be limited to about 40 minutes. In its payment plans it admits up to 1000 participants with 10000 people watching these meetings.
Like any business-oriented and payment tool, we have a powerful support that will solve our doubts and problems quite quickly and effectively.The tool also adds some great things like the ability to stream HD video, HD voice, different view types, screen sharing option, a “virtual” background change option, features to collaborate via Internet and a large extension of tools
Among the most notable tools we can talk about the extensions for Chrome and Outlook, local recording in MP4, a private and a group chat, the ability to raise your hand, group rooms, clients for everything kind of platforms (Mac, Windows, Linux, iOS and Android) and a few more things. It offers 256-bit AES encryption and is quite secure, although its default controls make it vulnerable (that's its main problem that has been talked about these days).
Therefore, this is a very professional tool with many options and it works well.Despite this, it has limitations in its free version as we have seen and that is where Jitsi could be a good option to replace Zoom.
Jitsi: free, free and with many options to make the most of the tool
Jitsi is a completely different tool that has little or nothing to do with the one mentioned above. This tool offers private chats, real-time chats, and also large meetings without any type of participant limit Unlike Zoom, here the limit is already set by the server that Jitsi can be used on your own server or through its own rooms. The tool is completely free and open source, which means that you will be able to analyze its code to see how it works and examine each part of it. Like the previous one, it is available for all types of platforms and in a web version, which works very well.
Jitsi is nothing like Zoom when it comes to data processing and privacy. This tool is much more private, because you won't need to create any account or anything to be able to use it This means that the owners of the tool will not receive data of any kind when you use the tool. It does use Google Analytics to send certain monitoring data, but the user community itself has created a code so that you can deactivate this function and do not have to send any type of data to the application servers.
In Jitsi communications are encrypted, but not from point to point, since they are decompressed on the server that is executing them. Despite this, Jitsi allows you to make video calls from your own server (on their website they have clients for all platforms) and that is where you can take complete control of this tool, choosing at any time what happens with all the data that goes through the video calls.
Jitsi, despite being free, has a lot of useful options as well as Zoom. Yes, it is true that it does not have so many tools when collaborating or working online, but in terms of meetings or video calls it is very useful since it does not have a limit on participants. You will be able to choose different views, raise your hand to speak (it would be chaos with 100-person video calls not to do this) and also record the sessions you do through the platform.
Using Jitsi is as easy as open its web page, enter a name, and enter the room. If the name exists, you will enter the room, if the name does not exist, you will create a room. You can put a password to that room to prevent anyone from entering (especially if it is a very common name). As you can see, it is also very useful, completely and completely free. That's where Jitsi's potential lies.
If what you are looking for is a super complete tool with many resources, Zoom may be very interesting for you (as long as you are going to make use of its advanced tools).If not, we highly recommend Jitsi as most of the features you need are there, it's completely free and you don't even need to create an account to use it.
