Best European Alternatives to Zoom

Why people leave Zoom

Most of the case against Zoom that circulates online is four to six years old, and repeating it badly is the quickest way to lose an argument to a colleague who has read the current terms.

Start by discarding the part that is no longer true: section 10.2 of Zoom's terms of service states that Zoom does not use any of your audio, video, chat, screen sharing, attachments or other communications-like customer content to train Zoom or third-party artificial intelligence models. The August 2023 panic was about wording that has since been replaced with a commitment in the opposite direction.

What remains true is corporate and structural. Zoom Communications, Inc. is a Delaware corporation operating from 55 Almaden Boulevard in San Jose, renamed from Zoom Video Communications in November 2024. Its terms name a separate contracting entity for India, ZVC India Pvt. Ltd., and no equivalent for the EEA, so a European customer contracts with the American company itself.

And there is a design decision that no configuration fixes. End-to-end encryption exists, arrived in October 2020, and is off by default. Turning it on removes traditional PSTN phone dial-in and SIP or H.323 room systems from the meeting, which is why organisations with meeting rooms and dial-in bridges almost never enable it. The encryption is real and almost nobody is using it, which is a more honest sentence than either side of this debate usually offers.

• The FTC case was about marketing, and the marketing is the lesson On 9 November 2020 the FTC settled charges that Zoom had advertised end-to-end, 256-bit encryption while holding the cryptographic keys that let it access meeting content, had said recordings were encrypted immediately after a meeting ended when some sat unencrypted on its servers for up to sixty days, and had installed a ZoomOpener web server on macOS that bypassed a Safari safeguard and would reinstall the app without user action. All of that has been addressed. What it tells you is how the claims on the product page relate to the engineering underneath, which is a durable lesson rather than a historical one.
• End-to-end encryption costs you the meeting room E2EE is optional, set per meeting by the host, and available to free and paid users alike. Enabling it disables traditional phone dial-in and SIP or H.323 hardware room systems, because those endpoints cannot hold the keys. For a works council, a legal team or a clinical review that is a trade worth making. For an organisation whose meetings run through conference rooms and a dial-in number, it is why the setting stays off and why "Zoom has end-to-end encryption" is technically accurate and practically irrelevant.
• No European contracting entity Zoom's terms establish ZVC India Pvt. Ltd. as the contracting party for accounts based in India. There is no equivalent provision for the EEA, so a German hospital and a Dutch law firm contract with the Delaware corporation directly. That is not unusual and it is not hidden; it does mean the CLOUD Act reaches your meeting data through the provider regardless of which data centre carried the media.
• The metadata is the part people forget to ask about Arguments about video encryption skip over what a conferencing platform knows even when it cannot see the picture: who met whom, at what time, for how long, from which network, how often. For a supervisory board, a journalist's source list or a company preparing a restructuring, that record is frequently more sensitive than the conversation. Two of the four tools here remove it entirely, one by having no accounts at all and one by running on your own server.

What you have to replace, not just match

Before comparing anything, work out which shape of thing you are replacing, because Zoom sells four products under one name and the European market sells them separately.

There is the meeting: a conversation among peers where everyone can speak. There is the webinar: a broadcast with an audience, where the real product is registration, reminders, attendance data and follow-up. There is the video API, which is conferencing embedded inside somebody else's application. And there is the room system with the dial-in bridge, which is hardware and telephony rather than software.

Jitsi and Whereby answer the first, Livestorm answers the second, eyeson answers the third, and nothing on this page answers the fourth. If your Zoom estate includes Zoom Rooms and Zoom Phone, this is a partial migration and you should plan it as one rather than discover it in week three.

The alternatives compared

How each alternative compares to Zoom

What actually breaks when you switch

The first month is spent on other people. Every recurring invitation in every external calendar carries a Zoom link, and those links stop working when the account lapses without any redirect. Send the new address before you cancel, not after, and expect a long tail of one-off meetings where somebody turns up in an empty Zoom room.

Then the rooms. Zoom Rooms controllers, dial-in bridges and SIP endpoints are hardware with their own lifecycle, and nothing on this page replaces them. Decide in advance whether the meeting rooms stay on Zoom for a transitional period, which is a perfectly reasonable answer and much better than discovering the gap when someone walks into one.

And the recordings are files, not data. Cloud recordings, transcripts and chat histories download individually and import nowhere, so the realistic approach is to export what has to be kept, store it where your retention policy requires, and start the new tool with an empty archive. That is a decision for the team to agree to rather than a task for whoever is doing the migration.

Does Zoom train AI on my meetings?

Not according to the contract you are on. Section 10.2 of Zoom's terms of service states that Zoom does not use any of your audio, video, chat, screen sharing, attachments or other communications-like customer content, including poll results, whiteboard and reactions, to train Zoom or third-party artificial intelligence models.

The reason people believe otherwise is real. In August 2023 a change to the terms was read as granting exactly that permission, the reaction was immediate, and Zoom revised the wording. What exists now is a commitment in the opposite direction, printed in the agreement rather than in a blog post.

Use that carefully in an internal discussion. Leading with a claim that is demonstrably out of date damages every other point you were going to make, and the durable arguments here, jurisdiction and the practical unavailability of end-to-end encryption, do not need it.

If Zoom has end-to-end encryption, what is the problem?

That almost nobody can run it. E2EE has been available since October 2020 to free and paid users, toggled by the host on a per-meeting basis, with account and group level controls for administrators. It is off by default.

Switching it on removes traditional PSTN phone lines and SIP or H.323 hardware room systems from the meeting, because those endpoints cannot hold keys. Any organisation whose meetings involve a conference room, a dial-in number or a partner joining from a video suite therefore leaves it off permanently, and what protects the meeting is 256-bit AES-GCM transport encryption where Zoom holds the keys.

So the honest statement is that the feature exists and your meetings are almost certainly not using it. If end-to-end encryption for every participant is the requirement, self-hosted Jitsi delivers it without a trade against your room hardware, because there is no provider holding keys at all.

What does a European provider actually change?

It changes who can be compelled, which is the only part of this that a configuration screen cannot address. Zoom contracts with European customers through the Delaware corporation, so a valid US order reaches the provider holding the meeting data and the metadata around it.

Livestorm in France, eyeson in Austria and Whereby in Norway are all established under European or EEA law, so the same order has no route. Norway is an EEA member and the GDPR applies in full there, which matters for data protection even though the distinction from EU membership matters for some public procurement rules.

What it does not change is the quality of the call, in either direction. None of these will feel worse than Zoom in a browser, and none of them will match Zoom's hardware ecosystem, its telephony product or the fact that every external guest already has the client installed.

What breaks when a company leaves Zoom?

External guests, first and most. Zoom's real moat is that everyone you meet already has it, and the first month after switching is spent explaining a new link to clients, candidates and suppliers. Whereby, Jitsi and Livestorm are all browser-based with no download or account required for participants, which shortens that month considerably, but it does not eliminate it.

The room hardware, second. Zoom Rooms controllers, the dial-in bridge and any SIP endpoints are a separate purchase with a separate lifecycle, and nothing on this page replaces them. Organisations that budget for the software and forget the rooms discover the gap when someone walks into a meeting room with a screen that no longer knows what to do.

The recordings, third. Cloud recordings and their transcripts do not migrate anywhere; they are files you download before the account lapses. Decide early whether you are moving the archive or keeping it as an export, because that decision determines how much notice you need before cancelling.

Which one to pick

If your reason for leaving is confidentiality in the strict sense, self-hosted Jitsi is the only answer here that removes the provider rather than replacing it, and it is free. Budget for the person who runs it, because that cost is real and it is the whole cost.

If your reason is jurisdiction and you want the daily experience to improve rather than merely relocate, Whereby is the recommendation. The permanent room URL and the absence of a client download will be noticed by everyone you meet, which is unusual for a migration nobody asked for.

If the Zoom licence you are actually paying for is Webinars, Livestorm is a better product for that job than Zoom is, and the comparison is about registration and follow-up rather than about video.

And if you are leaving because you read that Zoom trains AI on your calls, check the terms first. Section 10.2 says it does not. Leave because a Delaware corporation holds your meeting metadata and because end-to-end encryption costs you your meeting rooms, both of which are true and neither of which anyone can talk you out of.