Which of these five are you actually shopping for?
A meeting is a conversation among peers where everyone can speak. Jitsi Meet and Whereby are built for that, and both are browser-based so nobody installs anything.
A webinar is a broadcast with an audience, and the product is really the registration, the reminders, the attendance data and the follow-up. Livestorm is built for that, with automation and CRM integrations, and it says plainly that it is not the right tool for everyday team calls.
A video API is infrastructure inside somebody else's product — telehealth, online education, customer support, live shopping. eyeson is API-first, and Whereby offers Embedded alongside its meeting product.
Scheduling with video attached is a different job again: the hard part is the calendar negotiation, not the call. meetergo replaces Calendly and Zoom together, which is why it competes on booking pages rather than on video features.
Comparing prices across those four shapes produces nonsense. Decide the shape first and the shortlist is usually two products long.
Why does "no download" matter more than any feature comparison?
Because the first four minutes of every meeting are the product. A participant who has to download an installer, grant permissions and restart a browser is a participant who joins late, and in a webinar is a participant who does not join at all.
Jitsi Meet, Whereby and Livestorm are all fully browser-based using WebRTC. Livestorm attributes a measurable improvement in show-up rates to it, which is the metric a marketing team is actually buying. Jitsi goes furthest: no account for anyone, host or participant, so there is nothing to register and no personal data collected to join a call.
There is a second-order benefit for organisations. No software to deploy or update, nothing for a security team to vet, and consistent behaviour across Windows, macOS, Linux and Chromebooks. For a company that has to get external guests into calls — clients, candidates, patients — that is the difference between a tool that works and a tool that generates support tickets.
The cost is that quality now depends on the participant's browser and hardware. Whereby notes that older browsers and underpowered devices struggle in larger meetings, which is exactly the gap eyeson's single-stream approach was built to close.
What does single-stream video actually change?
Conventional video conferencing sends a separate stream per participant, so every device receives and decodes as many streams as there are people in the call. A ten-person meeting means nine incoming streams to decode, which is why laptops heat up and older phones give up.
eyeson composites all the feeds into one stream on the server and sends that single stream to everyone. Bandwidth stays constant regardless of participant count — two people or a hundred, each device receives one stream. On a poor connection, on mobile data, or on hardware a few years old, that is the difference between a working call and a slideshow.
It also makes the layout programmable. Because the composition happens server-side, an application can control layouts, overlay graphics and trigger recordings through the API, which is what makes eyeson suitable for live shopping, interactive broadcasting and virtual classrooms rather than only meetings.
The trade-off is explicit: all video processing happens on eyeson's servers, so this is not an architecture for anyone who needs media never to be decoded by a third party. eyeson's EU infrastructure and GDPR compliance answer most of that concern, but not the strictest version of it.
When is self-hosting the right answer, and when is it a trap?
Self-hosting Jitsi is the only configuration in this category where no third party can see a meeting at all. For a law firm, a healthcare provider, a works council or a government body, that is not a preference but a requirement, and no contract with a SaaS vendor delivers it.
The trap is assuming the public service is the same thing. meet.jit.si is free and convenient, but using it means trusting 8x8's servers — and Jitsi's own documentation advises against it for highly sensitive meetings. The privacy argument for Jitsi is an argument for running it yourself.
Running it yourself is real work. Video is bandwidth- and CPU-hungry, and meetings above roughly a hundred participants need deliberate server sizing and configuration. Enterprise expectations such as SSO and detailed analytics need extra configuration or third-party tooling that a SaaS product includes by default.
The honest rule: self-host Jitsi if you have infrastructure staff and a confidentiality requirement. If you have neither, a European SaaS provider with EU hosting — Whereby, eyeson or meetergo — gets you most of the benefit for none of the operational cost.
What does a video meeting actually cost per year?
Less than most teams assume, and the free tiers here are unusually usable. Jitsi is free outright, open source under Apache 2.0, with no participant cap on the public service. Whereby's free tier gives one room for up to 100 participants capped at 45 minutes. Livestorm's free plan allows unlimited events with 30 attendees and 20 minutes each. meetergo has a free tier.
The paid steps are where the shapes diverge sharply. Whereby Pro is €6.99 per month per host, which removes the time limit and adds rooms, recording and breakout rooms; Business is €9.99. meetergo starts around €10 per month. Livestorm Pro is €79 per month for up to 100 attendees and four-hour events, because a webinar platform is priced on the audience, not the host.
eyeson prices by participant minute rather than per seat, which suits variable usage and makes it cheap to build against and predictable to scale. For an application embedding video, per-seat licensing would be the wrong model entirely.
The cost that catches organisations out is the tier gate on enterprise features. SSO, custom domains, custom branding and detailed analytics sit on higher plans at Whereby and Livestorm both, so price the plan you will actually need rather than the entry one.
