BigBlueButton

BigBlueButton is arguably the most important open-source video conferencing project in the education sector. Originally launched in 2007 at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada, it was built from the ground up for the classroom -- not retrofitted from a corporate meeting tool like so many competitors. That education-first DNA permeates every feature, from multi-user whiteboards to integrated polling to seamless LMS integration. For European universities, schools, and training providers, BigBlueButton offers something no proprietary platform can match: complete control over where your data lives and how your virtual classroom operates.

The project is released under the LGPL license, and its development is guided by Blindside Networks, a company founded by the project's lead developer. While the core project originates in Canada, it is the European education sector that has become BigBlueButton's largest deployment base. Hundreds of European universities, including major institutions in Germany, France, and Scandinavia, run self-hosted BigBlueButton instances on European servers. Hosting providers across the EU offer managed BigBlueButton deployments, ensuring that video streams, recordings, and user data never leave European jurisdiction.

Purpose-Built for Education

Unlike Zoom or Microsoft Teams, which were designed for business meetings and later added classroom features as an afterthought, BigBlueButton was architected around the teacher-student dynamic. The presenter has fine-grained control over participant permissions: who can share their camera, who can unmute, who can draw on the whiteboard. These controls are essential in educational settings where managing a class of 30 students is fundamentally different from running a corporate standup with six engineers.

The platform includes a built-in presentation system that supports uploaded slides with real-time annotations. Teachers can draw, highlight, and write on slides while students follow along. Crucially, annotations can be multi-user: the teacher can enable shared whiteboard access so students can collaborate visually in real time. This feature, called "Whiteboard Vision" in recent releases, even allows educators to give each learner their own whiteboard while maintaining a bird's-eye view to see who might be struggling.

Breakout Rooms and Collaborative Learning

BigBlueButton's breakout room implementation is one of the most mature in any video conferencing platform, open-source or proprietary. Teachers can create multiple breakout rooms, assign students to specific groups or allow self-selection, set time limits, and broadcast messages to all rooms simultaneously. Each breakout room functions as a fully featured mini-session with its own whiteboard, chat, and shared notes.

The shared notes feature deserves special mention. Every session includes an Etherpad-based collaborative document where participants can take notes together in real time. This is invaluable for group work in breakout rooms or for creating a shared record of a lecture. Combined with the polling feature -- which supports multiple choice, true/false, and custom response types -- BigBlueButton provides a richer interactive toolkit than most paid platforms.

Recording and Playback

BigBlueButton can record entire sessions for later playback. Recordings capture not just the audio and video but also the presentation slides, whiteboard annotations, chat messages, and shared notes as synchronized, interactive playback. Students can navigate the recording by clicking on chat messages or slide transitions, making review sessions far more productive than watching a flat video recording. This structured playback format is a significant advantage over the simple MP4 recordings that Zoom and Google Meet produce.

Recordings are processed and stored on your own server, giving you full control over retention policies and access permissions. Many institutions integrate recording playback directly into their LMS, so students access session recordings alongside other course materials without needing to visit a separate platform.

LMS Integration and Interoperability

BigBlueButton integrates natively with the world's most popular learning management systems. Moodle includes a built-in BigBlueButton plugin, and Canvas, Schoology, Jenzabar, and other major LMS platforms offer official integrations. The integration typically works through LTI (Learning Tools Interoperability), the industry standard for embedding educational tools into LMS platforms. This means teachers can launch a BigBlueButton session directly from within their course page, and recordings are automatically linked back to the course.

The LMS integration coverage is remarkable: BigBlueButton estimates that its integrations cover more than 75% of the world's learning management systems for K-12 and higher education. For institutions already invested in an LMS ecosystem, this interoperability eliminates the friction of managing a separate video platform with its own user accounts and permissions.

BigBlueButton 3.0 and Beyond

The BigBlueButton 3.0 release in 2025 represented a major milestone. It introduced a completely redesigned user interface informed by extensive research and user testing, moving to a more modern, intuitive, and consistent experience. The 3.1 release, which entered beta in 2025, continues this modernization effort with additional UI refinements and performance improvements. The development team has also invested heavily in improving scalability, allowing larger institutions to host thousands of concurrent sessions on clustered deployments.

The annual BigBlueButton World conference brings together developers, administrators, and educators from around the globe to share deployment experiences and shape the project's roadmap. This community-driven development model ensures that features are prioritized based on real classroom needs rather than corporate product strategy.

Self-Hosting and European Deployments

Self-hosting is BigBlueButton's core deployment model, and this is where its value proposition for European institutions becomes compelling. By running BigBlueButton on your own servers -- whether in an institutional data center or on a European cloud provider like Hetzner, OVHcloud, or Scaleway -- you achieve complete data sovereignty. No video streams are routed through US servers. No recordings are stored on infrastructure subject to the CLOUD Act. No student data is processed by a foreign corporation.

For institutions that prefer not to manage servers themselves, numerous European hosting companies offer managed BigBlueButton services with EU-only data residency guarantees. Pricing for hosted solutions typically starts around 5 EUR per user per month, which remains competitive with proprietary alternatives while providing the transparency and control that open-source software enables.

Screen Sharing and Presentation Tools

BigBlueButton supports full-screen sharing as well as application-specific sharing, allowing presenters to share exactly what their audience needs to see. The platform also includes a built-in timer, raise-hand functionality, emoji reactions, and a multi-user cursor that shows where each participant is pointing on shared content. These small features add up to a significantly more interactive experience than basic video conferencing tools provide.

Who Should Use BigBlueButton?

BigBlueButton is the right choice for educational institutions, corporate training departments, and any organization that conducts regular online learning sessions and values data sovereignty. Universities running Moodle or Canvas will find the LMS integration seamless. Schools subject to strict data protection requirements -- as is increasingly common under GDPR and national education privacy laws -- will appreciate the self-hosted deployment model. Organizations that need to record sessions for compliance or review purposes will benefit from the structured recording and playback system.

For standard corporate meetings or quick video calls between colleagues, BigBlueButton may feel over-engineered -- tools like Jitsi or Whereby are better suited for those use cases. But for structured educational sessions where a teacher needs to present, poll, whiteboard, manage breakout groups, and record the entire experience, BigBlueButton remains the open-source gold standard.