Jitsi Meet
FreeShare a link and start a meeting — no seat caps, no 40-minute timer
An open-source video conferencing system you join by opening a link in a browser — no install, no account. Screen sharing, recording, chat, raise-hand and virtual backgrounds included, and the whole stack can be deployed on your own server.
Why we picked it
Zoom's free tier cuts you off at 40 minutes; most Chinese alternatives require an installed client and a login. Jitsi's approach: send a link and the other person is in — it runs in the browser, and participants need no account and no download. 29,735 stars, Apache-2.0.
The feature set covers the basics properly — screen sharing, recording, chat, raise hand, virtual backgrounds, pinning a speaker. For classes, remote interviews and small team standups it is entirely sufficient.
One change worth flagging: the official public server, meet.jit.si, now requires a sign-in to create a meeting (via Google, GitHub and similar), while invited participants still join without one. This was added to curb abuse and differs from the fully anonymous experience of a few years ago.
That is also where its main advantage lies: the whole stack is open source, so you can deploy it on your own server — at which point even the create-a-meeting sign-in requirement disappears and no meeting data touches a third party. Plenty of schools, community groups and small companies do exactly this, and a modest cloud VM handles a fair amount of concurrency.
Do note that bandwidth and CPU demands climb steeply once you have dozens of cameras on at once, so size the machine before self-hosting for a crowd.