The best Zoom alternatives, compared honestly
Zoom still has the most reliable video in the category and the shortest distance between a link and a working call. What changed is the metering. Zoom is the only major platform that keeps meeting recordings in their own charged bucket rather than in the file storage you already pay for: 10 GB per licence, pooled across the account, then $10 per month for another 30 GB and $1.50 per GB over a committed block. Meanwhile the free plan's 40-minute clock runs on one-to-one calls, which Google Meet and Microsoft Teams both exempt. This page compares 7 alternatives on the numbers behind those two facts, all verified on 20 August 2026 in US dollars from each vendor's own pricing source.
The best Zoom alternative depends on which meter is hurting:
- You want both meters gone → Jitsi Meet: Apache-2.0, no seat licence and no storage meter, with a managed tier that publishes a price if you do not want the ops.
- You want the same price with real storage → Google Workspace Business Standard: $14.00 per user per month against Zoom Pro's $14.16, with 2 TB per user in Drive instead of 10 GB.
- You want the cheapest cloud recording → Microsoft Teams Essentials at $4.00 per user per month, and EU data residency at no extra fee on every commercial plan.
- Your meetings are classes → BigBlueButton: LGPL-3.0, built for teaching, recordings on your own disk.
Why teams look elsewhere
What pushes teams off Zoom
None of these are about call quality. Every one of them is about what gets counted, what it costs when you exceed it, and which tier the compliance answer sits on.
Recordings have their own meter
Pro and Business include 10 GB per licensed user, pooled at account level, so ten seats share one 100 GB bucket. Beyond it, another 30 GB is $10 per month, and overage on a committed block is $1.50 per GB. Zoom mails the billing admin at 80% of the limit. Google puts recordings in Drive, Microsoft in OneDrive, self-hosted tools on your disk. Zoom is the only one where the archive keeps billing.
The 40-minute clock runs on 1:1 calls
Zoom cut the one-to-one limit for Basic hosts on free accounts on 2 May 2022 and extended it to Basic users on paid accounts on 15 July 2022. Every meeting a Basic user hosts ends at 40 minutes, however many people are in it. Google Meet's 60-minute limit and Microsoft Teams' 60-minute limit both exempt one-to-one calls.
Capacity is per licence, not per account
Pro caps at 100 participants. Getting to 500 means the Large Meeting add-on at $50 per month per licence, and the webinar format is a different SKU again at $129 per month per licence. Neither is bought once for the organisation, so the cost of "we occasionally do a big all-hands" scales with how many people might need to host one.
AI is credit-metered, on free and paid
The paid capacity tiers are explicit buckets: $20 per month for 2,200 credits, $100 for 11,500, top-ups at $25 for 2,750. Even the free plan now counts: 3 meeting summaries, 20 AI queries and 3 note-taking uses per month. Google folded Gemini into every Workspace Business tier in January 2025 with no separate AI line, though that bundling came with a price rise.
EU residency is a sales conversation
Zoom documents dedicated EU infrastructure, Customer Managed Key and Zoom Node, but frames them around Education and Enterprise customers. There is no residency switch on Pro or Business. Microsoft completed the EU Data Boundary on 26 February 2025 at no additional fee for all commercial Microsoft 365 customers; Google offers a Europe data region from Business Standard upward.
The 2023 terms-of-service episode
Zoom's ToS published 31 March 2023 carried a Section 10.4 that read as a broad right to use service-generated data for AI training. After the story broke on 6 August 2023, Zoom amended it on 7 August and again on 11 August to state it will not use any customer content to train AI models. The clause is gone and Zoom does not train on your meetings today. The episode is still why a lot of privacy-sensitive orgs moved to self-hosted.
The shortlist
7 Zoom alternatives worth evaluating
Ranked on how much of Zoom's metering they remove without asking you to accept a worse meeting. Two of them are suites you may already own, three are self-hosted, and every price below carries its currency and billing cycle. Each pick lists one honest strength and one real weakness.
Apache-2.0, 29.8k stars, pushed 2026-08-19. No seat licence, no recording-storage meter, and unusually for an open-source project there is a managed escape hatch with a published price: Jitsi as a Service is free to 25 monthly active users, $99 per month to 300 MAU, $499 to 1.5K, with overage at $0.99 per MAU and recording billed at $0.01 per minute. The public meet.jit.si instance publishes no time limit and no participant cap. Weakness: recording needs a separate Jibri component plus your own storage target, and the handbook's own baseline is 4 dedicated cores and roughly 8 GB of RAM, scaled by adding bridges rather than a bigger box.
Business Starter $7.00, Standard $14.00, Plus $22.00 per user per month on annual commitment (month-to-month is exactly 20% higher). Recordings save to Drive against a 2 TB per-user quota on Standard, and the free tier leaves one-to-one calls uncapped while cutting group calls at 60 minutes. Europe data region from Business Standard up; Gemini bundled into all Business tiers since January 2025. Weakness: recording is not available on Starter, Standard caps at 150 participants, and you are buying an office suite to get a meeting tool.
Teams Essentials is $4.00 per user per month on annual billing and Microsoft 365 Business Basic is $7.00, both with 30-hour meetings, 300 participants and cloud recording with transcripts. Business Basic includes 1 TB per user in OneDrive. The EU Data Boundary completed 26 February 2025 at no additional fee on every commercial plan, which is the strongest compliance answer here short of self-hosting. Weakness: Essentials gives the same 10 GB per user as Zoom, the free tier still has a 60-minute group clock, and adopting Teams is a suite decision rather than a meetings one.
LGPL-3.0, 9.2k stars, pushed 2026-08-19. Purpose-built for teaching: multi-user whiteboard, breakout rooms, polling, shared notes, and recordings written to your own disk with no licence fee at all. Weakness: the install doc asks for a real server, not a small VPS. Its stated requirements are Ubuntu 22.04, 16 GB of memory, 8 CPU cores with high single-thread performance, 500 GB of disk for recordings and 250 Mbit/s symmetrical bandwidth, on a dedicated machine. There is also no vendor-run cloud with a published price, so you self-host or buy from a third-party host.
AGPL-3.0, pushed 2026-08-20. Calls and chat inside the file server many European organisations already run, so recordings land in Nextcloud Files and there is no second storage bill by construction. Worth a licence audit: nextcloud.com sells the High Performance Backend as an enterprise component, but the signalling server it is built on, strukturag/nextcloud-spreed-signaling, is AGPL-3.0 and actively maintained. You can run the HPB yourself for free; the commercial offer is support and packaging, not the code. Weakness: the default WebRTC mesh warns above about 4 participants and is practical to maybe 10, so it is not a Zoom replacement until the HPB is running, and Nextcloud Enterprise publishes no price.
Browser-only with nothing for guests to install, and a room URL that stays the same forever. Pro is $10.99 per host per month with unlimited meeting length, 100 attendees and unlimited local recording; Business is $13.99 with a 3-host minimum. Annual saves 17%, prices exclude VAT. Weakness: two of them. Recording is local only, so archiving and sharing are your problem, and the free tier is tighter than Zoom's at 30 minutes and 4 attendees, which makes the common assumption that "Whereby is the free option" wrong.
AGPL-3.0, pushed 2026-08-20. Group calls with end-to-end encryption on top of Matrix, and the Element Community edition is free of charge for both frontend and backend with Element Call included. If your threat model puts the server operator inside it, this is the entry that answers it. Weakness: it is a component, not a product you switch to on a Tuesday. You need a Matrix homeserver plus a LiveKit SFU standing before you have a meeting tool, the ecosystem is the smallest here, and Enterprise and Sovereign publish no numbers, only "per seat" and "per deployment".
Deliberately left out: Cisco Webex, whose pricing page returns HTTP 403 to non-browser clients, so there is no primary-source price we can cite or re-verify; Livestorm, which does publish a price (EUR 2.50 per attendee credit, one credit per unique participant per session over 12 months) but is a webinar product with no meetings plan and no free tier, so it competes with the Zoom Webinars add-on rather than with a Zoom seat; and video SDKs such as Daily.co, which are billed per participant-minute and replace Zoom's Video SDK, not a Zoom licence.
Side by side
Zoom alternatives compared
Verified 20 August 2026 from each vendor's own pricing page, in USD on annual billing unless noted. Zoom's page is rendered client-side and geo-priced, so the figures below come from the US dollar response of Zoom's own billing endpoint. The column most people never check is the third one: whether the free plan's clock runs on a two-person call.
| Tool | Free tier: time limit | Clock runs on a 1:1? | Cheapest plan with cloud recording | Recording storage per user on it | Self-host | Licence | EU data residency |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Zoom | 40 min | Yes | Pro, $14.16/user/mo billed yearly ($169.90/yr) | 10 GB, pooled at account level | ✗ | Proprietary | Education and Enterprise framing only |
| Jitsi Meet | No published limit | ✓ no clock | Self-host $0, or JaaS free to 25 MAU then $99/mo to 300 | Your disk or your S3 | ✓ | Apache-2.0 | By construction when self-hosted |
| Google Workspace | 60 min for 3+ people | ✓ 1:1 uncapped | Business Standard, $14.00/user/mo | 2 TB in Drive | ✗ | Proprietary | Europe data region from Business Standard |
| Microsoft Teams | 60 min for group calls | ✓ 1:1 uncapped | Essentials, $4.00/user/mo; Business Basic $7.00 | 10 GB on Essentials, 1 TB on Business Basic | ✗ | Proprietary | All commercial plans, no fee, since 2025-02-26 |
| BigBlueButton | No licence fee, no clock | ✓ no clock | Self-host $0; ✗ no vendor cloud price published | Your disk (docs suggest 500 GB) | ✓ | LGPL-3.0 | By construction |
| Nextcloud Talk | No licence fee, no clock | ✓ no clock | Self-host $0; Enterprise ✗ no published price | Your Nextcloud storage | ✓ | AGPL-3.0 | By construction |
| Whereby | 30 min, 4 attendees | Yes | Pro, $10.99/host/mo, local recording only | Your own disk | ✗ | Proprietary | Not published as a plan feature |
| Element Call | Community edition free, no clock | ✓ no clock | Self-host $0; Enterprise ✗ no published price | Your infrastructure | ✓ | AGPL-3.0 | By construction |
Ten people who record their meetings
The cheapest plan from each vendor that permits cloud recording at all, ten users, annual-commitment pricing in USD. This is where the separate recording meter shows up as a number.
| Plan | Per user / month | 10 users / month | Recording storage for those 10 | Where recordings live |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Zoom Pro | $14.16 | $141.60 | 100 GB pooled | Zoom cloud, metered |
| Google Workspace Business Standard | $14.00 | $140.00 | 20 TB pooled | Google Drive |
| Microsoft 365 Business Basic | $7.00 | $70.00 | 10 TB | OneDrive / SharePoint |
| Microsoft Teams Essentials | $4.00 | $40.00 | 100 GB | Teams cloud storage |
| Whereby Pro | $10.99 (monthly billing) | $109.90 | Unlimited, local | Your own disk |
| Jitsi or BigBlueButton, self-hosted | No licence fee | Server cost only | Whatever the disk holds | Your disk or your S3 |
Two things fall out of that table and both are checkable. Zoom Pro and Google Workspace Business Standard are within 16 cents per user of each other, and Google includes roughly 200 times the recording storage (2,048 GB per user against 10 GB). And Microsoft Teams Essentials gives the identical 10 GB per user for $4.00 rather than $14.16, so if 10 GB each is genuinely enough, the same allowance costs 3.5 times more on Zoom. All figures USD, annual-commitment pricing except Whereby, verified 20 August 2026. Zoom's own footnote applies to its column: annual plans bill as a single upfront charge and the monthly rate shown is the annual total divided by twelve. Pricing changes often; check each vendor for current terms.
Official pages: Zoom · Jitsi · Jitsi as a Service · Google Workspace · Microsoft Teams · BigBlueButton · Nextcloud Talk · Whereby · Element
A fair call
When Zoom is still the right choice
Meetings are the one tool where switching cost lands on people outside your company. Every customer, candidate and supplier who has your Zoom link has to learn the new one, and the first call that fails on an external guest's laptop costs more goodwill than a year of the storage add-on. Price that before you price the seats.
Zoom is still right if…
- Most of your calls are with people outside your company. Zoom is the link everyone already knows how to open, on every laptop, behind every corporate firewall, and that is a real feature.
- You do not record much. The 10 GB per licence meter only bites if you keep the archive, and the pooled allowance covers a team that records occasionally and deletes afterwards.
- You run large or hybrid events. Large Meeting, Webinars, Zoom Rooms and the phone system are one vendor and one support contract, and stitching that together from three vendors is its own project.
- Call quality on bad networks is the deciding factor. Zoom's performance on a hotel connection is still the category benchmark and no self-hosted stack gets there without work.
Look elsewhere if…
- You record every meeting and keep it: Google Workspace costs 16 cents less per user and puts recordings in a 2 TB Drive quota rather than a 10 GB metered bucket.
- You already pay for Microsoft 365: cloud recording with 1 TB per user is included at $7.00, so the Zoom licence is a second bill for a capability you own.
- EU data residency has to be in writing without an enterprise negotiation: Microsoft covers it on every commercial plan at no fee, or self-host and the question disappears.
- Your free-tier users keep getting cut off mid one-to-one: Jitsi publishes no clock at all, and Google and Teams exempt 1:1 calls.
- The recordings genuinely must not sit on a vendor's disk: Nextcloud Talk (AGPL-3.0) writes them into your own file server, and Element Call (AGPL-3.0) is end-to-end encrypted.
Common questions
Common questions about Zoom alternatives
What does Zoom actually cost for a 10-person team that records its meetings?
Ten Zoom Pro licences on annual billing are 169.90 US dollars per user per year, or 141.60 dollars a month, and they come with 100 GB of cloud recording storage pooled across the account. Storage beyond that is a separate recurring charge: another 30 GB is 10 dollars a month, and going over a committed storage block costs 1.50 dollars per GB. Google Workspace Business Standard is 14.00 dollars per user per month for the same ten people and puts recordings in Drive against a 2 TB per-user quota, and Microsoft 365 Business Basic is 7.00 dollars per user per month with 1 TB per user. Verified against each vendor's own pricing page on 20 August 2026.
Does Zoom's 40-minute limit apply to one-on-one calls?
Yes. Zoom applied the 40-minute cap to 1:1 meetings hosted by Basic users on free accounts on 2 May 2022, and to Basic users on paid accounts on 15 July 2022. Every meeting a Basic user hosts now ends at 40 minutes regardless of how many people are in it. The host's licence decides: a Pro host can run 30 hours with free attendees, and a free host is cut off at 40 minutes even with paid attendees. Google Meet and Microsoft Teams both leave one-to-one calls uncapped on their free plans.
Is Zoom's cloud recording storage per user or shared?
Both. Zoom grants 10 GB per licensed user on Pro and Business, then pools it at the account level, so a Business account with ten licensed users has one shared 100 GB pool. Zoom emails the billing admin at 80 percent of the limit. A recording in progress when the pool fills is allowed to finish, but you then have to delete files or buy more storage before the next one.
What is the best open-source alternative to Zoom?
Jitsi Meet, for most teams. It is Apache-2.0 licensed, imposes no seat licence and no recording-storage meter, and you can either self-host it or buy the managed version, Jitsi as a Service, which starts free for 25 monthly active users and costs 99 US dollars a month for 300. Self-hosting wants roughly 4 dedicated CPU cores and 8 GB of RAM for a small deployment, and you scale by adding videobridges rather than by buying a bigger server. If your meetings are classes, BigBlueButton (LGPL-3.0) is the better fit; if the recordings must stay on your own file server, Nextcloud Talk (AGPL-3.0) is.
Which Zoom alternative gives EU data residency without an enterprise contract?
Microsoft. The EU Data Boundary was completed on 26 February 2025, covers customer data and pseudonymised personal data for Microsoft 365, and carries no additional fee on any commercial plan. Google Workspace offers a Europe data region from Business Standard upward at 14.00 US dollars per user per month. Zoom's EU infrastructure is framed around Education and Enterprise customers, and Customer Managed Key and Zoom Node are separate layers on top, so there is no EU-residency switch on Pro or Business. Self-hosting Jitsi, BigBlueButton, Nextcloud Talk or Element Call puts the question beyond doubt, because the server is wherever you put it.
Did Zoom train AI models on customer meetings?
Zoom's terms of service published on 31 March 2023 and effective from 27 July 2023 contained a Section 10.4 that read as a broad right to use service-generated data for machine learning and AI training. After the story broke on 6 August 2023, Zoom amended the clause on 7 August 2023 to say it would not use audio, video or chat customer content to train its AI models without consent, and revised it again on 11 August 2023 to cover all customer content including screen sharing, attachments, poll results, whiteboards and reactions. The clause is gone, but the episode is still the reason a lot of privacy-sensitive organisations moved to self-hosted conferencing.
Why does Zoom's pricing page show me a different currency?
Because it is geo-priced and rendered in the browser. The pricing cards ship no numbers in the served HTML; they are hydrated from Zoom's own billing endpoint, which keys the currency off cookies that default from your IP address. From an EU address the page renders local currency, and those figures are not a straight conversion of the US dollar ones: the AI credit pack and the cloud storage add-on convert at visibly different ratios. Every price on this page is the US dollar figure Zoom's own endpoint returns, so check your own local card before budgeting. Zoom's footnote also matters: annual plans bill as one upfront charge, and the monthly figure shown next to them is the annual total divided by twelve.