A sovereign alternative to Zoom and Teams for education

In 2026, using Zoom or Microsoft Teams in a French school or university is no longer a neutral choice. The data protection authority advises against it, the public sector has banned them, and a decree now requires secondary schools to use tools compliant with security and interoperability standards. This is no longer a matter of opinion about sovereignty: it is a matter of regulatory compliance. Here is the context, the options and what to do.

Why are Zoom and Teams a problem in education?

The problem is legal, not technical. Zoom and Microsoft Teams work very well. But they are tools published by American companies subject to the CLOUD Act: the United States government can require access to data held by those companies, including on European servers.

In education, the data concerned is particularly sensitive. The French data protection authority underlined this in its 2021 opinion, issued at the request of the French conferences of grandes écoles and university presidents: the data processed concerns students (including minors), staff, research and sometimes health information (IT-Connect, Phonandroid). It recommended that institutions find GDPR-compliant alternatives.

Since then, the regulatory framework has tightened.

On 26 January 2026, the French minister for the civil service, David Amiel, announced a ban on Zoom, Teams, Webex and Google Meet across the whole public sector. Civil servants must move to Visio, the sovereign platform run by DINUM (CX Foundation). That ban does not yet apply to schools or private companies, but it sets a clear direction.

On 5 December 2025, decree 2025-1165 wrote a “digital reference framework for education” into the French education code. It requires public secondary schools to use digital tools compliant with the interoperability, security and responsible-digital standards set by the ministry (Légifrance, La Gazette des communes). Café pédagogique calls it a historic moment for digital education (Café pédagogique). The French directorate for digital education is explicit: pupils’ data is politically sensitive (Café pédagogique).

What sovereign options exist today?

Three families of solution exist for French education.

Visio (DINUM) is the state’s sovereign platform, intended for public officials. It is being rolled out and targets the administrative public sector, not schools directly.

BigBlueButton is the historic choice of the French education ministry. The directorate for digital education runs BBB instances (visio.education.fr) for virtual classes (Primàbord / Éduscol). The higher education ministry invested 4.2 million euros to deploy BBB in a sovereign cloud for universities (Campus Matin). BBB is part of the French interministerial free software base (Wikipedia) and works natively with Moodle.

But BBB has recognised limits. A university vice-president for digital told Campus Matin that they had tested BBB in 2020 and found a latency that can make exchanges difficult, and that scaling up was complicated, where Zoom kept its connection quality throughout the meeting (Campus Matin). The infrastructure required is heavy: 16 GB of RAM, 8 CPU cores, a dedicated Ubuntu server (BBB documentation).

Vuisio is the third way: a French sovereign alternative, lighter than BBB, compatible with its API, and available as a free sovereign cloud or self-hosted.

Why Vuisio suits education

Vuisio answers the four specific requirements of teaching: sovereignty, LMS compatibility, light infrastructure and ease of use.

Compatible with Moodle, with nothing to change. Vuisio implements the BigBlueButton API protocol through its compat-api module (docs.vuis.io). An institution using Moodle with BBB can switch to Vuisio by changing the server URL and the shared secret in the Moodle configuration. The teacher starts the meeting from their course, the student joins with one click, with their name and role (teacher or student) already filled in. No training needed.

Sovereign by design. Vuisio is published in France by Geezot, and the core is released under the AGPL 3.0 licence (docs.vuis.io). The sovereign cloud is hosted in France. No user account is required: a participant is an ephemeral numeric identifier, for the length of the session. No cookie, no behavioural tracking. The data that is kept is encrypted with AES-256-GCM. The default STUN server is European (Nextcloud), not Google. The default TLS certificate is European (Actalis), not American (docs.vuis.io).

Light, even for small institutions. Vuisio is written in Rust and relays audio and video without re-encoding them (docs.vuis.io). The server footprint is a fraction of BBB’s: 1 GB of RAM and 2 cores carry about ten participants. On a modest server (6 vCPU, under 2 GB of RAM used), Vuisio carried 450 to 500 participants in load testing. That is a decisive advantage for small schools and for institutions that cannot afford a dedicated high-performance server.

Simple for users. Everything happens in the browser, with nothing to install. The interface includes webcam, screen sharing, chat, file sharing, reactions, moderation and a whiteboard (docs.vuis.io). One feature is unique in education: real-time voice anonymisation, useful for protecting participants’ identity in certain teaching contexts (docs.vuis.io).

Criterion	Zoom / Teams	BigBlueButton	Vuisio
Vendor	United States	Canada (Blindside Networks)	France (Geezot)
Subject to the CLOUD Act	Yes	No (self-hosted)	No
Recommended by the French data protection authority	No (IT-Connect)	Yes (interministerial free software base)	Yes (open source, hosted in France)
Moodle compatibility	Third-party plugin	Native	Yes (BBB-compatible API)
Minimum server	Vendor cloud	16 GB RAM, 8 cores, dedicated Ubuntu	1 GB of RAM, 2 cores for ten participants
Data encrypted at rest	Not documented	Not documented	AES-256-GCM
User account required	Yes	Yes (Greenlight)	No
Sovereign cloud in France	No	No (infrastructure at your expense)	Yes (free or Pro)
Price	Licence per user	Free (heavy infrastructure)	Free / Pro €29 per host per month

How to migrate in practice

Migration depends on where you are today.

You use Moodle with BigBlueButton. This is the most common case in higher education and increasingly in secondary schools. Install Vuisio’s compat-api module (vuisio module add compat-api), then change the BBB server URL and the shared secret in the Moodle configuration (Administration > Plugins > BigBlueButton). Test a session. Existing rooms, roles and join links keep working.

You use Zoom or Teams without Moodle. The switch is even simpler: create a Vuisio link (through the lobby module or the API) and share it with participants. Nothing for students to install, everything runs in the browser. The free sovereign cloud plan limits neither the length of the class nor the number of students connected.

You are an institution with limited technical means. Vuisio’s free sovereign cloud needs no infrastructure: no server to administer, no certificate to manage, no updates to watch. If you need full control, Vuisio’s interactive installer deploys an instance in a few minutes on a Debian or Ubuntu server (docs.vuis.io).

In summary

The French regulatory framework is pushing education towards digital tools that are sovereign, secure and interoperable. The data protection authority advises against Zoom and Teams in teaching. The decree of 5 December 2025 imposes binding standards on secondary schools. And the public sector has banned American tools since January 2026.

BigBlueButton opened the way, but its hardware demands and performance limits hold many institutions back. Vuisio keeps its Moodle compatibility, pushes sovereignty down to the details (European STUN, European TLS, no cookie, no account) and divides the infrastructure requirement by ten. All with a free sovereign cloud to start with no commitment.

Try Vuisio free and check for yourself: your students will not see the difference, your IT department will.