What your video conferencing really costs: BBB, Jitsi, Zoom, Vuisio

Comparing prices per licence says almost nothing about what video conferencing really costs. What decides it is the number of people you bring together. Zoom bills per host but caps participants, and charges extra to go past the cap. Jitsi JaaS bills every active user: the cost follows the audience. BigBlueButton is free on licence but not on servers. This guide compares the four solutions on cost per participant, and says where Vuisio is not the cheapest.

Why the sticker price is not enough

The real cost of video conferencing breaks down into four items.

1. The software licence: the price per user or per host, or zero for self-hosted open source solutions.
2. The infrastructure: the server (or cloud) the solution runs on. RAM, CPU, storage, bandwidth.
3. Administration: the human time to install, configure, monitor, update and troubleshoot. This is the most underestimated item.
4. Hidden costs: recording storage, add-ons, scaling, support, and the opportunity cost of the time spent.

To those four, add a variable that pricing pages rarely put forward: the participant cap. Zoom Pro stops at 100 people, Business at 300, and going past those thresholds is paid for separately. It is that constraint, more than the licence price, that decides what you will actually pay.

A “free” tool that takes ten hours of administration a month from a systems engineer costing €500 a day really costs €625 a month in human time, before the server.

What each solution costs

Zoom: simple on the surface, complex in practice

Zoom bills per host, not per participant. The 2026 prices (zoom.us, CostBench, Koalendar):

Plan	Price per host per month (annual)	Max participants	Cloud storage	Limits
Basic	Free	100	None (local)	40 min in groups
Pro	13.33 USD	100	5 to 10 GB per licence	Max 99 licences
Business	18.33 USD	300	1 GB per licence	Max 250 licences, SSO
Business Plus	22.49 USD	300	1 GB per licence	Zoom Phone included
Enterprise	On request	500 to 1,000	Unlimited	100+ licences minimum

Zoom’s hidden costs are well documented (ITQlick): additional cloud storage at 10 USD a month for 30 GB, a “Large Meetings” add-on from 50 USD a month to exceed 300 participants, Zoom Phone at 13.33 USD per user per month. Contracts renew automatically, and the median Zoom customer pays 11,551 USD a year according to CostBench data verified across 1,335 purchases (CostBench). And above all: Zoom is an American company subject to the CLOUD Act.

BigBlueButton: free on licence, heavy on infrastructure

BigBlueButton costs nothing in software licence (LGPL 3.0). The whole cost shifts to infrastructure and administration.

Infrastructure. The official documentation requires a dedicated Ubuntu 22.04 server with 16 GB of RAM, 8 CPU cores, 500 GB of storage and 250 Mbit/s of symmetric bandwidth (BBB install docs). A compliant dedicated server costs between 70 and 140 USD a month depending on capacity (Webhostingzone). Above 200 simultaneous participants (BBB FAQ) you need a Scalelite load balancer and additional servers.

Administration. BBB runs more than ten services at once (BBB architecture docs). Upgrading from BBB 2.x to 3.0 means starting again from a fresh Ubuntu 22.04 server (BBB install docs). The critical CPU threshold is 70 %, beyond which audio degrades (BBB FAQ). All of that takes a competent systems administrator and regular time.

The free server built into Moodle is very limited: 60 minutes per session, 25 participants maximum, recordings that expire after 7 days (BigBlueButton Host).

Jitsi: free but without a safety net

Jitsi is free when self-hosted (Apache 2.0). The infrastructure is lighter than BBB: 8 GB of RAM recommended, 4 GB minimum (Jitsi docs). But several points weigh on the total cost.

No official support when self-hosted. 8x8, which owns Jitsi, offers no support for self-hosted installations (8x8 FAQ). When something breaks, there is only community documentation.

Recording is expensive. Jibri, the recording module, launches a full Chrome instance in a virtual framebuffer and encodes the output with ffmpeg. The result: 8 GB of RAM minimum per recording session at 720p, and a separate server is recommended (Jitsi docs).

The official cloud offering, JaaS, bills 0.35 USD per monthly active user, with 25 free (8x8). JaaS is hosted in the United States by 8x8.

Vuisio: one price per host, no participant cap

Plan	Price	Participants	Included
Starter	€0	Unlimited	Unlimited length, chat, files, basic whiteboard, polls
Pro	€29 excl. VAT per host per month	Unlimited	Breakout rooms, recording, SmartSlides, participation analytics, voice anonymisation
Team	€149 excl. VAT per month, 5 hosts, then €15	Unlimited	Admin console, custom roles, consolidated reporting, one API key (BBB and Jitsi compatibility), priority support
Sovereign	On request	Unlimited	On-premise or dedicated cloud, unlimited API keys, configurable retention, service commitments

Billing applies to the host, the person who opens the room. Participants are never counted, whatever their number, and no tier comes in between.

Let us say it plainly: on a small meeting, this is not the cheapest. A Zoom Pro licence costs 13.33 USD against €29 for a Vuisio host. If you gather twelve people around a virtual table, Zoom will cost you less. The gap reverses as the audience grows, and that is exactly what the next section measures.

Cost per participant: three volumes, three verdicts

Amounts are monthly and exclude VAT, with dollars converted at €0.92. Only the licence is counted here: infrastructure and administration are added for the self-hosted solutions, and costed further down.

A class: 1 host, 35 participants

Solution	Monthly cost	Per participant	Cap reached?
Zoom Pro	€12	€0.35	No (100)
Jitsi JaaS	€11	€0.32	Not applicable
Vuisio Pro	€29	€0.83	Not applicable

Zoom wins. At this scale, paying one licence for a handful of participants comes to less than a Vuisio host. If all your meetings look like this one, price is not the argument that should decide for you: sovereignty and Moodle compatibility are.

A cohort: 3 hosts, 300 participants

Solution	Monthly cost	Per participant	Cap reached?
Zoom Pro	€37	€0.12	Yes, at 100
Zoom Business	€51	€0.17	Exactly at the threshold (300)
Jitsi JaaS	€97	€0.32	Not applicable
Vuisio Pro	€87	€0.29	Not applicable

Zoom Business stays ahead, but exactly at its ceiling. One more participant forces the “Large Meetings” add-on, billed from 50 USD a month (ITQlick), which takes the total to €97 and puts Vuisio in front. That is the tipping point.

A general assembly: 2 hosts, 1,500 participants

Solution	Monthly cost	Per participant	Cap reached?
Zoom Business plus add-on	On request	Not calculable	Yes, above 1,000
Jitsi JaaS	€483	€0.32	Not applicable
Vuisio Pro	€58	€0.04	Not applicable

The gap becomes an order of magnitude. Jitsi JaaS bills every active user, so its cost tracks the audience upwards. Zoom leaves its public price list: above 1,000 participants you move to Enterprise, which imposes a minimum of 100 licences. Vuisio bills two hosts, and nothing else.

What these three tables say

Vuisio’s cost per participant is the only one that falls as the audience grows, because it depends only on the number of people opening rooms. Jitsi JaaS stays constant by construction. Zoom’s falls too, up to the cap, then jumps.

The tipping point sits at around a hundred participants per host. Below it, a licence per seat costs less. Above it, billing per host becomes clearly cheaper, and above all predictable: your budget stops depending on how successful your meetings are.

And the infrastructure of self-hosted solutions

The tables above count only the licence. For BigBlueButton and Jitsi self-hosted, add the server and the administration time, which depend neither on hosts nor on participants but on load.

Item	BigBlueButton	Jitsi self-hosted	Vuisio self-hosted
Server	70 to 140 USD a month (16 GB, 8 cores)	~30 USD a month (8 GB VPS)	From a 1 GB, 2-core VPS
Administration	Several hours a month, 10+ services	Prosody, Jicofo, JVB, Jibri	A single binary, atomic updates
Licence	€0	€0	€0

This is where “free” stops being free. One hour of administration billed at €60 is enough to wipe out the licence gap of several hosts.

What the tables do not show

The cost of non-compliance. Using Zoom or Teams in an educational institution when the French data protection authority advises against it, and when the decree of 5 December 2025 requires tools compliant with the ministry’s standards (Légifrance), is a regulatory risk whose cost is hard to quantify but potentially high.

The cost of an emergency migration. The French public sector banned Zoom and Teams in January 2026 (CX Foundation). If that ban extends to schools or to publicly funded training providers, unprepared organisations will have to migrate in a hurry, with the costs that entails.

The cost of dependency. Zoom contracts renew automatically, and users report difficulties cancelling even several weeks ahead (CostBench). With an open source tool (BBB, Jitsi, Vuisio), there is no lock-in: you can migrate when you choose.

In summary

Solution	Billing	Participant cap	Cost per participant at 1,500	Sovereign
Zoom Pro	13.33 USD per host	100	Off the price list	No
Zoom Business	18.33 USD per host	300	Off the price list	No
BigBlueButton	Free plus infrastructure	None (cluster required)	Depends on the server	Yes (self-hosted)
Jitsi JaaS	0.35 USD per active user	None	€0.32	No (8x8, USA)
Vuisio Pro	€29 per host	None	€0.04	Yes (France)

The price per licence says very little. What counts is what one more person in the room costs: with Zoom, they eventually cost a change of plan; with Jitsi JaaS, they cost 0.35 USD; with Vuisio, they cost nothing.

If your meetings gather a dozen people, a licence per seat remains cheaper, and we are telling you so. If you teach, if you hold assemblies, if you train whole cohorts, the arithmetic reverses, and it reverses by a wide margin.

Our comparison of BigBlueButton alternatives covers the rest: architecture, sovereignty, features. And to check for yourself without committing to anything, the free plan limits neither length nor the number of participants: open a room.