Zoom became the verb of the pandemic. Before 2020, video conferencing was another tool in the enterprise kit. After 2020, saying zoom meant remote meeting with the same naturalness that saying google means internet search. That market position carries a cost most users do not calculate until they need to renegotiate with the vendor or read the terms of service more carefully than usual: total dependence on private American infrastructure, per-user pricing that scales without service value scaling proportionally, and a privacy history that includes at least one major encryption scandal and the routing of European calls through Chinese servers.
Jitsi Meet, the open-source video conferencing project currently maintained by 8x8, spent years being perceived as the functional but uncomfortable alternative for those who did not want to pay Zoom. In 2026, that perception no longer reflects product reality. The feature gap has closed for most standard enterprise use cases, and the digital sovereignty advantages Jitsi offers — particularly in self-hosted form — have become more relevant as European data regulations are applied with increasing rigour and debates about American jurisdiction over corporate data have become concrete rather than theoretical.
Zoom's rise and the cracks the pandemic covered over
Zoom was founded in 2011 by Eric Yuan, a former VP of Engineering at Cisco WebEx. The first serious scandal arrived in 2020 when security researchers found Zoom was not implementing real end-to-end encryption despite claiming to do so explicitly in its marketing. The company implemented genuine E2EE by late 2020, but only for calls between Zoom clients without active recording and without phone-connected participants. That same year, some European users' calls were found to be routing through Chinese servers for capacity reasons — attributed by Zoom to a configuration error but leaving an uncomfortable question about infrastructure control that the market had not seriously asked before.
Jitsi Meet: what it actually is and why the distinction matters
Jitsi Meet can be used in two fundamentally different ways: through the public instance at meet.jit.si maintained by 8x8 (American, same Cloud Act exposure as Zoom), or installed and operated on an organisation's own servers. The real advantage of Jitsi only emerges in self-hosted form: no call data leaves the organisation's infrastructure, no third party has technical access to conversations, no Cloud Act is applicable, and encryption can be configured to specific security requirements. In 2026, Jitsi has waiting rooms, virtual backgrounds, screen sharing with audio, cloud recording via Jibri, breakout rooms, and AI transcription as a plugin. Zoom still performs better for groups above 50 participants and has a more mature integration ecosystem with enterprise platforms — but for the 90% of meetings that are under 20 people with standard requirements, the feature gap has largely closed.
The cost comparison and data sovereignty argument
Zoom Business costs 18.33 euros per user per month. For a 100-person organisation, that is 22,000 euros annually, every year, with lock-in that increases as conversation history and integrations accumulate. A dedicated Jitsi server on a European cloud provider capable of comfortable service for up to 20 simultaneous participants costs 20 to 50 euros per month. The annual difference for a 20-person team can exceed 4,000 euros.
On data governance, Zoom as a US company is subject to the Cloud Act regardless of where data is physically stored. Its privacy policy changed in 2023 in a way that generated controversy about potential use of meeting data for AI training — the company clarified the policy but illustrated that American platform terms of service are living documents that change without users necessarily noticing. Self-hosted Jitsi on an organisation-controlled European server eliminates all of those concerns structurally. No third-party terms of service to interpret. No Cloud Act applicable. No privacy policy that can change. For law firms, medical practices, newsrooms protecting sources, European public bodies, or any organisation handling legally privileged communications, this difference is legal in nature, not a matter of product preference.
The Democratic Market recommendation
For small teams without technical staff, without sensitive communications, who need minimum friction to get started, Jitsi Meet's public instance at meet.jit.si offers the best functionality-to-cost ratio in the video conferencing market — free, no registration required, sufficient for most daily meetings. For teams with technical capacity or access to external support, for any organisation with sensitive meeting data, for businesses wanting to control communication costs as they scale, and for any organisation that takes digital infrastructure independence seriously, self-hosted Jitsi on a European server is the more coherent choice. For large organisations with mass-audience events, critical enterprise software integrations, or contractual SLA requirements, Zoom remains the most mature option. But for the majority of mid-sized businesses without those specific needs, paying for Zoom is primarily paying for comfort and the inertia of a de facto standard. And de facto standards change.
The video conferencing market's democratic analysis is complicated by a paradox that rarely appears in technology comparisons: Zoom, one of Silicon Valley's most spectacularly successful pandemic-era companies, was founded by Eric Yuan, a Chinese-American engineer who emigrated from China and built the platform in the United States. Zoom Video Communications (USA, 7.85 EIU) is an American company subject to US law, but early in the pandemic it faced significant scrutiny when researchers discovered that some encryption keys for European and American calls were being routed through servers in China. Zoom addressed these routing concerns with architectural changes, but the episode highlighted the complexity of assessing data governance in distributed cloud services even when the corporate entity is from a democratic country.
Jitsi Meet, developed by 8x8 (USA, 7.85 EIU) and available as open-source software hosted by anyone, provides the democratic-sovereignty solution to this routing concern: a European organization can host its own Jitsi instance on European servers with no data ever leaving its controlled infrastructure. The 8x8 cloud instance of Jitsi (meet.jit.si) is the free public option, but self-hosted Jitsi on German, French, or Dutch cloud infrastructure provides a democratic-origin, data-sovereign video conferencing solution that requires no per-seat licensing fees and no data transfers to US corporate servers.
The German government has been the most active European state actor in deploying democratic-sovereign video conferencing alternatives. The Bundeswehr uses its own Jitsi-based deployment. Several German states have deployed BigBlueButton (Canada, 9.38 EIU) or Jitsi for educational institutions to avoid US corporate jurisdiction over school communications data. France's Tchap platform (built on Matrix) and videoconferencing infrastructure developed by French state digital agency DINUM reflects similar national sovereignty motivations. These government decisions are the clearest institutional signal that the democratic and data sovereignty concerns about US-jurisdiction cloud communication tools are not academic — they translate into procurement decisions at the highest levels of European governance.
