Zoom Webinars is genuinely hard to beat on polish. Registration pages, a backstage for speakers, Q&A, polls, and streaming to YouTube, all bundled into one product. The catch? It's hosted only, priced by attendee capacity, and every recording and attendee list lives in Zoom's cloud.
So if you need webinars running on your own servers, for cost, compliance, or control, there's no self-hosted Zoom you can just buy. You build the equivalent from open-source parts.
This article compares seven open-source tools you can self-host instead, and explains the one pattern that matters most: for audiences past a few hundred, almost every self-hosted webinar is an interactive room for the speakers plus a stream for everyone else. Zoom's prices below were checked on its pricing page on October 22, 2026.
The Quick Take
For webinars up to a few hundred people, self-host a meeting server. For thousands, put the speakers in a meeting room and stream it out. And if you only run a couple of webinars a year with no data rules, Zoom is honestly still less work.
Company webinars and town halls
A browser room for speakers, recording, and streaming out when the audience grows.
Classes and training
Slides, whiteboard, polls, and breakout rooms built for teaching, under 200 per session.
Thousands of viewers
Speakers interact in the room; the audience watches a stream with chat, a few seconds behind.
Occasional marketing webinars
Registration, reminders, and attendee reports out of the box. Rebuilding those yourself isn't worth it for a few events a year.
Why Look for a Zoom Webinars Alternative?
The reasons people give usually fall into one of three buckets.
- Cost that scales with the audience, and a licence you didn't budget for. Zoom lists Webinars from $89/month, or $66.67/month billed annually, for the entry capacity tier (300 attendees). But there's a catch the pricing page makes easy to miss: Webinars is an add-on that requires a paid Zoom Workplace Pro licence beside it, at $16.99/month. So the real entry cost is closer to $83.66/month annual, not $66.67. Bigger audiences mean a bigger licence, per host.
- Data you have to keep in-house. Recordings, chat, Q&A, and the attendee list all live with Zoom. For healthcare, public sector, and some financial firms, that alone rules it out. Our guide to sovereign video conferencing covers why an EU data region doesn't fully fix it.
- Embedding and branding. Running webinars inside your own site, LMS, or product is simply easier with software you control.
If none of those apply to you, reread the "Stay on Zoom" card above before you build anything.
How to Choose
Every tool below gets judged on the same four things:
Audience size
How many people can join live, and is there a view-only mode or a path to streaming for more?
Speaker tools
Screen sharing, slides, moderation, a lobby, polls, Q&A.
Streaming and recording
RTMP out to YouTube or your own server, plus recordings you store yourself.
Licence and effort
How permissive the licence is, and how much work it takes to install, scale, and keep running.
The Room-Plus-Stream Pattern
This is the part most comparison lists skip.
A live meeting server sends every participant their own media streams in real time. That's what makes conversation possible, and also what makes it expensive past a few hundred people. A stream, by contrast, sends one video to everyone, a few seconds late, and scales to large audiences on ordinary web infrastructure.
Here's how the pattern works:
- Speakers and panelists join the roomA Jitsi Meet, plugNmeet, or BigBlueButton room where hosts talk, share slides, and take questions.
- The room is streamed out over RTMPJitsi does this with Jibri; plugNmeet and MiroTalk have RTMP built in.
- The audience watches the streamOn YouTube, or on your own Owncast or PeerTube server if the stream has to stay in-house. Questions come in through the stream's chat.
Zoom Webinars does the same split internally. Panelists are in the meeting, attendees watch. Self-hosting just makes the two halves visible and lets you size each one separately.
1. Jitsi Meet: The Default Self-Hosted Room
Jitsi Meet is the most widely deployed open-source meeting server, licensed under Apache 2.0. For webinars, it gives you the room, and Jibri gives you recording and RTMP streaming. Jitsi also has a visitors mode for large view-only audiences. The architecture segregates passive viewers onto separate Prosody XMPP nodes, each handling up to 250 visitors by default; deploy multiple nodes to scale to thousands.
Why pick it
- Browser-based, no download for attendees
- Recording and YouTube/Twitch streaming through Jibri
- Lobby, moderator controls, and built-in polls
- The biggest community of any tool here
Watch out for
- One Jibri instance handles exactly one recording or stream at a time; two concurrent webinars mean two Jibri containers
- No registration pages or attendee reports
- Large rooms need load testing, and visitor mode adds XMPP infrastructure to manage
2. BigBlueButton: Built for Teaching
BigBlueButton is an LGPL-3.0 web conferencing system designed for online classes. Slides, a multi-user whiteboard, polls, shared notes, and breakout rooms are all first-class citizens. Its documentation recommends keeping a single server to around 200 concurrent users, and the current 4.0 release requires Ubuntu 24.04, 8 CPU cores, and 16 GB of RAM for production.
Why pick it
- The best presenter tools for training and lectures
- Listen-only mode for attendees who just watch
- Recording built in, plus tight LMS integrations
Watch out for
- Streaming out isn't part of core. RTMP broadcasting requires a separate bridge like BigBlueButton-liveStreaming, a third-party project that wraps the meeting in a headless browser and pushes it to YouTube, Twitch, or a custom endpoint
- Under 200 per session by its own recommendation; past 300 concurrent users, dedicated bare-metal hardware is strongly advised
- Heavier servers than a plain meeting tool; our guide to scaling BigBlueButton on AWS covers clusters
3. plugNmeet: Webinar Features on LiveKit
plugNmeet is an MIT-licensed meeting system built on LiveKit. It ships with a waiting room, polls with a quiz mode, a whiteboard that opens office files, MP4 recording, and RTMP/RTMPS broadcasting out of the box. And the benchmarks are unusually specific: plugNmeet ran 300 and 500 users in a single room on a 4-vCore / 16 GB server with zero missed heartbeats, zero errors, and ~100% delivery in tests published September 2026.
Why pick it
- Recording and streaming without a separate Jibri pool
- One install script for the whole stack
- Moodle, WordPress, and LTI plugins
Watch out for
- The single-server ceiling is around 900 users. At 1,000 attempted joins, 901 got in and 99 timed out; 1,000 in one interactive room needs a multi-server cluster
- A much smaller community than Jitsi or BigBlueButton
- Mainly developed by one company, MynaParrot
4. OpenVidu Meet: A Packaged Meeting App
OpenVidu is a platform based on LiveKit and mediasoup, and OpenVidu Meet is its ready-made video conferencing app, with recording, screen sharing, chat, virtual backgrounds, and custom branding. The Community edition is Apache 2.0 licensed and free, and recording/egress ships wired up by default, writing to S3-compatible storage without extra hardware sizing. Broadcasting to YouTube or Twitch is a listed platform feature.
Why pick it
- Branding and embedding in your own app are core features
- Recording and egress bundled by default, no separate Jibri pool
- A commercial company behind it, with a Pro tier
Watch out for
- No dedicated webinar mode is listed for Meet
- Pro pricing isn't on the main site
5. MiroTalk SFU: Lightweight and Embeddable
MiroTalk SFU is a mediasoup-based meeting server under AGPL-3.0, with a paid licence available for different terms. It lists built-in RTMP streaming, recording, a lobby, a REST API, and embeddable iframes and widgets, and installs with Node.js or Docker. In SFU mode, an RTMP publisher can replace the browser broadcaster: MediaMTX receives the stream and viewers keep watching over WebRTC.
Why pick it
- Small and quick to install
- RTMP streaming built in
- Easy to embed in an existing site with a few lines of iframe code
Watch out for
- AGPL-3.0: changes you make must be shared, unless you buy the commercial licence
- Mostly one maintainer
- Polls and a dedicated webinar mode aren't listed
6. Owncast: Your Own Live Stream
Owncast isn't a meeting tool. It's a self-hosted live-streaming server, MIT licensed, with built-in chat and moderation, and no subscriptions or viewer limits. You send it a stream from OBS or from your meeting room's RTMP output, and the audience watches in a browser. The player embeds in any website, and there's no platform fee or takedown policy between you and your audience.
Why pick it
- The audience half of a large webinar, kept on your own server
- Chat with moderation for audience questions
- Works with any RTMP source, and costs only the server and bandwidth
Watch out for
- One-way: viewers watch, they don't join on camera
- Large audiences need bandwidth or CDN planning once you outgrow one machine
7. PeerTube: Streams With a Video Library
PeerTube is a self-hosted video platform under AGPL-3.0 with first-class live streaming over RTMP. It accepts RTMP ingest from OBS or any RTMP software and serves the live as HLS. It supports both permanent streams (same stream key, each session saved as its own video) and short-lived lives that become replays, which suits a recurring webinar series. PeerTube's docs even describe streaming a Jitsi Meet conference into it.
Why pick it
- Live and on-demand in one place
- Permanent lives for recurring webinars
- Federation, if you want your videos discoverable
Watch out for
- One-way, like Owncast
- Live has to be enabled by the instance administrator in configuration
Self-Hosted Zoom Webinars Alternatives Compared
| Tool | Type | Licence | Stream out (RTMP) | Recording | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Zoom Webinars | Hosted webinar | Proprietary | Yes | Yes | Marketing webinars, no data rules |
| Jitsi Meet | Meeting room | Apache 2.0 | Yes, via Jibri (one stream per Jibri) | Yes, via Jibri | Company webinars, town halls |
| BigBlueButton | Meeting room | LGPL-3.0 | Via separate streaming bridge | Yes | Classes and training |
| plugNmeet | Meeting room | MIT | Yes, built in | Yes | Webinars with polls and LMS |
| OpenVidu Meet | Meeting room | Apache 2.0 (Community) | Broadcasting is a platform feature | Yes, egress bundled | Branded, embedded meetings |
| MiroTalk SFU | Meeting room | AGPL-3.0 or paid | Yes | Yes | Lightweight embedded calls |
| Owncast | Live stream | MIT | Receives RTMP | Via your source | The audience half, in-house |
| PeerTube | Live stream + library | AGPL-3.0 | Receives RTMP | Replays and permanent lives | Recurring webinar series |
What You'll Still Need to Add
A meeting server and a stream cover the live event. They don't cover what Zoom wraps around it, and it's better to know that up front.
Registration
A sign-up form that issues a link, and ideally a short-lived token so only registered people can join the room.
Reminders and follow-up
Emails before and after. A self-hosted newsletter tool such as Listmonk handles the sends.
Attendance and analytics
Who registered, who showed up, how long they stayed. Plan where those numbers come from before the first event.
Running Jitsi Webinars With Meetrix
Jitsi is the tool we run most, so it's the one we can speak to from experience. The Meetrix Jitsi Meet images on AWS and Google Cloud come in plans for 50 to 500 users, with or without Jibri recording, so the room half of the pattern is a launch rather than a build. The recording-enabled developer guide covers Jibri and S3. For the stream half, our Jitsi live streaming to YouTube with JMAP guide shows the admin-panel route, and our virtual event platform case study shows Jitsi scaled across four AWS regions for a real event platform.
Where I'd Start
Size the audience first.
- Under 200Any of the meeting rooms will do. BigBlueButton for teaching; Jitsi Meet or plugNmeet for everything else.
- Between 200 and 500Pick Jitsi or plugNmeet and load-test before the event. plugNmeet's own benchmarks show 500 users comfortable on one 4-vCore server.
- Around 900plugNmeet's single-server headroom runs out here. Time to look at clustering or the room-plus-stream pattern.
- Past thatStop trying to fit everyone in the room. Keep the speakers in Jitsi or plugNmeet and stream to YouTube, or to Owncast or PeerTube when the audience has to stay on your servers.
And be honest about how often you run webinars. For two marketing webinars a year with no data rules, Zoom's registration and reports are worth the licence, even at the real $83.66/month entry price once the Pro licence is counted. For a weekly series, an internal town hall, or anything regulated, self-hosting pays back the setup time. Our BigBlueButton vs Jitsi Meet comparison helps if you're torn between the two most common rooms.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is there a self-hosted version of Zoom Webinars?
No. Zoom Webinars is hosted-only. You build the equivalent from open-source parts: a meeting server for speakers plus a stream for the audience.
How much does Zoom Webinars cost?
From $89/month, or $66.67/month billed annually, for the entry 300-attendee tier, plus a required Zoom Workplace Pro licence at $16.99/month. Webinars Plus is $99 and Zoom Events is $149, with larger audiences moving to quote-based tiers.
Can Jitsi Meet host a webinar?
Yes, for a few hundred attendees. Beyond that, use Jitsi for speakers and stream the room out via Jibri to YouTube, Owncast, or PeerTube. Jitsi's visitor mode can scale passive viewers to thousands, but each visitor node handles up to 250 by default.
How many attendees can a self-hosted webinar handle?
A meeting room handles a few hundred. BigBlueButton recommends under 200 per server. plugNmeet measured 300-500 comfortably and hit its single-server ceiling around 900. The room-plus-stream pattern scales to thousands or more.
Which free webinar software can I self-host?
Jitsi Meet, BigBlueButton, plugNmeet, OpenVidu Meet, MiroTalk SFU, Owncast, and PeerTube, each with different trade-offs on licence, effort, and features.
What does a self-hosted webinar platform not include?
Registration pages, reminders, attendee reports, and analytics. You'll need to add those separately.
Host Webinars on Your Own Jitsi Server
Launch a pre-configured Jitsi Meet server for 50 to 500 users on AWS or Google Cloud, with Jibri recording when you need it.
See the Jitsi Meet Plans