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To build a self-hosted video-conferencing service, combine a client application, signaling and room control, a media-routing layer, secure public networking, and ongoing operations. The quickest route to a ready-to-deploy conferencing app is usually Jitsi Meet; LiveKit is a strong starting point for a custom product built on a self-hosted SFU platform; mediasoup suits teams that want low-level media control and can build more of the application themselves. No option has a dependable universal meeting-size limit: capacity depends on the room, media settings, network, and hardware you actually deploy.
What does a self-hosted video-conferencing app need?
A video-conferencing app is more than a web page that turns on a camera or a server that forwards video. A complete service needs a client, signaling and session coordination, a media plane, identity and access rules, and a secure, monitored deployment. Jitsi’s architecture makes these roles visible in a single established conferencing product: its web and mobile applications sit alongside XMPP signaling, conference control, and video bridges.
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- Client: The browser or mobile interface handles device selection, room layout, mute controls, participant state, and other user-facing features. Jitsi’s applications use React and React Native; a custom service also needs to decide which clients and capabilities to support.
- Signaling and room control: These services coordinate room membership, connection state, and media-session decisions. In Jitsi, Prosody provides XMPP signaling and Jicofo manages media sessions and bridge selection.
- Media plane: This moves audio and video between participants. Jitsi Videobridge, LiveKit, and mediasoup all provide SFU-based media routing, though they differ in how much application functionality they include.
- Identity and access: The product must define who can create rooms, who can join, whether authentication is required, and what happens when a host leaves. No single policy fits every deployment; configure the chosen stack and your application’s rules deliberately.
- Operations: Public access brings DNS, HTTPS certificates, firewall and media-network configuration, secrets, logs, updates, capacity planning, and recovery procedures. If your application stores persistent data, plan its storage and backups as well.
The first decision is not a server size. It is whether you want to deploy an existing conferencing application, build your product around a self-hosted media platform, or assemble more of the application around a low-level media layer.
Which implementation should you choose?
Choose based on how much product code you want to own and how much control your team needs over media routing. These projects serve different implementation needs, so their architectures should not be treated as a neutral performance ranking.
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| Option | Best fit | What your team takes on |
|---|---|---|
| Jitsi Meet | A team seeking an integrated conferencing application to deploy and customize. | Operate its web application, XMPP signaling, conference focus, and video bridges. Add services for capabilities such as recording or telephone participation when needed. |
| LiveKit | A team building a custom product on a self-hosted SFU platform with documented deployment choices. | Build the product experience and application behavior around the media platform. Select a VM, Kubernetes, or multi-region approach and configure networking and optional services. |
| mediasoup | A team that wants fine-grained control over media routing and has engineering capacity for the surrounding application. | Implement signaling and application orchestration, allocate routers and workers, and distribute rooms across processes or hosts as demand grows. |
Jitsi reduces the amount of conferencing application you must assemble, but it still requires operating several components and configuring the service. LiveKit offers a media platform and deployment options, not a finished substitute for every application decision. mediasoup is a lower-level media layer: its signaling-agnostic design gives the application team flexibility, while also leaving more of the product and coordination work to that team.
Compare the choices against five practical questions: How much user-facing functionality is already included? Do you need low-level media control? Who will operate the deployment? Are recording or telephone integrations required? Can the team load-test and support real-time infrastructure? The project documentation describes architectures and deployment models, but it does not establish a neutral, same-workload benchmark that ranks the three.
How should you define the workload before building?
Write down the meeting patterns the service must support before choosing capacity or publishing a participant limit. A small camera-heavy meeting and a one-presenter event with many viewers place different demands on the media layer, network, and clients.
Record at least these requirements:
- Expected number of concurrent rooms, not just registered users.
- Typical and peak participants in each room.
- How many participants may publish camera video at the same time.
- Target video resolutions and whether screen sharing is important.
- Supported browser and mobile platforms, including the range of client devices you need to accommodate.
- Whether meetings need recording, live streaming, or telephone participation.
- Where participants are located and whether meetings must span regions.
These inputs affect how many tracks the service forwards, the bandwidth participants receive, and the work performed by servers and devices. The primary documentation reviewed for these projects does not specify one generally applicable server size or meeting limit. Treat a capacity figure as relevant only to the precise release, hardware, codecs, network, and room shape behind it.
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Should you use an SFU or an MCU?
An SFU forwards participants’ encoded media tracks to other participants rather than decoding and combining every camera stream into one server-rendered picture. An MCU takes the other approach: it processes incoming media and sends participants a centrally composed output. Neither design is best for every interface and bandwidth budget.
With an SFU, a client can subscribe to separate tracks and arrange them flexibly—for example, showing different participants in separate tiles. The SFU can select spatial or temporal layers based on consumer settings and network capability. The trade-off is that a participant subscribed to several cameras may need to receive several streams, which affects bandwidth and client load.
An MCU can reduce the number of distinct streams a participant receives and simplify a composite view, but central media processing requires server-side work and gives recipients less control over separate tracks. Choose based on your interface, bandwidth profile, and server budget. Do not assume that the label alone predicts the cost or quality of a particular deployment; measure your intended workload.
How do you deploy a first version?
Start with one region and a deliberately small test room, then add complexity only when the product requires it. For public browser-based WebRTC, plan a real DNS name and valid HTTPS from the beginning; an installation that works only through an unencrypted local address is not a reliable public-service milestone.
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- Select a path and define the room behavior. Decide whether you are deploying Jitsi Meet or building around LiveKit or mediasoup. Document how rooms are created, how users authenticate, who may join, and what the application does when its host leaves.
- Choose an internet-reachable host and domain. Jitsi’s self-hosting guidance recommends an internet server with a certificate for a domain registered in DNS. Private-network and self-signed-certificate setups can be more difficult, including on phones. A managed VM or cloud deployment may be more suitable than exposing a home machine, depending on your network and operational needs.
- Follow the chosen project’s current deployment guide. For Jitsi’s documented Docker path, use a release package, configure its environment file, set strong internal passwords, prepare writable configuration and storage directories, and start the services with Docker Compose. For a real deployment, set
PUBLIC_URLto the public domain. Deployment instructions can change by release, so follow the guide for the version you select. - Configure HTTPS and networking. Jitsi warns that direct access over HTTP can cause browser camera and microphone errors. Check the selected project’s current firewall and media-port instructions against your host, network, and deployment version; do not copy a generic port list without confirming it applies.
- Verify access and room controls. Test joining through the public HTTPS address, device permissions, the intended authentication and room-creation rules, and behavior when participants disconnect or reconnect. Keep the first test deliberately small; passing it confirms basic setup, not production capacity.
- Make updates and rollback operational. Record the release and configuration, keep logs available, and define how you will apply updates and recover from a failed change. Jitsi’s Docker guidance documents release updates and configuration migrations for older releases, so do not assume that an upgrade is only a container restart.
Keep a written deployment record: domain and certificate ownership, where secrets are managed, which services are exposed, where configuration and persistent data live, and how to restore them. These details are part of operating the app, not optional polish.
What changes when you add recording, streaming, or telephone access?
Each optional capability adds integration and operational work. Decide whether it is a real product requirement before adding another service, and settle access, retention, and participant-notice policies before enabling capture.
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- Telephone participation: Jitsi’s Jigasi gateway lets SIP clients join, while LiveKit documents a SIP server path. Both add another integration and service to operate.
- External media sources: LiveKit documents ingress paths for RTMP, WHIP, and external media sources. Confirm which source types your product needs before adding ingress to the deployment.
- Multiple regions: LiveKit documents multi-region deployment options. Add regions only after measuring latency and deciding how rooms are placed and what should happen if a region fails.
- Collaborative editing: Jitsi’s Docker guidance documents optional Etherpad and Excalidraw integrations. Treat each as an additional product dependency with its own configuration and operating needs.
How do you estimate capacity without promising too much?
Load-test the exact room shapes you plan to support and monitor the service under those conditions. Avoid translating one component’s consumer estimate into a universal number of participants per server: consumers, participants, publishers, and rooms are not interchangeable measures.
mediasoup describes a worker as a C++ subprocess that uses one CPU core, with routers belonging to workers; applications can distribute rooms across workers and hosts. Its scalability documentation says a subprocess can “typically handle over ~500 consumers in total,” conditional on host CPU capabilities. It also illustrates how four peers each consuming the other three peers’ audio and video would create 24 consumers. That figure is an implementation-specific documentation example, not a promise about participants per meeting or capacity on another host.
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LiveKit documents an SFU that can split work across nodes and adjust track parameters according to subscriber bandwidth, as well as benchmark and deployment material. Any published capacity claim should be read in context: release, hardware, codecs, network, and room shape all matter. The available project materials do not provide a directly comparable benchmark for Jitsi, LiveKit, and mediasoup under one common workload.
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A practical test plan increases publishers and subscribers gradually while recording CPU, memory, network throughput, packet loss, reconnection behavior, audio and video quality, and client-device mix. Test camera-heavy meetings separately from one-presenter/many-viewer events. Include the devices and network conditions your users are likely to have, rather than treating a server-side load figure as the complete user experience.
When a test fails, narrow down which resource or behavior degrades: server CPU or memory, network throughput or packet loss, participant reconnection, or client quality. Change one relevant dimension at a time—such as the number of simultaneous publishers or the room pattern—and repeat. Use the results to set internal operating limits and alert thresholds; do not advertise a ceiling that the test did not cover.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.What security and operating decisions should you make?
Secure the public endpoint, restrict access to the intended audience, protect secrets, and treat recording and updates as production responsibilities. HTTPS is a necessary browser-access foundation for public WebRTC, but it does not replace the application’s authentication, room authorization, or recording policy.
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- Use a valid public certificate. Jitsi’s self-hosting guide recommends an internet server with a certificate for a DNS-registered domain. Confirm certificate renewal and DNS ownership are part of the deployment plan.
- Set strong, unique secrets. Jitsi’s Docker guide says containers no longer start without required passwords set. Do not leave internal credentials at defaults or reuse secrets across environments.
- Control room creation and administrative access. Decide who can create rooms and join them, and restrict administrative interfaces to the people and systems that need them. The projects do not prescribe a universal policy for every application.
- Set recording rules before enabling capture. Define participant notice, recording access, storage location, and retention. Verify the applicable legal requirements for the jurisdictions and use cases involved.
- Track configuration and upgrades. Keep release and configuration changes documented, preserve required data, and plan a rollback. Check migration guidance when upgrading rather than assuming older configuration files remain compatible.
- Monitor and rehearse failure behavior. Keep logs, test capacity and reconnection behavior, and decide how you will respond if a host or region becomes unavailable.
What is a sensible first production milestone?
A useful first milestone is a single-region deployment with a public domain and valid TLS, defined access rules, logs enabled, and a deliberately small test room. Keep optional recording, telephony, and multi-region components out until they are requirements you can support. Document an update and rollback process before relying on the service for important meetings.
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Frequently Asked Questions
Is self-hosted video conferencing end-to-end encrypted by default?
Do not assume that self-hosting or using HTTPS means meetings have end-to-end encryption. Check the chosen project’s documentation for its current encryption behavior and limitations, and evaluate whether it fits your security requirements before deployment.
Can I run a private conferencing server on a home network?
It may be possible, but a public service still needs reachable networking, a valid domain and certificate, and a suitable media-network configuration. The Jitsi guidance notes that private-network or self-signed-certificate setups can be harder, including for phones; a managed internet host may be simpler to operate.
Can users join from a phone browser?
Jitsi’s self-hosting guidance specifically cautions that private-network and self-signed-certificate setups can be difficult for phones, which is one reason to plan for a publicly reachable HTTPS endpoint. Test the actual mobile browsers and applications your audience will use rather than assuming desktop behavior carries over.
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Does self-hosting mean the service has no ongoing costs?
No. You still need to account for the internet host or hardware, bandwidth, domain and certificate operations, storage for persistent data or recordings, and engineering time for updates and monitoring. The total depends on the deployment and workload; the project documentation does not establish one universal operating cost.
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