I was looking for an alternative to Google Meet for a constantly open meeting room where we can share ideas and screens and spend the lunch break. Ideally, this would've been Slack with discord-like voice channels where you can drop in and out and see if a participant is online. They promised this feature [1] last year, but it did not land.

What we tried and their pros and cons:

1. Google Meet:

* ○ Excellent noise suppression only if you are on one of their higher paid plans like Enterprise or Business Plus

* + Statistics on participant activity (how often did they enable their mic/camera, bitrate, etc.)

* - Overheating on MacBooks

* - Room will be deleted if nobody is joined for X days

* - Real full screen for screen sharing not possible

* - Proprietary, needs a paid plan

* - Forget about privacy

2.Zoom:

* - Proprietary, no privacy, security vulnerabilities

3. Teamviewer:

* - Needs a separate software (otherwise a worthy competitor to Google Meet)

4. Mumble:

* - Others in this thread have already laid out why it is not being used more: UX, setup wizard, no echo suppression, finicky push-to-talk

5. Discord:

* - No privacy

* - No encryption

* - Focused on gaming

* + Interesting feature for screen sharing: You can select if you want readability and low frame rate or high frame rate and low readability

* + Voice channels

6. We now ended up with a self-hosted k8s instance of Jitsi Meet (they host their own at [2]) which works great:

* + Open source

* + Latency and call quality is phenomenal

* + sharing screens of multiple participants works like a charm. Sharing a screen in Google Meet takes 5 seconds or so, in Jitsi Meet, it is immediately.

* ○ Echo suppression is not as good as Google Meet's

* + Unique features like synchronized Youtube player (which automatically mutes all participants)

* + End-to-end encryption

* + Recordings

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2020/10/7/21505519/slack-instagram-...

[2] https://meet.jit.si/