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In the presence of current wave of COVID-19, we all are forced to work-from-home and attend online group meetings. In this context, my organization is currently using MS Teams for such meetings. However, we are trying to move away to some other similar product (as we are not comfortable to give control and data to MS).

So, in this effort, first we tried Zoom, but it has a limitation of 40 minutes. Then we tried Jitsi, which is good, but in Jitsi, any one of the participants can kick-out any other (which is a serious problem). Therefore, we are still looking for an open-source alternative to MS Teams with at least following functionalities:

  1. Does not require to own a server or domain (by me)
  2. Conference Calling
  3. Screen Sharing
  4. Only Admin can kick out any member

Actually, it is me who is trying to motivate people in my setup to use open-source software. Therefore, first I have to test things on my end, before recommending anything to the organization.

If you happen to know any software with these features, kindly let me know. Thanks.

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  • Welcome Salman! I edited your title and tags to include "video conferencing", because I think this is is what you desire. If I'm mistaken, please feel free to modify my edits.
    – End Anti-Semitic Hate ♦
    May 19, 2020 at 18:45

5 Answers 5

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BigBlueButton would meet your requirements:

  • open-source: Yes.
  • Does not require to own a server or domain (by me): While you can self-host it, there are providers offering it for you. Though BBB itself being open source, that would most likely mean to pay for the (hosting) service.
  • Conference Calling: Yes.
  • Screen Sharing: Yes. Combining the two: I've recently used it for a talk with 130 participants. Worked fine (the server was powerful enough) with a moderator (admin) managing who shares a webcam or opens the microphone.
  • Only Admin can kick out any member: Yes. Even more: Admin can mute any member (switching of their mike/cam – either per user or all-at-once; they still can listen then)

There are additional benefits to BBB. It's targeting education, and allows to integrate several other educational products.

As pointed out, I have been using BBB (once until know) as a "speaker". We did try it out before the talk to figure its limits and features, and really liked it. Participants can signal using emoticons – like raising their hand indicating they want to say something, giving thumbs up/down, applause, happy/sad face. Screen sharing worked excellently: you can either share a single window, a single monitor, or your entire "display range". You also can "upload" your presentation (it accepts several formats, but converts them to PDF – so no animations), and use a whiteboard.

TL;DR: I can really recommend it.

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We are using Openmeetings as our video conference, some what same as BigBlueButton (already suggested in one of the answer), here we can share our PDF, Spreedsheet or any other file as on whiteboard. We can draw on whiteboard also. I would recommend Openmeetings for this.

Here are some demo links:

https://om.alteametasoft.com:8443/next #Next version of OpenMeetings

https://demo-openmeetings.apache.org/openmeetings #Next major version of OpenMeetings

https://om.alteametasoft.com/openmeetings #Latest release version of OpenMeetings

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In addition to more popular options Jitsi Meet and BigBlueButton, which personally I dislike for being humongous and heavy on resource demands server-side, I would like to highlight a lesser known alternative:

Frontend multiparty-meeting using backend Mediasoup - with demon instance at https://letsmeet.no/.

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Actually jitsi does have the ability to restrict who kicks out... This is also explained on their community page under exactly same concern:

https://community.jitsi.org/t/fix-requested-any-participant-can-kick-out-meeting-host-too/20384/2

However, meet.jit.si the hosted solution as explained on that post has a module enabled which allows anyone to kick out anyone... so unless hosted yourself it does not solve the problem.

Mine is not meant as an answer but a comment but looks like I don't have enough rep points to put comments just yet.

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discord it has a lot of extensions, completely free and it’s open source

discord.com

although it may be confused to be a gaming alternative because of it’s capability for screen sharing

but it’s a really broad and free solution

and no kicking, only admins can kick.

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  • 2
    since when has Discord been open source? Could you please substantiate this claim with a source (e.g. a link or so)? I was under the impression it's proprietary and skimming the website still doesn't suggest anything else.
    – 0xC0000022L
    May 19, 2020 at 20:45
  • Discord is proprietary software, not open source. It's further quite controversial (see the specific section in the linked Wikipedia article). I'd not recommend it.
    – Izzy ♦
    May 19, 2020 at 21:53

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