Sonacove Meets vs BigBlueButton for Online Teaching (2026)
BigBlueButton is the strongest competitor on this site, and pretending otherwise would waste your time. It was built for teaching rather than adapted for it, the software costs nothing, and it is wired into the learning management systems schools already run. The question this page answers is narrower and more useful than “which is better”, because the honest answer to that turns entirely on one thing: whether anyone at your school is paid to keep a server running.
Sonacove Meets vs BigBlueButton: which is better for online teaching?
BigBlueButton is the better product for teaching, and Sonacove Meets is the better fit for teachers with nobody to run infrastructure for them. BigBlueButton has a multi-user whiteboard, shared notes, polling, breakout rooms and a Learning Analytics Dashboard, and it is free to self-host, but the minimum server is 16 GB of RAM, 8 dedicated CPU cores, 500 GB of disk and 250 Mbit/s symmetrical bandwidth on a specific Ubuntu release. Sonacove Meets is a paid hosted service where the operational job does not exist, capped at 20 guests per meeting and with no learning management system integration at all.
If your school has a systems administrator, or a technically confident teacher with real time set aside, BigBlueButton is very hard to argue against. It gives you more classroom capability than we do, at a licence cost of zero, with integrations we cannot match.
If your school has no such person, the free software is not free. It becomes an unowned server that works until the afternoon it does not, at which point a lesson is cancelled and nobody in the building knows why.
What does BigBlueButton give a teacher that Sonacove Meets does not?
Four things, and all four are real. A Learning Analytics Dashboard, shared notes inside the session, a document-upload presentation model, and integration with the learning management system your institution already uses. These are core product in BigBlueButton rather than add-ons, which is what “education-native” actually means in practice.
The Learning Analytics Dashboard is the one with no equivalent anywhere in our product. BigBlueButton describes it as showing “who is attending your sessions, who is participating on your sessions, and who is learning” (BigBlueButton features). A teacher running six groups a week can open that and see the quiet student who has attended everything and answered nothing. Sonacove gives you a post-meeting record of poll votes and who cast them, which is a fragment of the same picture rather than the picture.
Shared notes is a collaborative document living inside the session, which is genuinely useful for group work and which we do not ship. Document upload is subtler and matters more than it sounds: BigBlueButton lets you upload PowerPoint, Word, PDF and images and present the slides directly instead of screen sharing them, and its own support documentation recommends exactly that for large sessions because it cuts the number of video streams dramatically (BigBlueButton FAQ). Screen sharing a deck to 40 people is a bandwidth problem that presenting slides simply does not have.
Then the integrations. BigBlueButton is built into Moodle 4.0 core, and the project states it “has been designed into Moodle Cloud, Canvas, Sakai, D2L, Jenzabar, and Schoology” (BigBlueButton Moodle integration). Sonacove has no LMS or LTI integration whatsoever. If your teachers already work inside a course page, and scheduling, roles and recordings are expected to live there, that is the end of the comparison and you should stop reading.
Who has to run BigBlueButton, and what does that job involve?
Someone at your organisation, permanently. The published minimum for BigBlueButton 3.0 is a machine with 16 GB of memory with swap enabled, 8 CPU cores with high single-thread performance, 500 GB of free disk space for recordings, 250 Mbit/s symmetrical bandwidth, and “Ubuntu 22.04 64-bit OS running Linux kernel 5.x” specifically (BigBlueButton installation requirements). That machine also needs TCP 80 and 443 free and not in use by any other web server or reverse proxy, UDP ports 16384 to 32768 reachable, both an IPv4 and an IPv6 address, a hostname, and a valid SSL certificate, because browsers refuse camera and microphone access without one.
The install itself is not the hard part. The hard part is what the requirements page implies rather than states: certificate renewal, version upgrades, recording storage that grows every week against a 500 GB ceiling, and a person who can be reached at 08:55 when a class is starting and the room will not load. The documentation recommends dedicated rather than burstable CPU instances, naming Digital Ocean c-8, AWS c5a.2xlarge and Hetzner AX52 as examples, which tells you the shape of the monthly bill even though the software is free.
Capacity is the other planning item. BigBlueButton’s own guidance is that a server meeting the minimum requirements “should be able to support 200 simultaneous users, such as 3 simultaneous sessions of 50 users, 6 x 25”, and that as of version 2.5 no single session should exceed 200 users. That is the whole school on one box, so period five on a Tuesday is a capacity question rather than an assumption.
The buying question, stated plainly: does someone’s job description already include keeping a Linux server alive? If yes, BigBlueButton is probably your answer and the rest of this page is a formality. If the honest answer is “our IT is a contractor we call when the printer breaks”, the free software carries a cost that does not appear on any invoice.
Is the free hosted BigBlueButton good enough for a small school?
For evaluation, yes. For teaching, only for very small groups and short lessons. The free hosted service from Blindside Networks caps sessions at 25 concurrent users and 60 minutes, keeps recordings for seven days without allowing downloads, makes student webcams visible only to the moderator, and is scoped to Moodle 4.0 and above (free BigBlueButton service for Moodle).
Read those four limits together and the shape of the offer is clear. It is a working demonstration inside an LMS you already run, not a service to build a timetable on. A 60 minute cap ends a double period. Recordings that expire after seven days and cannot be downloaded mean you cannot build a library of lesson catch-ups for absent students, which is one of the main reasons schools record at all.
The webcam restriction is worth reading twice, because it is easy to skim past. Student webcams being visible only to the moderator changes the lesson: students see the teacher and each other’s names, and not each other. For a lecture that is fine. For a language class built on pair conversation it is not.
What does each one cost?
BigBlueButton self-hosted costs nothing to licence and the whole bill is the server plus the person running it. Commercial hosting from Blindside Networks, the founders’ company, publishes no prices at all: the hosting page routes you to “Request Info” or “Schedule a Demo”, and pricing is quoted on inquiry against the number of concurrent sessions you buy (Blindside Networks hosting, BigBlueButton premium features). Sonacove Meets is €8.99 per user per month on the Individual plan and €15.99 per user per month on the Organization plan, with no free tier.
That pricing opacity is a genuine practical problem rather than a debating point. A head teacher cannot compare BigBlueButton hosting against anything from a web page, cannot budget for it without starting a sales conversation, and cannot check a year later whether the renewal is fair. Third-party BigBlueButton hosts do exist and some publish prices, but none are cited here because none were verified for this comparison, and an invented figure in a pricing table is worse than a blank cell.
What the paid tier adds is documented even though the price is not. The Enhanced tier raises the ceiling to 300 users per session and adds recordings, meeting analytics, personal rooms, guest invites, a dial-in number and account customisation, and it can be bought through LMS resellers including Instructure, Schoology, Jenzabar and Moodle Partners.
How do Sonacove Meets and BigBlueButton compare feature by feature?
BigBlueButton wins the feature count and Sonacove wins the setup. The table separates the two products from the two ways BigBlueButton is actually obtained, because self-hosted and free-hosted behave very differently, and every BigBlueButton row is sourced underneath.
| Sonacove Meets | BigBlueButton (self-hosted) | BigBlueButton (free hosted) | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Licence cost | Paid subscription | Free | Free |
| Price | Individual €8.99 / user / month, Organization €15.99 / user / month | Server and staff cost only | None |
| Who runs the server | We do | You do | Blindside Networks |
| Minimum server | Not applicable | 16 GB RAM, 8 cores, 500 GB disk, 250 Mbit/s symmetrical, Ubuntu 22.04 | Not applicable |
| Participants | Up to 20 guests | 200 recommended per session and per server | 25 concurrent |
| Session length | No per-meeting limit | No product limit | 60 minutes |
| Guest account required | No | No | No, students authenticate through the LMS |
| Guest install required | No, browser only | No, browser only | No, browser only |
| Multi-user whiteboard | Whiteboard, content does not persist after the meeting | Yes | Yes |
| Shared notes | No | Yes | Yes |
| Polls | Yes, votes attributed to the voter | Yes | Yes |
| Breakout rooms | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Learning analytics | No | Yes, Learning Analytics Dashboard | Yes |
| Document upload and slide presentation | No, screen share instead | Yes: PowerPoint, Word, PDF, images | Yes |
| Recording | Yes | Yes | Yes, expires after 7 days, no download |
| Student webcams | Visible to everyone | Visible to everyone | Visible to the moderator only |
| LMS integration | No | Moodle 4.0 core, Canvas, Sakai, D2L, Jenzabar, Schoology | Moodle 4.0 and above only |
| Recurring class scheduling | Yes, by day of week with an explicit timezone | Through the LMS or Greenlight | Through Moodle |
| Host apps | Browser, with optional desktop and mobile apps | Browser | Browser |
As of September 2026. BigBlueButton rows are sourced from the features page, the installation requirements, the support FAQ, the Moodle integration page, the free service for Moodle and the Greenlight installation guide. Commercial hosting prices are not published anywhere, so that row is deliberately absent.
One row needs explaining rather than reading. Sonacove whiteboard content does not persist after the meeting ends, which is a limitation we would rather state than bury, and it means exporting the board before you leave is a habit and not an optional extra. BigBlueButton’s board behaves the same way inside a session and its recordings capture the session, which is a different answer to the same problem.
Can you run BigBlueButton without a learning management system?
Yes, using Greenlight, the project’s own front end. Greenlight is an open-source web application that gives you room management and user accounts on top of a BigBlueButton server, so room owners have logins and guests join by link (Greenlight installation guide). It installs either alongside BigBlueButton or standalone, and it needs its own hostname, BigBlueButton server credentials and an SSL certificate.
This matters because it is how a small school or a tutoring business uses BigBlueButton without buying Moodle first. It is also more server work, not less: Greenlight is a second application to install, secure, update and back up.
The alternative shape for a small school is a paid hosted plan, which brings you back to a quote-only sales conversation. There is no self-serve middle path between running it yourself and asking for a price.
Where is BigBlueButton the better choice?
In more places than most vendor comparison pages would admit. If you recognise your school in any of these, choose BigBlueButton.
You have technical staff. This is the whole argument. A person who already maintains Linux servers can stand BigBlueButton up on a Hetzner or AWS instance and serve every teacher in the building for the cost of one machine. Against per-seat pricing at any scale beyond a handful of teachers, that wins on money and keeps winning every month.
You run Moodle, Canvas, D2L, Sakai, Jenzabar or Schoology. BigBlueButton is inside Moodle 4.0 core and designed into the others, so lessons are scheduled in the course, students are already authenticated, and recordings are managed where the coursework lives. We have nothing in this category and are not close to having it.
You want to know who is actually learning. The Learning Analytics Dashboard covers attendance, participation and poll-based understanding in one view. For a school that has to report on engagement, or a teacher trying to spot the student drifting away in week four, that is a serious tool and we do not have one.
Your classes are bigger than 20. Sonacove caps a meeting at 20 guests. BigBlueButton recommends up to 200 in a session, and commercially hosted Enhanced raises that to 300 users per session. A lecture, a year assembly or a class of 30 is not something we can do at all.
You need the data on your own hardware. Self-hosting means the media, the recordings and the accounts sit on machines you control, under whatever policy your institution has written. That is a requirement for some public sector buyers and it is not a preference we can satisfy with a hosted product.
Presenting slides matters more than screen sharing. Uploading a deck and presenting it natively is better than screen sharing for large groups and for students on weak connections, and it is a design decision made by people who watched teachers work.
Which one should you choose?
Choose BigBlueButton if you have someone to run it or an LMS that already includes it, and accept that you are also choosing the server, the upgrades and the 08:55 phone call. Choose Sonacove Meets if you teach groups of 20 or fewer, you want polls, breakout rooms, whiteboard, recording and moderation working today with nothing to administer, and a predictable monthly price is worth more to you than a licence fee of zero. The one path we would warn against is adopting self-hosted BigBlueButton with no named owner, because unowned infrastructure fails at exactly the moment it is being used.
If you are between them, cost the sysadmin time honestly before you compare anything else. An hour a week at a real salary is the number that decides this, and it is the number nobody writes down.