Sonacove Meets vs Jitsi Meet for Online Teaching (2026)
Almost every comparison of Jitsi against a paid tool is wrong in the same way, because “Jitsi” is three products with three completely different answers. There is the free public service at meet.jit.si, there is the open-source software you install on your own server, and there is 8x8’s commercial hosted version. A teacher who reads a review of one and buys the other has been misled, so this page separates them before comparing anything.
Sonacove Meets vs Jitsi Meet: which is better for online teaching?
It depends entirely on which Jitsi, and only one of the three is a realistic platform for paid teaching. The free meet.jit.si is capped by its own terms at 25 active end points per calendar month across all your accounts and tells you not to rely on it commercially, self-hosted Jitsi is genuinely free and genuinely yours but needs a systems administrator, and 8x8’s hosted JaaS starts at $99 a month for 300 monthly active users. Sonacove Meets, at €8.99 per user per month, is aimed at the tutor or small academy with nobody to run servers, teaching groups of 20 or fewer.
Put the other way round, Jitsi is the better fit for an organisation with technical staff that wants to own the whole stack, or for a developer building video into a product. Sonacove is the better fit for someone who wants polls, breakout rooms, a whiteboard, recording and moderation working this afternoon with nothing to install and nothing to maintain.
What are the three different things called Jitsi?
One codebase, three delivery models, and the practical differences between them are larger than the differences between most competing products. Get this straight before reading any other comparison, including this one.
meet.jit.si is the free public instance run by 8x8. Since 24 August 2023 you need an account to create a room there: the announcement states that “we will no longer support the anonymous creation of rooms on meet.jit.si, and will require the use of an account”, initially supporting Google, GitHub and Facebook sign-in (authentication on meet.jit.si). The maximum number of participants in a meeting there is not published on any official page, so treat any figure you see quoted in a forum as unofficial.
Self-hosted Jitsi is the Apache-licensed software installed on your own machine. There is no licence fee and no vendor cap, and every operational cost is yours.
8x8 Jitsi as a Service (JaaS) is the commercial hosted version, billed by monthly active users, with an API for embedding. It supports “a maximum of 500 participants per meeting” with “no limit to the number of concurrent meetings”, and participants do not need an account because JaaS stores an identifier in the device’s local storage instead (JaaS FAQ).
Can you teach paid lessons on the free meet.jit.si?
The terms of service say you should not plan on it. Two clauses matter, and neither is the 2023 login change that most articles about Jitsi stop at. The free usage cap and the commercial reliance warning are both in the live terms and both are easy to miss.
The cap first. The terms state that “Your Use of the Service at no cost is limited to a maximum aggregate total of 25 Active End Points per calendar month (‘Monthly Active End Points’) across all of Your accounts”, where an Active End Point is “a unique point of access, which may be a browser tab, laptop, mobile device, etc.” that connects to a meeting also joined by at least one other end point (meet.jit.si terms of service).
Read that arithmetic against a timetable rather than a demo. Twenty-five end points per calendar month, aggregated across every account you own, is one class of 25 students, once, in a month. A tutor with six students meeting twice a week is at 48 end points in the first week if each student joins from one device, and a student who joins from a phone and a laptop counts twice. The cap is not a per-meeting limit that resets on Monday.
Then the warning, which is more explicit than most free services bother to be. The same terms say that “8×8 offers paid services designed to meet the needs of business users” and that “you should not place any reliance on the Service being offered for any commercial or other purposes”.
Worth knowing: those terms carry the dates “Updated: October 26, 2020” and effective from 19 October 2020, so they predate the 2023 sign-in change by nearly three years. They are still the live text on the page, which means the 25 end point cap has been sitting there the whole time people have been recommending meet.jit.si to schools.
If you charge for lessons, that clause is the end of the discussion. Not because anyone is likely to send you an invoice, but because you would be building a paid service on a free one whose operator has written down, in advance, that you should not depend on it. A cancelled lesson you cannot explain to a parent costs more than a subscription.
What does self-hosting Jitsi actually require?
A Linux server and a person who looks after it, indefinitely. The official guidance asks for Debian 11 or newer, or Ubuntu 22.04 or newer, an A record pointing your domain at the server’s public IP, and open ports of 80 TCP for certificate verification, 443 TCP, 22 TCP for SSH, 5349 TCP for the TURN fallback and 10000 UDP for the actual audio and video (Jitsi self-hosting quick start). The recommended certificate route is Let’s Encrypt, and self-signed certificates are explicitly not recommended.
Sizing is more forgiving than you might expect and has one sharp edge. The requirements page suggests 8 GB of RAM, notes that “for small meetings you can get away with 4 GB”, says 4 dedicated cores can be enough for a basic server and 20 GB of ordinary disk will do, then adds the detail that catches people out: “a Jitsi Meet component, Prosody, can only use ONE (1) core” (Jitsi requirements). Adding cores does not help the part of the system that is most likely to be your ceiling.
Recording is a separate machine-shaped cost rather than a setting. Jibri, the recording component, works on the rule that “one Jibri instance = one meeting”, needing at least 8 GB of RAM for 720p output. Three teachers recording at the same time on Tuesday morning means three dedicated Jibri instances, sitting idle the rest of the week.
The item that decides whether your students can join at all is TURN. The quick start warns that if you are already running Nginx on port 443, “turnserver configuration will be skipped as it will conflict”, and coturn is what gets a call through a restrictive school or corporate firewall. A Jitsi install that works perfectly on your home network and fails for the student on a locked-down school laptop is almost always a TURN problem, and diagnosing that is not a job for a teacher between lessons.
What does 8x8 JaaS cost?
Free for 25 monthly active users, then $99 a month, and the steps after that are large. The published ladder is Developer at 25 MAU free, Basic at $99 or £90 a month for 300 MAU, Standard at $499 or £450 for 1,500, Business at $999 or £950 for 3,000, and Enterprise by arrangement above 5,000, with overage at $0.99 per MAU (JaaS pricing). Recording and RTMP streaming are $0.01 per minute each, transcription is $0.06 per minute, and SIP in or out is $0.06 per minute.
A monthly active user is “a participant who has attended at least one meeting with at least another participant during your monthly billing cycle”, tracked by an identifier in the device’s local storage. For a school, that means students count, not teachers, so the number that drives your bill is your roll rather than your staff list.
Work an example through. A tutoring business with 40 students crosses the free tier immediately and pays $99 a month, the same as a business with 300 students. Add one 60 minute recorded lesson a day and recording adds roughly $18 a month at $0.01 per minute. That is a real service at a fair price, and it is a step function rather than a slope, so growing from 25 to 40 students costs the same as growing from 25 to 300.
How do Sonacove Meets and Jitsi compare feature by feature?
The three Jitsi delivery models need three columns, because rows that are true of one are false of another. Blank-looking cells below are deliberate: where no official page states a limit, this table says so rather than repeating a number from a forum.
| Sonacove Meets | meet.jit.si | Self-hosted Jitsi | 8x8 JaaS | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Price | Individual €8.99 / user / month, Organization €15.99 / user / month | Free | Free software, server and staff cost only | Free to 25 MAU, then $99 / month for 300 MAU |
| Free usage limit | No free tier | 25 active end points per calendar month across all your accounts | None imposed by the software | 25 monthly active users |
| Max participants per meeting | Up to 20 guests | Not published | No hard software limit, bounded by hardware | 500 |
| Meeting duration limit | None | Not published | None | None stated |
| Account needed to create a room | Yes, the host subscribes | Yes: Google, GitHub or Facebook | No, you set the policy | Yes, you hold the JaaS account |
| Account needed to join as a guest | No | Not published | No | No |
| Guest install required | No, browser only | No, browser only | No, browser only | No, browser only |
| Who runs the server | We do | 8x8 | You do | 8x8 |
| Whiteboard | Yes, content does not persist after the meeting | Yes, with a configurable user limit | Yes, configurable | Yes |
| Polls | Yes, votes attributed to the voter | Present in the product, not documented in the configuration reference | Present in the product, not documented in the configuration reference | Present in the product, not documented in the configuration reference |
| Breakout rooms | Yes | Yes, including auto-assign | Yes, including auto-assign | Yes |
| Waiting room or lobby | Waiting room with per-person admit | Lobby with knocking | Lobby with knocking, plus room passwords | Lobby with knocking |
| Recording | Yes | Local and Dropbox | Local, Dropbox, or Jibri on a dedicated 8 GB instance per simultaneous recording | Yes, $0.01 per minute |
| Transcription | No | No | Not built in | Yes, $0.06 per minute |
| Chat, including private messages | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Recurring class scheduling | Yes, by day of week with an explicit timezone | No | No, unless you build it | No, unless you build it |
| Phone dial-in | No | No | Needs a SIP gateway you configure | Yes, billed per minute plus MAU |
| LMS integration | No | No | No | No, though the API allows you to build one |
| Host apps | Browser, with optional desktop and mobile apps | Browser and mobile apps | Browser and mobile apps | Browser, plus whatever you embed it in |
As of September 2026. Jitsi rows are sourced from the meet.jit.si terms of service, the meet.jit.si authentication announcement, the Jitsi handbook FAQ, the configuration reference, the self-hosting quick start, the requirements page, the JaaS pricing page and the JaaS FAQ. Rows marked “not published” are exactly that, so do not fill them in from a forum thread.
Two Sonacove rows need saying out loud rather than reading as ticks. Our whiteboard content does not survive the end of the meeting, so export the board before you leave if the drawing matters. Our poll votes are attributed rather than anonymous, with voter avatars under each option and a post-meeting record of who chose what, which is useful for follow-up and unhelpful if you ask a question students would rather not answer under their own name.
How does each one handle a class that runs every week?
Sonacove schedules recur by day of week with an IANA timezone stored on the schedule, so a Tuesday class at 10:00 stays at 10:00 through daylight saving changes, and the room name is the URL so the link never changes. Jitsi rooms are permanent in a simpler way: a room exists whenever someone opens its URL, and there is no scheduling layer at all unless you build or buy one.
That simplicity cuts both ways. A Jitsi room URL that anyone can open is convenient until a student shares it, at which point your only protections are the lobby and a room password you have to remember to set.
We cap a recurring Sonacove schedule at one year from its start date, on purpose. Schedules that run forever rot quietly: the class ends, the teacher moves on, and a live room with a public link keeps existing with nobody watching it. Re-confirming annually is a small annoyance that prevents a larger one, and it is the sort of decision a self-hosted install leaves entirely to you.
Where is Jitsi the better choice?
In several situations, and they are not edge cases. If any of these describe you, choose Jitsi.
You have a systems administrator and you want to own your infrastructure. Self-hosted Jitsi has no licence fee, no seat count and no vendor. Media flows through machines you control, you set the retention policy, and adding your two hundredth teacher costs nothing. For a school with technical staff and a policy requirement about where data sits, this is a serious answer and a paid hosted product cannot match it.
Your groups are larger than 20. Sonacove caps a meeting at 20 guests. JaaS supports up to 500 participants per meeting with no limit on concurrent meetings, and a self-hosted server is bounded only by hardware. A lecture or a whole-year session is not something we can host.
You are building video into your own software. JaaS is an API with per-minute add-ons and MAU-based pricing, so a school portal or a booking product can embed lessons directly. We have nothing comparable.
You want deep configuration. The Jitsi configuration surface covers whiteboard user limits, lobby behaviour, breakout room controls, recording limits and the resolution threshold at which tile view drops from HD to SD. If you have opinions about video quality tuning and want to act on them, an open configuration file beats a settings page with five toggles.
You need transcription without a separate vendor. JaaS bills transcription at $0.06 per minute as a native add-on. Sonacove does not offer transcription at all.
Which one should you choose?
Choose self-hosted Jitsi if you have the person to run it, and budget their time honestly, including the coturn setup and one 8 GB Jibri instance for every recording that has to happen simultaneously. Choose JaaS if you are embedding video in your own product or you need rooms far larger than 20, and check the MAU ladder against your student roll rather than your staff count. Choose Sonacove Meets if you teach groups of 20 or fewer, you want polls, breakout rooms, a whiteboard, recording, a waiting room and per-participant moderation working today, and you would rather pay a predictable monthly price than own a server.
Do not choose meet.jit.si for paid teaching. The 25 end point monthly cap and the sentence telling you not to rely on the service commercially are both in the current terms, and building a timetable on them is a risk with no upside.