Are you a planning to start working on building a WebRTC based audio-video calling infrastructure for your upcoming use case? If yes, then be careful, there can be danger ahead if you don't select the correct media server for your use case today. We are here to help you selecting the correct media server or infrastructure based on your use case need as well as the phase of the execution of the project you currently are in.
The possible alternatives for your use case are agora, tokbox, twillio, jitsi, janus, mediasoup, kurento, openvidu etc. This list has many other names in it as well. Her we have considered the most popular options out there to help you build your video infrastructure.
We primarily divide these above mentioned options into 2 categories. First one are the vendors who provide video apis so that other applications integrate them with less to very less effort. Second one are the open source media servers which one can use to build video applications on top of it as well but in this case the implementer i.e. you need to take care of the implementation part of it as well as the infrastructure part of it. Let's analyse both of these options more elaborately and provide specific suggestions for each of these options.
agora / twillio / tokbox :- These are good, dependable and scalable api services. Agora is my top pick among them. Use these if you are building a MVP for a demo or if your video calling solution is not core to your business and your product's customer satisfaction index is not directly dependent on this solution which you have build on top of them. The reason is that if they change their apis overnight, it shouldn't break the core of the product. It is better to have less dependencies for the core of your product.
Jitsi:- Jitsi is a really nice end to end solution for in house video conferencing needs when you don't want to depend on zoom or MS teams for your team video conferencing needs. You can deploy the whole solution quickly and run it on premise cloud or managed cloud and use it without any issue. It is a good open source zoom alternative, may be the best one but it is not very good if you want to integrate it with your product to build your solution on top of it as it is less agile, modular and customisation unfriendly. It's architecture and it's approach of getting things done in a certain way make's it the best open source zoom alternative but not a great media server for your next webrtc project.
Janus/ mediasoup:- The 2 best open source media servers available today ready for integration in any use case. These are stable enough and scale nicely without much issues. Some amount of tweaking will be needed to align it to your use case. The only point to mention about mediasoup is that it is currently available only as a npm module which means it can only be integrated with a nodejs backend server. Nodejs is a great backend server according to me and I use it for may use cases. I can assure you that Nodejs+mediasoup work very well with each other and is a wining combination. These both can handle 100+ participants in one conference call if implemented properly on a scalable infrastructure.Use these if your use case is more focussed on large group calls.
Kurento/openvidu :- Kurento is one of the most versatile open source media servers out there with capabilities of MCU and SFU based upon configuration. It also has options to integrate different type of filters like face detection filters, chroma filters etc. on the live media stream. It also provides capabilities to record the streams to a file or a http end point. Use this if you have unique use case where you don't need a large group call and if you have in house kurento expertise. Openvidu is a signalling and application server combination built on top of kurento which can be used as an Jitsi alternative.
BigBlueButton:- BBB(BigBlueButton) is a good option for online classroom/ learning use cases. If you are a school or college OR a business catering to the needs of schools and colleges, looking for an online teaching learning solution on self hosted/ cloud based online classroom solution on your own domain name with full control, then this is a good solution for you. It has all the option needed for the teacher to control the students including muting all students in the class.
Finally there can be a question in your mind that should one own the video infrastructure or use it as a service? To answer this question of owning the WebRTC infrastructure, our take is this. If the WebRTC infra is core to your business and your monetisation strategy is directly dependent on it's performance, it is advisable to own the whole infrastructure else go for a managed service or even outsource it.
In case you are looking for developing your next video project or adopt an open source one for your own use case, we will be delighted to provide our support in helping you achieve a great result for your use case. Don't hesitate to drop us a mail at hello@centedge.io for a free 1st round consultation. #Happytohelp.