Jitsi vs Webex

Jitsi (Jitsi Meet plus its open-source backend) is an engineering-led project whose blog doubles as its changelog. The newest post covers distributed tracing implemented across the main backend components, generating events in each service so a call can be followed end to end. It follows July's from-scratch transcription architecture replacing the decade-old Jigasi approach, and sits alongside community items like the Google Summer of Code cohorts.

The arc is toward operating the media stack at scale, not just building it: selective audio subscriptions, SSRC rewriting and AV1 addressed efficiency, and now tracing addresses diagnosability. For a project whose users largely self-host, being able to follow a call across services is what turns an intermittent media fault from guesswork into something reproducible. Legacy components keep being shed rather than patched — Jigasi for transcription, and now opaque cross-service debugging.

Expect the tracing work to surface concrete latency or packet-loss findings in later posts, and the new transcription architecture to carry broader real-time features such as live captions; continued media-pipeline optimization for large meetings is the steady background.