Jitsi Videobridge (often just JVB) is the SFU that powers Jitsi Meet, the free open-source video conferencing platform. It started in 2013 as one of the earliest WebRTC SFUs, became part of Atlassian Hipchat's video, and after Atlassian discontinued Hipchat in 2018, the Jitsi team and the SFU went to 8x8. JVB powers meet.jit.si (the public free service), 8x8's commercial video platform, and many self-hosted Jitsi deployments at universities and enterprises.
JVB is JVM-based, which is unusual in the otherwise C/C++/Go-dominated SFU space. Its scaling story is different from mediasoup or LiveKit — JVB handles roughly 100–300 simultaneous participants per JVM instance and scales horizontally with a coordination layer (Octo). Modern Jitsi deployments use multiple JVB instances behind a JICOFO (Jitsi Conference Focus) signalling component.
For new SFU deployments in 2026, JVB is less common than mediasoup, LiveKit or Cloudflare Calls — the JVM tax and JVB's tight coupling with the broader Jitsi stack make it a heavier choice for greenfield projects. JVB persists in deployments that already use Jitsi Meet (its UI is well-loved by many universities and open-source projects) and in environments where JVM operational expertise is the default.
The book · Volume 3 of 7
Video Streaming: A Complete Guide to Video Delivery: From ABR and CDNs to Players, WebRTC, DRM, and the Economics of Streaming
Jitsi Videobridge is a proven open-source SFU, but scaling it past a few hundred participants takes planning. Volume 3 covers Jitsi Videobridge in the context of WebRTC and real-time media: video calls and conferencing, SFU topologies and QoE monitoring. Written by Nikolay Sapunov, CEO at Fora Soft.
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