Comparison
Castio vs Jitsi
Both give you ownership. One requires a DevOps team.
Jitsi is a great open-source project. It proves that self-hosted video conferencing is possible. Castio proves it doesn't have to be painful.
Same goal, different approach
Jitsi Meet
Self-hosted video conferencing that runs on your servers. VMs, Docker, Kubernetes -- you choose the infrastructure. You get full control, but you also get full responsibility: 5-7 interdependent services, server provisioning, scaling, patching, and monitoring.
Castio
Self-hosted video conferencing that runs on your Cloudflare account. Serverless, zero ops. You own the infrastructure and the data, but you never provision a server, manage a process, or scale a cluster. Deploy once, done.
Both platforms give you ownership of your video infrastructure. The difference is operational: Jitsi puts you in charge of the servers. Castio puts you in charge of the product.
Feature comparison
A side-by-side look at what each platform offers out of the box.
Meeting Types
Recording
AI Features
Branding
Analytics
Roles & Permissions
Scheduling
Scaling
Operations
Cost
Where Jitsi wins
Jitsi is a respected open-source project with real strengths. Here's where it has the advantage.
Free and open-source
Apache 2.0 license, no software cost. Castio has a license fee. If your budget is zero and your time is free, Jitsi is the obvious choice.
Runs on any infrastructure
Bare metal, VPS, any cloud provider, your own data center. Castio requires a Cloudflare account -- you can't run it on AWS, your own servers, or air-gapped infrastructure.
Native mobile apps
iOS and Android apps on the App Store, Play Store, and F-Droid. Full-featured native experiences. Castio is browser-based on mobile -- it works, but it's not the same as a dedicated app.
End-to-end encryption
E2EE on Chromium-based browsers for audio, video, and screen sharing. Castio does not have E2EE currently. If E2EE is a hard requirement, Jitsi wins.
No vendor dependency
Fully community-driven. No company can pull the rug. Castio depends on both the Castio license and Cloudflare's infrastructure.
Large open-source community
Active forums, community plugins (Nextcloud, Moodle, WordPress), and years of production-tested deployments worldwide.
SIP/SRTP gateway and air-gapped operation
Jigasi provides SIP/PSTN dial-in. The entire stack can run completely air-gapped on hardware you physically control. Castio requires internet connectivity and Cloudflare.
Where Castio wins
Same ownership philosophy, fundamentally different operational experience.
Zero operations burden
No servers to provision, no processes to monitor, no patches to apply. Deploy once to your Cloudflare account and it runs. No 2am pages when JVB runs out of memory.
Recording that actually works
No Jibri. No dedicated recording servers. No one-at-a-time limit. No headless Chrome crashes. Built-in composite recording stored directly on your R2 with a playback UI.
Built-in AI transcription and summaries
Whisper v3 Turbo transcription and AI-generated meeting summaries. Toggle it on. No Jigasi, no external STT service, no Google Cloud Speech API keys.
Full analytics dashboard
Usage trends, per-participant quality metrics, and meeting investigation tools. Built in. No Prometheus. No Grafana. No community-maintained dashboards.
5-tier role hierarchy
Owner, Admin, Host, Member, Guest -- with granular permissions per meeting type. Jitsi has moderator and participant. That's it.
Built-in scheduling
Scheduled, recurring, and permanent rooms with RRULE support, RSVP, invitations, and automatic meeting activation. Jitsi has none of this -- you share URLs and hope people show up.
Complete white-label branding
Custom domain, logo, colors, and themes through a settings panel. Not by editing CSS files, replacing image assets, and rebuilding the frontend.
Webinar and livestream modes
Built-in stage management for webinars and livestreaming. Jitsi only does basic video calls -- there's no formal webinar or broadcast mode.
Diagnostics and meeting investigation
Four-layer observability from infrastructure to individual participant. When someone reports a bad call, you can trace what happened -- without grepping log files across five servers.
Deploy in minutes, not hours
Connect your Cloudflare account, deploy, done. No Docker Compose files, no Ansible playbooks, no DNS and firewall debugging. A production-ready Jitsi deployment takes days to weeks.
The operational burden
Here's what it actually takes to run Jitsi in production -- versus what it takes to run Castio.
Jitsi -- your responsibility
Jitsi Videobridge (JVB)
The SFU. CPU and bandwidth intensive. Needs horizontal scaling for more than ~75 users.
Jicofo
Conference focus component. Orchestrates participants across JVB instances.
Prosody
XMPP signaling server. Single-threaded -- becomes a bottleneck at scale. Requires Lua module management.
Jibri
Recording service. Needs a dedicated server with 8GB+ RAM per concurrent recording. Runs headless Chrome. The most hated component in the ecosystem.
Nginx + TLS
Reverse proxy, SSL certificates, port configuration, firewall rules.
Monitoring stack
Prometheus, Grafana, jitsi-prom-exporter. Community-maintained dashboards. Another system to run.
Plus: OS patches, Java heap tuning, Chrome/Chromedriver updates, coordinated multi-component upgrades, bandwidth monitoring, and capacity planning.
Castio -- your responsibility
Connect your Cloudflare account
One-time setup.
Deploy
Workers, D1, R2, and KV are provisioned automatically on your account.
Done
There is no step three.
No servers. No processes. No patches. No containers. No port configurations. No SSL renewals. No Java heap tuning. No Chrome updates. No load balancers. No monitoring stack.
Keep the ownership.
Drop the ops burden.
Deploy a complete video platform on your own Cloudflare account. Everything Jitsi promised, without the infrastructure babysitting.