Alternatives · 2026
6 Google Meet alternatives, honestly compared.
If your company runs on Google Workspace, you never chose Google Meet — it arrived with Gmail. Every calendar invite carries a Meet link, joining takes one click in the browser, and for scheduled calls it simply works. The price of that convenience: your meetings live in Google's cloud, there is no self-hosted edition today, and the meeting stays a destination on the calendar — separate from the chat, tasks and documents where the actual work happens.
This guide compares six real candidates to replace Google Meet. One of them is our own product; that is stated openly on its card, and the honest-caveat rule applies to it without exception.
Five questions worth asking before you leave Meet.
- (01)
Where does the call start — the calendar or the work?
Meet starts from a calendar invite. Most internal calls start from a conversation: someone in the channel types 'quicker to talk'. Check how far the video is from the place where that sentence gets written.
- (02)
Can it leave Google's cloud?
Meet offers no self-hosted edition today — and for Google it may never need one. If regulators, clients or your own policy require calls on infrastructure you control, that single fact ends the evaluation.
- (03)
What do the outcomes turn into?
Decisions and action items should land somewhere trackable. When the notes end up in a doc nobody links to the tasks, the follow-up meeting is already booked.
- (04)
How much of the value is the bundle?
Meet is good because Workspace is everywhere. Judge each alternative on what it does by itself and what it connects to — not on the suite it comes stapled to.
- (05)
What does the bill look like without the suite?
Meet's real price is a Workspace tier; free personal accounts currently cap group call length. Count what each alternative costs once you include the stack around it.
The six contenders.
- 01(01)
Polybase
Our productThe sovereign team workspace
Full disclosure: Polybase is our product. Treat this entry as the maker's perspective — and hold its caveat to the same standard as everyone else's.
Polybase treats a call as something a conversation does, not something a calendar owns: any channel or DM starts one in place — WebRTC calls powered by a self-hosted LiveKit media server, encrypted in transit (DTLS-SRTP). Screen share, live captions, noise suppression and background blur are built in, and because chat, tasks and docs share the workspace, the in-call chat turns a decision into a tracked task in one click. Hosting reaches where Meet does not go today: EU cloud, your own VPC, or air-gapped self-host — it runs fully offline; calls use a self-hosted LiveKit server.
- Best for
- Teams whose calls grow out of ongoing work rather than calendar slots, and organisations that cannot put meetings in Google's cloud.
- Hosting model
- EU cloud, private VPC, or self-hosted / air-gapped (calls run through a self-hosted LiveKit server).
- Honest caveat
- No call recording today — auto summaries and transcripts are coming soon; it targets team-scale calls, not 500-person webinars.
- 02(02)
LiveKit
Open-source realtime media infrastructure
LiveKit is an open-source realtime media server and SDK suite for teams building their own audio and video experiences. You run the server on your infrastructure and own the application around it — the same self-hosted foundation Polybase uses for calls.
- Best for
- Product teams that want to build a custom realtime audio or video experience on infrastructure they control.
- Hosting model
- Self-hosted open-source server.
- Honest caveat
- Infrastructure and SDKs, not a ready-made workspace: you build the meeting UI, identity, permissions and workflows, and operate the media service.
- 03(03)
Zoom
The dedicated meetings heavyweight
Zoom is the dedicated meetings product Meet borrowed its ambitions from: webinars, breakout rooms, recording, and an enormous device and integration ecosystem. When the meeting itself is the event — all-hands, external webinars, trainings — Zoom remains the professional's tool.
- Best for
- Large external meetings, webinars, and organisations standardised on a dedicated meetings platform.
- Hosting model
- Zoom's cloud (SaaS).
- Honest caveat
- One more standalone app with its own links and licences, cloud-hosted — and the free tier currently limits group call length.
- 04(04)
Microsoft Teams
Meet's mirror image in Microsoft 365
Microsoft Teams is Meet's mirror image on the other side of the office-suite divide: meetings, chat and files bundled into Microsoft 365. If your organisation lives in Outlook and SharePoint, Teams is already paid for and already installed.
- Best for
- Microsoft 365 organisations trading one suite's default for the other's.
- Hosting model
- Microsoft cloud only — no self-hosted edition.
- Honest caveat
- Moving from Meet to Teams swaps one ecosystem's gravity for another's — plus more licensing tiers and admin surface than Meet's.
- 05(05)
BigBlueButton
The self-hosted virtual classroom
BigBlueButton puts video conferencing on servers you control, shaped for teaching: whiteboards, polls, breakout rooms and recording built for the virtual classroom. In education it is the self-hosted standard.
- Best for
- Schools, universities and trainers who need classrooms on their own infrastructure.
- Hosting model
- Self-hosted (open source); third-party managed hosting exists.
- Honest caveat
- Its classroom furniture — lecterns, polls, moderated hand-raising — is overhead for a daily standup; it teaches better than it huddles.
- 06(06)
Whereby
The permanent room link, from Norway
Whereby, from Norway, distilled the meeting down to a link that always works: a persistent room in the browser, no installs, no guest accounts. For calls with clients who use a different stack every week, that simplicity earns its keep.
- Best for
- Client calls and small teams that want a permanent, friction-free room link.
- Hosting model
- SaaS only (European vendor).
- Honest caveat
- Cloud-only and meetings-only by design — everything around the call lives elsewhere, and room capacity grows with paid plans.
Where Polybase wins — and where we don't win yet.
This list lives on our site, so here is the part a vendor would normally leave out.
- Calls live in the channel, not the calendarIn Meet, a call is an event with a link. In Polybase it is a button inside the conversation that made the call necessary — teammates join from the channel, context already open.
- The meeting leaves something behindIn-call chat messages become tracked tasks in one click, and notes sit as docs in the same channel — findable next quarter, not lost in someone's Drive.
- A hosting answer Meet does not offerMeet does not run on your servers today. Polybase deploys to EU cloud, a private VPC, or fully air-gapped — it runs fully offline; calls use a self-hosted LiveKit server.
- Gmail can stayPolybase's email module connects an external Gmail or Microsoft 365 account (OAuth), or any IMAP/SMTP mailbox — leaving Meet does not have to mean leaving your mail.
- Pricing without an edition matrixCalls ship in Core at €10 per user/month alongside chat, tasks, drive and automation — no Workspace tiers to decode.
- RecordingPolybase does not record calls today; auto summaries and transcripts are coming soon. If recording is a hard requirement, Meet — which records to Drive on paid Workspace tiers — is the honest answer for now.
- One-click joins from Google CalendarIf your whole organisation schedules in Google Calendar, the Meet link auto-attached to every invite is frictionless in a way no outsider can match. Polybase meetings send standard ICS invites with RSVP — guests join from any calendar — but it does not live inside Gmail.
- CertificationsNot certified yet — SOC 2 and ISO 27001 are on our roadmap. We answer security questionnaires and architecture questions today.
- Enterprise sign-onSSO/SAML/SCIM are on the roadmap; today sign-in is email/password and magic links.
- Native appsDesktop and mobile apps are available. You can also use the web app or installable PWA, and calls run in any modern browser.
Choosing a Google Meet alternative.
It depends on your binding constraint. Open source and self-hosted: LiveKit. Self-hosted classrooms: BigBlueButton. Big webinars and external events: Zoom. Already on Microsoft 365: Teams. A friction-free room link for clients: Whereby. Calls inside the workspace, next to tasks and docs: that is what Polybase is built for — we are biased, so read the side-by-side comparison too.
No — Meet runs in Google's cloud and does not offer a self-hosted edition today. If calls must run on your infrastructure: LiveKit and BigBlueButton are open source and self-hostable, and Polybase self-hosts all the way to air-gapped — it runs fully offline; calls use a self-hosted LiveKit server.
No — call recording is not available in Polybase today; automatic call summaries, action items and transcripts are coming soon. Meet records to Drive on paid Workspace tiers, so if recording is a hard requirement, Meet or Zoom is the honest answer for now. What Polybase gives you today: the in-call chat turns any message into a tracked task in one click, and notes live as docs in the same channel.
No. Teams commonly run their internal chat, calls and tasks in Polybase while keeping Google for mail: Polybase's email module connects Gmail via OAuth (or any IMAP/SMTP account), and meeting invites go out as standard ICS that Google Calendar understands.
Meet is priced as part of a Google Workspace subscription. Polybase includes calls in Core at €10 per user/month together with chat, tasks, drive and automation; further modules are add-ons. Whether it saves money depends on what else it replaces — book a demo and we will walk through your actual stack.
See Polybase next to Google Meet, side by side.
Book a 30-minute demo — a call started from a channel, ending as tasks — or start with the detailed feature-by-feature comparison.
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