BigBlueButton is a virtual classroom platform designed for online teaching, tutoring, office hours, and collaborative learning.
It provides real-time conferencing for educators and learners, with tools for presenting lesson material, managing live sessions, and supporting interactive remote classes. The software is built for education-focused use cases and can be self-hosted on Ubuntu servers.
This is free and open source software.
Key Features
- Supports real-time audio and video conferencing for virtual classes.
- Includes breakout rooms for small-group collaboration.
- Offers polling tools to help instructors engage participants.
- Provides shared notes for collaborative note-taking during sessions.
- Features a multi-user whiteboard for interactive lesson delivery.
- Allows document upload for presentations, including common office and PDF formats.
- Supports public and private chat during live sessions.
- Integrates screen sharing for demonstrations and walkthroughs.
Website: github.com/bigbluebutton/bigbluebutton
Support:
Developer: BigBlueButton Inc.
License: GNU Lesser General Public License v3.0
BigBlueButton is written in JavaScript and TypeScript. Learn JavaScript with our recommended free books and free tutorials. Learn TypeScript with our recommended free books and free tutorials.
Related Software
| WebRTC Tools | |
|---|---|
| mediasoup | Server-side WebRTC library, specifically a Selective Forwarding Unit (SFU |
| Pion | Modern stack for web real-time communication |
| Jitsi | Innovative voice and video conferencing |
| LiveKit | End-to-end stack for WebRTC |
| OpenVidu | Platform to develop WebRTC real-time applications |
| Janus | Gneral purpose WebRTC server |
| aiortc | Library for WebRTC and ORTC |
| coturn | Implementation of TURN and STUN Server |
| Galene | Easy to deploy videoconference server |
| libpeer | Portable WebRTC library for IoT/embedded devices |
| libdatachannel | WebRTC network library |
| Kurento | WebRTC media server |
| str0m | Sans I/O WebRTC implementation |
| Elixir WebRTC | Elixir implementation of the W3C WebRTC API |
Read our verdict in the software roundup.
Explore our comprehensive directory of recommended free and open source software. Our carefully curated collection spans every major software category.This directory is part of our ongoing series of informative articles for Linux enthusiasts. It features hundreds of detailed reviews, along with open source alternatives to proprietary solutions from major corporations such as Google, Microsoft, Apple, Adobe, IBM, Cisco, Oracle, and Autodesk. You’ll also find interesting projects to try, hardware coverage, free programming books and tutorials, and much more. Discovered a useful open source Linux program that we haven’t covered yet? Let us know by completing this form. |

