8x8 develops Jitsi and sells it as a hosted service, JaaS. The same software can also run on your own server. The right choice depends on your users, your data rules and who will operate it.
At a glance
| 8x8 JaaS | Self-hosted Jitsi | |
|---|---|---|
| Who runs it | 8x8 | You, or a provider in your account |
| Pricing | Per monthly active user, tiers | Server and bandwidth |
| Recording and transcription | Per-minute fees | Your server capacity, no per-minute fee with Vosk |
| Where data lives | 8x8’s infrastructure | Your cloud account and region |
| Branding | Supported | Full, including domain and UI |
| Embedding | IFrame API, JWT | IFrame API, JWT |
| Time to start | Minutes | Hours by hand, minutes with one-click tools |
| Operations | None | Updates, monitoring, certificates |
Cost as usage grows
Per-user pricing is friendly at the start and steep later. A server’s cost is flat: the same t3.medium serves 20 or 200 monthly users if they do not all meet at once. Recording and transcription make the gap wider, because self-hosted Jibri and Vosk have no per-minute charge. Our self-hosting cost guide has worked examples.
Data and compliance
With self-hosting, meetings, recordings and transcripts stay in the cloud account and region you choose. That is often the deciding factor for healthcare, education and public sector projects with residency or processor rules.
Effort
JaaS’s real advantage is zero operations. Self-hosting means someone handles installs, upgrades, SSL and incidents. That is the gap our platform closes: it deploys and manages Jitsi in your own AWS account, so you get self-hosted economics and data control with a hosted-style setup.
Which to choose
- JaaS: prototypes, low or unpredictable usage, no ops capacity, no data residency requirements.
- Self-hosted: growing usage, heavy recording or transcription, strict data control, full white label.
- One-click self-hosting: you want the second list without hiring for it. See how it works.