Janus
General-purpose, lightweight, minimalist WebRTC Server.
Description from awesome-selfhosted (CC BY-SA 3.0)
Still maintained? Yes: 61 commits in the last 90 days.
Also an alternative to Zoom.
At a glance
Janus quick facts
- Health score
- 61/100 SLOWING
- Stars
- 9,197
- Last commit
- yesterday (Oct 2026)
- Latest release
- No tagged release
- Licence
- GPL-3.0
Top alternatives to Janus
Full rankings: Zoom alternatives
In its own words
The project's README opens: "Janus is an open source, general purpose, WebRTC server designed and developed by Meetecho. This version of the server is tailored for Linux systems, although it can be compiled for, and installed on, MacOS machines as well. Windows is not supported, but if that's a requirement, Janus is known to work in the "Windows Subsystem for Linux" on Windows 10: do NOT trust repos that provide .exe builds of Janus, they are not official and will not be supported."
Why it ranks here
Health score explained
Janus scores 61/100, #8 of 10 in Communication - Video Conferencing: 61 commits in the last 90 days earn 35.0 of 35 points, the absence of a tagged release forfeits all 25 release points, 9,197 stars add 15.9 of 20, an active, unarchived repository keeps 10 and no advertised Docker image leaves the final 10 unclaimed. That places it in the slowing band (40 to 69). The biggest shortfall is release recency, worth 25.0 more points.
Recomputed nightly from the GitHub API. How the score is calculated.
- Commit activity 35.0 / 35
61 commits in 90 days (30+ scores full marks)
- Release recency biggest shortfall 0.0 / 25
No tagged release found
- Stars 15.9 / 20
9.2k stars on GitHub (logarithmic)
- Not archived 10.0 / 10
Repository is active
- Docker support 0.0 / 10
No Docker support advertised
Commit activity
- 61
- Last 90 days
- 111
- Last 12 months
- yesterday
- Last push
Ranked #8 of 10 tools in Communication - Video Conferencing by health , between MiroTalk C2C (#7) and Galene (#9) .
Details
| Licence | GPL-3.0 |
| Platforms | C |
| Latest release | No tagged release |
| Stars | 9,197 |
| Open issues | 16 |
| Docker | Not advertised |
| Repository | meetecho/janus-gateway ↗ |
Janus vs its top 5 alternatives
Active tools that share a comparison page or a category with Janus (Communication - Video Conferencing), scored on the same five terms.
| Tool | Health | Stars | Licence | Last commit |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Jitsi Meet | 98 | 30k | Apache-2.0 | yesterday |
| plugNmeet | 91 | 575 | MIT | 2 days ago |
| BigBlueButton | 86 | 9.3k | LGPL-3.0 | yesterday |
| MiroTalk P2P | 70 | 4.8k | AGPL-3.0 | today |
| MiroTalk SFU | 69 | 3.1k | AGPL-3.0 | today |
| Janus (this tool) | 61 | 9.2k | GPL-3.0 | yesterday |
Janus: common questions
What does Janus replace?
Repoly lists Janus as an open-source alternative to Zoom. Each comparison page ranks every alternative by the same health score, so you can see where Janus stands against the others.
Is Janus still maintained?
Janus had 61 commits in the last 90 days and its last push was yesterday. Repoly recomputes this nightly.