BigBlueButton vs Microsoft Teams
BigBlueButton and Microsoft Teams are both video conferencing software. BigBlueButton is open source under LGPL-3.0, with 9.3k GitHub stars. Microsoft Teams is a commercial product from Microsoft.
Which to pick
- Pick BigBlueButton when
- A school, university or training provider needs online classes integrated with Moodle, Canvas or another LMS on its own servers.
- Pick Microsoft Teams when
- Your business already pays for Microsoft 365 and wants chat and video meetings without another vendor.
Side by side
A virtual classroom server with audio, video, slides with whiteboard annotation, polls, shared notes, breakout rooms, recordings and learning analytics.
Chat, meetings, calls and file collaboration built on Microsoft 365, with SharePoint behind team files and optional phone system.
Installation expects a dedicated Ubuntu server with specific versions and plenty of CPU and bandwidth; upgrades between major versions are significant work.
The client is heavy and the chat experience is clumsier than Slack; in the EU it is now sold separately from some Microsoft 365 plans.
Production-ready (both)
Self-hosted server
Cloud service, desktop app and mobile app
TypeScript, Scala, FreeSWITCH, mediasoup, Redis and MongoDB
Not published
Open source, LGPL-3.0 (weak copyleft)
Closed source, sold by Microsoft
You can use it inside a product you sell; changes you make to its own files must be shared.
Closed source: you use it under the maker's terms and cannot change or resell the code.
9.3k GitHub stars
20k Wikipedia readers a month on phones
Established: started 16 years ago, latest release v4.0.1.
Not known
Other comparisons
More video conferencing software
Both sides were judged on 2026-11-03 from makers' descriptions, Wikipedia, READMEs and GitHub data. License, age and popularity lines are worked out directly.