What is BigBlueButton and what is it used for?

BigBlueButton is open-source web conferencing software designed for online teaching. It is released under the LGPL v3 licence, so anyone can download, install and use it without licence fees. It is developed by an open-source community; version 4.0 was released on 14 October 2026.

It is used mainly by schools, universities and training organisations for live classes, tutoring and webinars where teaching tools matter more than in a business meeting. Main features:

• Audio, video, chat and screen sharing in the browser (no app needed; works on desktop and on mobile browsers).
• Presentation upload with a multi-user whiteboard.
• Breakout rooms, polls, shared notes and a moderator/viewer role system.
• Recording and playback of sessions.
• Live captions (using the browser's speech recognition, when enabled by the administrator).

How it works: BigBlueButton runs on its own server. Learners do not usually go to BigBlueButton directly; they join from a learning platform (Moodle, Chamilo, Canvas and others), from a front-end such as Greenlight, or from any app that uses its API. The platform creates the meeting, and BigBlueButton handles the live session.

In Moodle, BigBlueButton is included as a standard activity. A teacher adds a "BigBlueButton" activity to a course, and learners click "Join session". The Moodle side is free, but the activity needs a BigBlueButton server behind it, either self-hosted or from a hosting provider (see the question on the free service for Moodle).

If you are comparing it with Zoom, Teams or Meet, the main differences are that it is open source, can be self-hosted and is built around the classroom rather than the meeting.