Video calls are the hardest working-from-home habit to change, because the tool has to work for everyone on the call, every time. The good news is that video conferencing is also one of the categories where European providers are strongest: several are run by companies whose main business is secure infrastructure, not advertising.
This post is part of a series on moving off American software. It covers the European video conferencing options listed on European Alternatives, grouped by what kind of calls you actually make.
Everyday meetings, no fuss
Infomaniak kMeet comes from the Swiss cloud provider Infomaniak. It has what you would expect from a video conferencing tool, with a heavy emphasis on safety and security, mobile apps for Android and iOS, and tight integration with the rest of Infomaniak's products. A free plan is available and hosting is in the EFTA region.
Hostpoint Meet, from Swiss hosting company Hostpoint, is a free service worth knowing about: video and audio conferencing without registration or installation, an integrated chat, screen sharing, background blurring, and no limit on time or number of participants. If you mainly need to throw together a call with a client or a colleague at short notice, this is the low-friction end of the market.
Whereby is from Norway, with a free plan that lets you test the service at your leisure, plus Android and iOS apps.
ClickMeeting comes from Poland, offers a free plan and apps for Android and iOS.
Open source and on-premises
OpenTalk is a video conferencing platform from Germany, part of the Heinlein Gruppe, which also owns the email provider mailbox.org. It is open source under the EUPL — the European Public License, similar to the GPL but written for the EU legal framework. Features include break-out rooms, a voting system and the ability to moderate meetings with multiple people. An enterprise version with support offers on-premise hosting, which matters for public-sector organizations and anyone with strict data-handling rules.
Nextcloud Talk is the open source, privacy-friendly conferencing and team collaboration component of the Nextcloud suite. It suits hybrid teams already running — or considering — Nextcloud, with a flexible open-source architecture that can be customized to a company's needs without lock-in to a proprietary provider.
The trade-off for self-hosting is the same as everywhere: you gain control over the infrastructure and you take on its operation.
Embedding calls into your own product
Digital Samba is from Spain and takes a different angle: end-to-end encrypted video conferences that you can embed into your own services through a low-code API. If you build software and want video calls inside it, this is the category to look at rather than a standalone meeting app.
Sales calls and webinars
Livestorm is a French platform focused on business calls and webinars, with CRM integrations, room configuration and tools to analyze meeting data.
meetergo is a German appointment scheduling platform that has grown into a broader all-in-one business platform. Clients book meetings through booking pages or forms against your calendar, with automated reminders to reduce no-shows. Alongside scheduling it bundles video calling, a CRM pipeline, AI-generated meeting notes, e-signatures and invoicing as optional modules — and the video conferencing product can be used on its own, independent of the scheduling features. It serves sales teams, HR and recruiting, law firms, healthcare providers and other service businesses.
What to weigh
- Who joins your calls? External clients need zero-friction entry, which is exactly what Hostpoint Meet and kMeet optimize for.
- Do you need break-out rooms, voting, or on-premise hosting? OpenTalk covers that; simpler tools may not.
- Webinars are a different product from meetings — Livestorm is built for that use specifically.
Test your real call patterns — screen sharing, external guests, mobile participants — on a free plan before you migrate a whole team.
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