Group: Skype Replacement

Real-time voice and video chat is an item on the FSF's High Priority Projects list.

Be sure to check our general list for remote communication tools: https://libreplanet.org/wiki/Remote_Communication

Protocol, not client

We need to make the discussion about protocols, not clients, (think how people say “send me an email” rather than “send me a Hotmail”).

The primary functionality we aim to replace is real-time:

voice calls (to computers)
video calls
text chat
voice calls to plain old telephones (via a SIP gateway or similar)

Anywhere over the Internet (or beyond), with as many people per conversation, logging, etc. whatever other features (clarify this section as necessary).

The free protocols currently available to do this are.

	Voice	Video	Text	Notes
SIP	Yes	Yes?	Yes	Sessions?
XMPP/Jingle	Yes	Yes	Yes	Full presence, group chat, widely deployed.
Mumble	Yes	No	Yes	Has positional audio support for integration with some video games as well as an overlay.
WebRTC	Yes	Yes	No	Not a protocol, but JavaScript APIs for media and raw data between web browsers.
Tox	Yes	Yes	Yes

Central Registry?

Creating and maintaining a central directory service with presence indication. Perhaps the freenode folks would not object if the tools integrated automatically with their network to set up users and share set-up signalling. Once set up, the call data can go direct. Freenode supports client SSL certificates.

Adoption

Apart from technical problems with free Skype replacements, there is a “network effect” problem preventing free protocols (and clients) from becoming popular. This might be solved by explaining the problems of Skype to the people and providing the stories about injustice concerning this software.

Free clients

Lists exist already:

Do we need more information? If so it can go here.

	SIP?	XMPP?	Mumble?	Tox	WebRTC	Active Development?	Operating System Support	License	Notes
Linphone	Yes	No	No	No	No	Yes	GNU/Linux, Windows, OSX, iOS, Android	GPLv2+	ZRTP Encryption
GNU Jami	Yes	No	No	No	No	Yes	GNU/Linux, Windows, OSX, iOS, Android, AndroidTV	GPLv3	Peer-to-peer, end-to-end encrypted, with IAX2 support
Jitsi	Yes	Yes	No	No	No	Yes	GNU/Linux, Windows, OSX	LGPL	ZRTP Encrypted Media, OTR, Conference
Gajim	No	Yes	No	No	No	Yes	GNU/Linux, Windows, OSX	LGPL	OTR
Ekiga	Yes	No	No	No	No	No	GNU/Linux, Windows XP, H323	GPLv2+
Empathy	Yes	Yes	No	No	No	Yes	GNU/Linux	GPL	GNOME default
Psi					No	No	GNU/Linux, Windows, OSX
Yate
Mumble	No	No	Yes	No	No	Yes	GNU/Linux, OSX, Windows, iOS, Android¹	BSD	Server and client software
QRadioLink	No	No	Yes	No	No	Yes	GNU/Linux (audio only, video planned)	GPL
Pidgin	No?	Yes	No?	No	No	Yes	GNU/Linux, Windows (no calls)	GPL
Twinkle	Yes	No?	No	No	No		GNU/Linux	GPL
Asterisk	Yes	Yes	No	No	No	Yes	GNU/Linux	GPL	Server software, VoIP PBX, connect SIP clients and hardware phones
sipX
Jitsi Meet	No	No	No	No	Yes	Yes	Browser-based	GPL	Web-server software
Talky	No	No	No	No	Yes	Yes	Browser-based		Web-server software
Openmeetings	No	No	No	No	Yes	Yes	Browser-based, Flash, WebRTC	Apache 2.0	Web-server software
Big Blue Button	No	No	No	No	Yes	Yes	Browser-based, Flash, WebRTC	GPL	Web-server software
Tox	No	No	No	Yes	No	Yes	GNU/Linux, BSD, Windows, OSX, Android	GPLv3	Peer-to-peer, encrypted

¹: Android has free third-party clients like Plumble.

Personal experiences

Ekiga

I have used Ekiga in the past and had good luck with it, but only with other Ekiga users on GNU/Linux -- Mattl 15:47, 14 May 2012 (EDT)
Ekiga used to work fine for me on the local network, but failed to connect to another user behind NAT firewall. It does not support UPnP mechanism provided by many modern routers and used by almost every torrent-client and by Skype as well. -- v_2e 05:49, 24 May 2012 (EDT)

Linphone

Used Linphone for video telephony with my own Asterisk server and the linphone.org service. Lightweight application, audio and video quite good. Conrad 22:11

Jitsi

Successfully used to three-way audio-video chat with a pair of Mac users. H.264 only, but VP8 support soon! -- Mattl 15:47, 14 May 2012 (EDT)
VP8 support has landed. --Johns 11:20, 30 May 2013 (EDT)
Use Jitsi for personal and collaboration purposes.

The good: impressive feature set:

XMPP, IRC, ICQ, Yahoo, Facebook, SIP
encrypted audio, video and screen sharing (remote control)
OTR chat encryption
NAT traversal - ICE and Jingle Nodes

The bad: severe stability issues:

connect problems - sometimes no audio, sometimes no video
audio and video drop outs.

The ugly: user interface:

incoming text message catches focus
but doesn't stay on the screen

Conrad 22:11 15 Dec 2014 (CET)

Empathy

Empathy is the GNOME default IM and SIP client.

The good:

Empathy is further improved in Fedora 18/GNOME 3.6. I am able to make voice calls on an XMPP network from Empathy to Empathy and from Empathy to the Google Talk desktop client. -- agajan 23:34, 14 May 2013 (EDT)

The bad:

Empathy doesn't do/support any kind of E2E encryption. Mimi89999 (27/09/2016)
Google browser plugin interop requires a non-free codec (H.264). Video quality is poor without this codec when calling from Empathy to Empathy.

Even with the new Xiph codec?

Is that issue still actual? Mimi89999 (27/09/2016)
Worked fine on the local network – failed when NAT involved Conrad 22:31 15 Dec 2014 (CET)
Is that still an issue in the latest version? Mimi89999 (27/09/2016)
I started to install Empathy on Debian Squeeze, using Synaptic. However, marking Empathy for installation resulted in Synaptic telling me that over 120 other packages were required, starting with brasero, brasero-common, cdrdao, cheese-common ... This is lunacy. Either there is a gross mistake in Empathy's packaging, or it really requires most of Gnome, which rules it out for me (I use Xfce).
The Debian stable version is now Jessie. Is that issue still actual? Mimi89999 (27/09/2016)

Tox

I've been using Tox for a while on GNU/Linux and moved a few people to it. I'm now using it as one of my only forms of instant messaging instead of XMPP. Jookia 08:42, 23 November 2014 (EST)

The good:

Peer to peer with trustless relay servers if not possible.
Uses OTR-level encryption between peers.
Group chats and calls.
Supports group voice calls.
A range of alpha quality clients are available and more are coming

The bad (but planned):

Echo cancellation isn't implemented.
Multidevice support for one ID isn't possible yet.
Only an experimental Android client.
Core not audited.

The ugly:

iOS support might need reimplementation due to GPL not allowing restrictions. However, it should probably be possible through jailbreaking.
No discussion of telephone network usage.

User: beccon:beccon 30 December 2014 (CET): I evaluated utox on different Linux machines:

Good:

Works out of the box. It takes a while to get someone on the roster - but once confirmed then text, file transfer, video and audio work
Easy to handle interface

Not so good:

High bandwidth consumption when idling. (some Megabyte per hour - making it not so suitable for mobile use) Obviously systemic - the client has to do the server's workload too.

User: usrname:usrname 17 May 2016: I have used Tox with the qTox client on a Libreboot X200 running Trisquel 7:

The Good:

Pretty easy install and straight forward to use.
Audio is very good quality without latency.
Text, file transfer, screen capture and screen sharing works great.
832 emoticons :P
That it's peer-to-peer!

The bad:

Video was lagging, for SOME reason - not necessarily because of Tox.

Overall: this can definitely be the first free skype replacement, but it still needs a security audit I think.

Navigation menu