Galene

Zoom routes every video feed through proprietary cloud infrastructure, logging meeting metadata and forcing closed-source client installations on participants. Galene runs as a self-hosted WebRTC server packaged into a single Go binary, keeping media streams and participant data entirely on private hardware. For operations leads and engineering teams, it replaces hosted video services with internal infrastructure that has zero external telemetry.

Why Galene instead of Zoom

Zoom bundles meeting rooms, cloud recording, telephony, and AI summarizers into a commercial suite, charging recurring per-host fees while storing call data on third-party servers. Galene acts strictly as a lightweight Selective Forwarding Unit. It decrypts and re-encrypts WebRTC media hop-by-hop on your server, routing video without cloud dependencies. Guests join via direct browser URLs with no mandatory client downloads or user accounts.

The operational tradeoffs center on scale and features. Zoom automatically orchestrates global multi-region routing and large webinars. Galene scales quadratically during multi-party meetings, where a four-core server accommodates roughly forty simultaneous video feeds before CPU limits are reached. In return, your team retains data custody. Recordings write directly to local disk, and access permissions configure through flat JSON files or auth tokens without vendor oversight.

What it does well

• Runs as a single Go binary requiring under 500 MB of RAM, using roughly a quarter of a CPU core for hundred-viewer lectures.
• Embeds a built-in TURN server that handles NAT traversal natively, eliminating the need to configure a separate coturn instance.
• Supports multi-window screen sharing and a blackboard mode that prioritizes high text legibility over frame rates.
• Facilitates direct browser-to-browser peer file transfers during calls without passing user files through the server.
• Ingests live streams from OBS Studio via the WHIP protocol, delivering low-latency presentation broadcasts.
• Saves call recordings directly to local host disk storage with a simple in-call toggle.

Limitations

• The built-in TURN server does not support IPv6, requiring an external relay daemon like coturn for IPv6-only environments.
• Multi-party meetings scale quadratically, causing video streams to freeze under excessive CPU load rather than degrading gracefully.