Free video meetings for small groups of up to 6 people

If you need free video meetings for small groups, Barside Meetings is made for exactly that: up to six people, with no paid plan to unlock. Start a meeting in one click or schedule it with a time zone and a repeat, invite people by email or calendar, and let guests in from a waiting room. People without Barside join from their browser.

There is no meeting server in the middle. Everyone connects directly to everyone else, so your video, sound, chat and captions never pass through Barside's servers.

How free video meetings for small groups work in Barside

A Barside meeting is a small mesh: each person's Barside connects to every other person's with WebRTC, the standard that browsers use for video calls. Barside's Spaces server only keeps the meeting's details and passes the short messages that help people find each other.

• Up to six people, you included. When the meeting is full, the next person is told so.
• A relay for strict networks. When an office, school or hotel network blocks direct connections, video and sound go through Cloudflare's relay. The media stays encrypted, so the relay cannot see or hear it.
• Sharp where it counts. Each person's Barside sends every other person a camera picture sized to how large they show it. Shared screens go at full resolution, at 15 frames a second for text or 30 for video.
• No cut-off. Barside does not end a meeting after a set time. The length you choose when you schedule (5 minutes to 8 hours) goes into the invitation and the calendar entry.
• One free account. Barside users sign in with the free Spaces account, with Google or an email code, so people know who is joining. Guests from a browser need no account.

Start, schedule or join a meeting

1. Open Meetings in the sidebar. Create → New meeting works too, and the search bar alias meet starts one from any app.
2. Choose New meeting to start a "Quick meeting" now, and its window opens.
3. Or choose Schedule: a title, date, time, length, time zone and repeat (every day, every weekday, every week, every 2 weeks or every month, with an optional last date), an agenda, the waiting room, and email addresses to invite.
4. Or choose Paste a meeting link to join to open a meeting someone shared with you.
5. Before you join, a preview shows the title, time, host and who is already in. Check your camera, microphone and speaker with Test, pick a background and a filter, and choose whether to join muted or with the camera off.

The Meetings tab lists your meetings and the ones you are invited to, by day, with past and cancelled meetings below. Barside reminds you five minutes before a scheduled meeting, repeats included, and the reminder opens the meeting.

Invite people and let them in

Every meeting has a link with a secret key. The key sits after the # in the link, so it never reaches the barside.space web server. Invite, in the Meetings tab or the meeting window, gives you:

• Copy link and Copy invitation, with the title, time, link, host, agenda and a download link, ready to paste anywhere.
• Send from my email app, which opens your own email app with the invitation.
• Invite by email: with Barside emails the invitation on, each person gets an email with Join meeting and Add to calendar links, and, if you choose, an update when you change the time or title, or a cancellation.
• Add to calendar: Google Calendar and Outlook open in the browser with the meeting filled in, and Other (.ics) saves a file for Apple Calendar or Outlook for Windows. Repeating meetings keep their local time across daylight-saving changes.

The link opens a join page on barside.space with the title, the time in the visitor's own time zone, the host and the agenda, plus Open in Barside, a download link and Join from your browser. Search engines do not index the page.

Who gets in:

• The host always gets in.
• Invited people, signed in with the address you invited, go straight in.
• Everyone else with the link, browser guests included, waits in the waiting room until a host lets them in, one at a time or with Let everyone in. The waiting room is on by default; with it off, people with the link go straight in.
• Lock the meeting keeps out everyone who is not in yet.

Join from a browser, with no install

People without Barside choose Join from your browser on the join page. The meeting opens in a tab of a recent Chrome, Edge, Firefox or Safari. The guest types a name, checks the camera, microphone and speaker, and waits until a host lets them in. Hosts see them as Guest · browser.

In the browser, video, sound, filters, screen sharing, chat, reactions, raised hands, full screen and everyone else's captions work. Backgrounds, captions of the guest's own words, recording, meeting notes and the small window need the app. Closing the tab leaves the meeting, after the browser asks.

Guests sign in anonymously, with no email address. A guest can reach only the meeting whose link they have, and the server deletes the guest and the typed name two days later.

In the meeting

• Mute and Stop video. Hold Space to talk while muted.
• Share screen: pick a whole screen or one window. Share computer sound (Windows) sends what your computer plays without Barside's own sound, so nobody hears an echo, and Optimize for video trades sharpness for smooth motion. One person shares at a time.
• People: who is here, with their role (Host, Co-host, Guest), microphone, camera, raised hand and connection. Change anyone's volume for yourself.
• Chat: to everyone, or privately to one person. Messages go only to the people in the meeting, are not saved on a server, and are not shown to people who join later.
• React: six reactions, Raise hand, and quick answers: Yes, No, Slow down, Speed up or Away.
• More: Speaker or Gallery view, Full screen, Small window on top, Meeting notes, Host tools, Settings and Keyboard shortcuts. Minimizing the window during a meeting keeps a small window on top.
• Pin anyone for yourself with the pin on their picture.

Host tools

The host is whoever created the meeting. Hosts can make co-hosts, and if the host is away, whoever has been in the meeting longest leads and can let people in. Hosts can:

• let people in from the waiting room, or remove them;
• mute someone or everyone, ask someone to unmute, turn off a camera or ask for it, stop a screen share, lower a hand, and spotlight someone for everyone;
• remove someone, who then cannot come back to that meeting;
• in Host tools, lock the meeting, turn the waiting room on or off, turn on Captions for everyone, and choose whether others may share their screen, unmute, turn on their camera or Record without asking, and who can chat: Everyone can chat, Only with hosts or No chat;
• End for everyone.

Cancelling a scheduled meeting ends it for anyone still in it, and its link stops working.

Captions, recording and meeting notes

Captions. A host turns captions on for everyone, and others can ask. Each person's Barside writes down that person's own words with the speech engine on their own computer, and sends only the text to the meeting. The Captions panel keeps the transcript, and Show captions on the video is a setting for each person. People without the speech engine show as having no captions; it is a free download of about 150 MB in Assistant settings, and it needs no AI key.

Recording. Hosts can record, and others when a host allows it or answers their request. Everyone sees who is recording. The recording puts everyone's camera, and a shared screen, into one 1280 × 720 picture with everyone's sound. It is saved on the recording person's computer, in their meeting note, not on a server.

Meeting notes. When a meeting ends, Barside saves a note in the workspace you choose in the meeting's Settings → Captions and notes: who came, how long it lasted, the transcript and the chat, with private messages marked. The end screen links the note and has a ready request for your AI.

From there, meeting follow-through turns the transcript into a summary, decisions and proposed tasks with the AI you connected, and you check them before anything saves. Your Claude or ChatGPT can also summarize the note through AI connections.

Decide together: polls in a Space

Not every decision needs a call. In a Space, anyone who can post can start a poll from the chat: a question of up to 300 characters, 2 to 10 options, one choice or several, and an optional closing time within 90 days. Members vote, change or remove their vote, and everyone sees the counts, the percentages and who voted. The author, the owner or a moderator can close a poll early.

Windows, Linux and Mac

Barside runs on Windows 10 and 11, on Linux and on Mac; people on a Mac can also join from their browser. On every system, signing out, sleep, a reload or quitting leaves the meeting, and locking the computer keeps your place but turns off your microphone, camera and share.

Privacy: who sees what

Video, sound, shared screens, chat, reactions and captions go straight between the people in the meeting. Barside's server does not see or keep what you say, show or write.

• What the server keeps for each meeting: its title, agenda, time, time zone, repeat, waiting-room setting, host, and the addresses you invite, which only you see. Anyone with the link can see the title, agenda, time and host's display name.
• IP addresses. A direct connection needs them: the people in the meeting and a public connection helper (Google's or Cloudflare's STUN server) can see yours. The preview says who can see it before you join.
• Your camera and microphone work only in the meeting window, and you pick the screen or window to share each time.
• Old meetings leave the list: cancelled ones after 7 days, past ones after 30.

Read Meetings and your data for the full detail.

How it compares

Zoom and Google Meet host large calls and limit meeting length on their free plans. As of September 2026, Zoom's free Basic plan allows 100 participants for up to 40 minutes per meeting, and free Google Meet allows up to 100 participants for up to 60 minutes per meeting, with no time limit on one-on-one calls.

Barside is for the other case: a small group that meets often and wants its notes kept. It holds six people, not a hundred, so for webinars or large classes those apps fit better. Compare them in the Zoom alternative guide, and see the best AI meeting assistants for note takers. For calls in other apps, call transcription records and transcribes them on your computer.

Works well with