A free Zoom alternative for small meetings of up to 6 people

If you want a Zoom alternative for small meetings, Barside does the job for free: video meetings for up to 6 people, with a waiting room, screen sharing, chat, captions and recording, and guests who join from a browser. Barside does not stop a meeting after 40 minutes, and you pay nothing to host. Meetings live inside Barside, a free desktop app for notes, tasks and recordings, so every call can end as a note with its transcript and chat. Barside runs on Windows, Linux and Mac.

It is not a Zoom replacement for everyone. Zoom holds 100 people on its free plan, splits meetings into breakout rooms and runs on phones as well as computers. This page compares the two honestly, so you can decide which one fits your meetings.

The short answer

Zoom is a complete meeting platform. It runs large meetings, splits them into breakout rooms and, on paid plans, records to the cloud and includes its AI Companion. It has apps for Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS and Android, plus a web app.

People look for a Zoom alternative mostly for three reasons: the free Basic plan ends meetings at 40 minutes, Pro costs US$16.99 per user a month on monthly billing, and a big meeting app is more than a weekly call with a few people needs.

Barside Meetings is built for exactly that small call:

• Free, with no paid meeting plan. Every meeting feature is in the free app.
• No set end. Barside does not end a meeting after a set time. The length you choose when you schedule fills the invitation and the calendar entry; it does not end the call.
• Up to 6 people, you included, connected directly to each other.
• A note after every call. When the meeting ends, Barside saves a note with who came, the transcript and the chat, and your own AI can turn it into tasks.

If you regularly meet with more than 6 people, need breakout rooms or host from a phone, stay with Zoom. For small teams, tutors, coaches and families on Windows, Linux or Mac, read on. People on a Mac can also join your meetings from a browser.

Why people look for a Zoom alternative

These are the reasons that come up most, stated fairly. Prices are from Zoom's pricing page, as of September 2026.

• The 40-minute limit. Zoom's free Basic plan allows 40 minutes per meeting, with up to 100 participants. A longer meeting means a paid plan.
• The price per user. Zoom Pro costs US$16.99 per user a month billed monthly, or US$14.16 billed annually. Business costs US$21.99, or US$18.33 billed annually.
• Too much for a small call. A weekly check-in with four people does not need 100 seats, breakout rooms and whiteboards. It needs a link that works and a place for the notes.
• Notes somewhere else. The call happens in one app and the notes in another, and the follow-up gets lost between them.
• A direct connection. Some people prefer calls that go straight between the people in them, with no meeting server in the middle.

Barside Meetings at a glance

Open Meetings in the sidebar, choose Create → New meeting, or type meet in the search bar from any app. Hosts sign in once with the free Spaces account, using Google or an email code.

• Start or schedule. New meeting starts a "Quick meeting" at once. Schedule asks for a title, date, time, length, time zone and repeat (every day, weekday, week, two weeks or month, with an optional last date), an agenda, the waiting room and the email addresses to invite. Paste a meeting link to join opens a meeting someone sent you.
• Reminders. Your meetings and the ones you are invited to are listed by day. Five minutes before a scheduled meeting, repeats included, Barside shows a reminder that opens it.
• A preview first. Check your camera, microphone and speaker with Test, pick a background and a filter, and join muted or with the camera off. The preview also says who can see your IP address.
• In the meeting. Mute and Stop video (hold Space to talk while muted), Share screen with Share computer sound on Windows and Optimize for video, People, Chat to everyone or privately, and React with six reactions, Raise hand, and Yes, No, Slow down, Speed up or Away. More holds Speaker or Gallery view, full screen, Small window on top, Meeting notes and Host tools.
• Host tools. Let people in from the waiting room, mute someone or everyone, ask someone to unmute, spotlight a speaker, remove someone, Lock the meeting, turn on Captions for everyone, and choose whether others may share, unmute, turn on their camera, record without asking, and chat.
• Shortcuts. Alt+A mutes, Alt+V turns the camera on or off, Alt+S shares, Alt+H opens chat, Alt+C toggles captions and Alt+R records.

Guests without Barside open the meeting link and choose Join from your browser, in a recent Chrome, Edge, Firefox or Safari. They type a name, check their camera and microphone, and wait until a host lets them in. The full walkthrough is in the guide to free video meetings for small groups.

Zoom vs Barside: feature comparison

The Zoom column comes from Zoom's own pricing and support pages, as of September 2026.

Pricing compared

One Zoom Pro host costs US$169.92 a year on annual billing. A Barside host pays nothing, and nothing changes when you add a second host. The only cost you might add is the AI company you connect for summaries, which bills you for what you use. Barside itself does not charge for AI.

Where Zoom is better

Zoom does a lot that Barside Meetings does not try to do. If any of these matter to you, it is the better choice.

• Size. Zoom holds 100 people on its free plan and up to 1,000 on Enterprise. Barside holds 6.
• Breakout rooms. Zoom splits a meeting into up to 100 separate sessions. Barside has no breakout rooms.
• Phones and Macs. Zoom has apps for Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS and Android, and its web app needs no downloads or plugins. Barside runs on Windows, Linux and Mac, and Mac users can also join as browser guests.
• Full features for browser guests. In Barside, guests in a browser get video, sound, screen sharing, chat, reactions and other people's captions, but not backgrounds, captions of their own words, recording, meeting notes or the small window.
• Cloud recording. Paid Zoom plans store recordings in the Zoom cloud, with 10 GB per user on Pro. A Barside recording is saved in the recording person's meeting note on their computer, with no shared cloud library; to pass it on, they share a link.
• Built-in AI. Zoom's AI Companion comes with paid plans, and even the free Basic plan gets meeting summaries for 3 hosted meetings a month. Barside has no AI of its own: summaries need an AI you connect, and that company bills you.
• Computer sound on Mac and Linux. In a Barside meeting, sharing your computer's sound works on Windows only: not on Linux, and not in Barside for Mac.

After the call: captions, notes and follow-up

This is where Barside is different. The meeting is part of the same app as your notes, so nothing has to be copied from one place to another.

• Live captions on each computer. A host turns captions on for everyone. 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 speech engine is a free download of about 150 MB in Assistant settings, and it needs no AI key.
• A meeting note. When the meeting ends, Barside saves a note in the workspace you chose in the meeting window's Settings → Captions and notes: who came, how long it lasted, the transcript and the chat, with private messages marked. A meeting with nothing to keep makes no note, and you can turn meeting notes off in the same place.
• Recording. Hosts record, and others when a host allows it. Everyone sees who is recording. The recording lands in the recording person's meeting note.
• Follow-through. Meeting follow-through turns the note into a summary, quoted decisions, proposed tasks with owners and deadlines, and a recap draft you can edit. You check everything before it saves, and Barside never sends the recap for you. See meeting follow-up and action items.

Some calls will still happen in Zoom, because a client sends the link. For those, Barside's call transcription records your microphone and your computer's sound and writes the conversation into a note, with You and Others labels, on your computer. Tell people before you record.

Privacy: how a Barside meeting travels

A Barside meeting has no meeting server. People connect directly to each other with WebRTC, and Barside's Spaces server only helps them find each other.

• What the server keeps: each meeting's title, agenda, time, time zone, repeat, waiting-room setting and invited email addresses. Only the host sees the addresses; anyone with the link sees the title, agenda, time and host's name on the join page.
• What it never sees: video, sound, chat and captions go straight between the people in the meeting. A recording is saved on the computer of the person who recorded it, and goes online only if that person backs up or syncs their notes with Barside Plus.
• IP addresses: the people in the meeting and a public connection helper can see yours. When a network blocks direct connections, Cloudflare's relay passes the encrypted media on; it cannot see or hear it, but it sees the IP addresses it connects.
• Browser guests get an anonymous account with the name they typed, and the server deletes both two days later.

The privacy guide has the details.

How to move from Zoom to Barside

Barside has nothing to import from Zoom. For a small team, switching is mostly setting up your meetings again.

1. Download Barside for Windows, Linux or Mac, open Meetings and sign in with Google or an email code.
2. For captions and transcripts, install speech in Assistant settings (about 150 MB, no AI key).
3. Recreate your repeating meetings with Schedule: title, time, time zone, repeat, agenda and the people to invite.
4. Send the invitations. Turn on Barside emails the invitations so each person gets Join meeting and Add to calendar links, or use Copy invitation, Send from my email app, or Add to calendar for Google Calendar, Outlook or an .ics file.
5. Tell people without Barside to choose Join from your browser on the join page. They wait in the waiting room until you let them in.
6. Pick your workspace for meeting notes in the meeting window's Settings → Captions and notes, and connect an AI in Barside's Settings → AI if you want summaries.
7. Bring old recordings you saved on your computer into Barside notes: drag a video file into a note, or add it with the media button. MP4 and WebM files play when Barside supports the codec inside them. The Clips tab can cut short highlights from them.

If your calendar lives in Google Calendar or Outlook, connect it to Barside to see today's events next to your notes and make one meeting note per event.

Who should switch, and who should stay

Barside is a good fit if you:

• meet in small groups: a team of five, a tutor and a student, a coach and a client, or a family;
• host from a Windows or Linux computer, or from a Mac with Barside for Mac;
• want free meetings that do not stop at 40 minutes;
• want the transcript, the chat and the follow-up in your notes, on your own computer.

Stay with Zoom if you:

• meet with more than 6 people, or need breakout rooms;
• host from a phone, or from a Mac;
• need cloud recording, or AI summaries without connecting your own AI;
• work in a company that already runs everything on Zoom.

Other Zoom alternatives worth a look

If Barside's 6-person meetings are too small, these are the tools we would check first. Limits are as of September 2026.

• Google Meet. Works in the browser. With a free personal Google Account, one-on-one meetings last up to 24 hours and meetings with 3 or more people up to 60 minutes.
• Microsoft Teams (free). Meetings of up to 60 minutes with up to 100 people.
• Jitsi Meet. Free, open-source video meetings in the browser at meet.jit.si, where the person who creates a meeting room signs in first with an account such as Google or GitHub. You can also host Jitsi Meet on your own server.
• Whereby. Video meetings in the browser, with no downloads and no login for guests. The free plan has one room, up to 4 people and meetings of up to 30 minutes.

If what you really want is notes from your calls, compare the best AI meeting assistants and the Granola alternative. For team chat between meetings, see the Slack alternative.

Works well with Meetings