Compared with Scalelite

Scalelite is free. That is usually the right reason to choose it.

Most teams running BigBlueButton at scale run Scalelite, and they are not wrong to. It is open source, it costs nothing, and if you have the people to operate it, it works. The question this table answers is narrower: what you are buying when you pay for ZcaleRight instead — which is mostly the interface and the people behind it.

The job	Scalelite	ZcaleRight
When a lecture fails at 9am	Your team, the community forum, and however long it takes. There is no one to call, because nobody was paid to answer.	A named team under a service level agreement, at a BigBlueButton Certified Service Provider — covering the balancer and the servers behind it.
Keeping it current	You track releases, test them, and schedule your own maintenance windows.	We apply updates at a time you choose. Nobody on your side is watching a changelog.
What the team needs to know	Its README asks for BigBlueButton and Linux administration, systemd, Docker, UDP and TCP, firewalls and TURN — and warns beginners plainly that this is not a beginner's deployment.	An operator who can use a web interface. The rest sits with us.
Day-to-day administration	Command-line tasks run inside the container, plus a management API.	A web dashboard: servers, pools, meetings, recordings, users, settings and logs.
Letting other people in	No user accounts or roles — whoever has shell access has everything.	Six roles, so support staff, recordings reviewers and quality assurance each get their own view.
Where a new meeting lands	On the least loaded server in the pool, decided by polling each node for its running meeting count.	On a server in the pool you chose for that kind of meeting, with a cap per pool and a cluster-wide cap above it.
Several customers on one cluster	Not what it is built for.	Tenants with their own API secrets, optional single-domain access, and your branding rather than ours.
Where recordings live	A shared NFS volume you provide and mount on every BigBlueButton server, indexed in the database.	No shared mount required: recordings can stay on the server that made them, or move to S3-compatible storage or SWIFT — either way one searchable, exportable library with playback links rewritten, and automatic unpublish and delete.
Getting through a peak	Add more BigBlueButton servers to the pool yourself.	Servers can be provisioned automatically on a schedule or on demand, then removed when the peak passes.
What you run	The balancer, an NFS volume, a PostgreSQL database and a Redis cache with persistence enabled — four things to size, secure and keep up.	One product, installed and kept current with you.
What it costs	Nothing. If you have the team and the time, that is genuinely the better deal and we would say so.	A commercial licence, quoted for your fleet. You are paying for the interface, the roles, the tenants and the people who answer the phone.

Scalelite rows are drawn from its public README: least-loaded placement by polling, the NFS, PostgreSQL and Redis architecture, rake-task administration, and its own list of prerequisites. Verify anything here against that document before you rely on it.

Mainz University
Evaluated while building the BigBlueButton cluster for the universities and schools of Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany.

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