# La Suite Meet: self-hosted video conferencing built on LiveKit, Django and React > La Suite Meet is an MIT-licensed video conferencing app from the French government's digital directorate, with a Django backend, a React frontend and LiveKit carrying the media. It is aimed at organisations that want to run their own meeting service rather than rent one. **suitenumerique/meet** — Open source video conferencing app powered by LiveKit. Built with Django and React. - Repository: https://github.com/suitenumerique/meet - Website: https://visio.numerique.gouv.fr - Stars: 2,394 · Forks: 295 - Language: Python - License: MIT - Published: 2026-09-28 · Updated: 2026-09-28 · Language: en - Canonical page: https://hysenlabs.com/projects/suitenumerique-meet ## What La Suite Meet is, and the problem it removes La Suite Meet is an open source video conferencing application published by suitenumerique, the French state's digital suite, and released under the MIT License. The homepage is visio.numerique.gouv.fr, which is also the DINUM production instance. The README describes it as "Simple Video Conferencing" powered by LiveKit, with no installation required for participants: calls are joined directly from the browser. The problem it addresses is ownership. A public body or a company that wants meetings to happen on infrastructure it controls normally has two options: run a media server stack and build the meeting UI around it, or accept a hosted service. La Suite Meet sits in between. The media layer is LiveKit, which is a separate project with its own documentation and self-hosting guide. What suitenumerique adds is the application around it: accounts, rooms, the React interface, and the operational pieces (Postgres, Redis, object storage, mail) that a real deployment needs. The audience is narrower than "anyone who wants video calls". The README points at French public servants as the primary user base, and the known instances table lists three government or cooperative deployments where ProConnect is required to sign in. The fourth, visio.lasuite.coop, is a free demo open to anyone, and the README notes its content and accounts are reset after one month. That mix tells you the project was built for federated identity and administration, not for anonymous link-sharing. ## How the Django and LiveKit split actually works The repository is a two-part application. The backend lives in src/backend and is a Django project; the frontend is React. The Dockerfile shows the backend built with uv from src/backend/uv.lock and src/backend/pyproject.toml, and a separate build stage for mail templates that runs yarn install and yarn build under node:22. Static files are collected with Django's collectstatic during the image build, then deduplicated with rdfind so duplicated assets become symlinks. LiveKit is not vendored. It is a dependency you run yourself, and the README repeatedly defers to LiveKit's own documentation for the media side. That means the meeting experience depends on two systems being healthy at once: the Django app for identity, rooms and persistence, and the LiveKit server for audio, video and screen share. The README's feature list credits LiveKit for speaker detection, simulcast, selective subscription and SVC codecs such as VP9 and AV1. Those are media-server capabilities, not application features, and treating them as things La Suite Meet implements would be a misreading. The feature list also mixes shipped and unshipped work. End-to-end encryption is marked "coming soon". Meeting transcription and summary are marked "currently in beta". Recording is listed without qualification, but the README's own note says advanced features including recording and transcription lack detailed documentation. Read that list as a roadmap with two confirmed gaps rather than a specification. ## Installing La Suite Meet with Docker Compose The README states that production runs on Kubernetes but that Docker Compose is supported, and it points to docs/installation/README.md for detailed instructions. It also mentions community-contributed methods including Nix and YunoHost, which are not described in the README itself. The compose.yml file in the repository root is the development stack, and the Makefile carries an explicit warning that it is for development only and should not be used for CI or production. What compose.yml defines is worth reading before you start, because it tells you the shape of a deployment. Postgres 16 is exposed on host port 15432. Redis 5 runs without a port mapping. Mailcatcher maps 1080 inside the container to 1081 on the host. MinIO runs with the root user meet and the password password, on ports 9000 and 9001, and a companion createbuckets service waits for MinIO's healthcheck before creating the bucket meet-media-storage. The backend container app-dev maps 8071 on the host to 8000 in the container and sets DJANGO_CONFIGURATION=Development. That MinIO bucket is the piece to notice. Meeting media storage is an object store, and the default credentials in the development compose file are placeholders that must not survive into anything reachable from a network. The development workflow is driven by the Makefile, which computes DOCKER_USER from your local uid and gid so files written inside the container stay owned by you: ```bash make bootstrap make run ``` After make run, the backend listens on http://localhost:8071, and the compose stack also brings up Postgres, Redis, Mailcatcher and MinIO alongside it. Mail sent by the app lands in Mailcatcher rather than leaving the machine, which is what you want when testing signup and invitation flows. The README does not document rollback, and UPGRADE.md exists at the repository root but its contents are not reproduced in the README. ## Where La Suite Meet is the wrong tool The clearest limitation is documentation coverage, and the project says so itself. The Docs section of the README states that technical and user documentation are still being worked on, and that in the meantime many essential aspects are covered by LiveKit's documentation and self-hosting guide. That is an honest statement, and it has a practical consequence: anything specific to the application rather than to the media server is something you will partly reverse-engineer from the repository. The README's note about recording and transcription lacking detailed guides is the same admission applied to two named features. End-to-end encryption is the second boundary. It appears in the feature list as "coming soon", which means it is not a property of the system you would deploy today. If your threat model requires the server to be unable to see media, this is not the project for that requirement yet, regardless of how the rest of the stack looks. A third constraint is deployment weight. The stack in compose.yml is Postgres, Redis, MinIO, a mail catcher and the Django app, plus LiveKit somewhere. That is a reasonable footprint for an organisation, and an unreasonable one for a single person who wants a private room for a weekly call. The README's own answer to that case is to use one of the public instances, and it lists visio.lasuite.coop as free and open to all with monthly resets. Finally, the identity model is not anonymous-first. Government instances require ProConnect to log in or sign up. If your use case is "send someone a link and let them in without an account", the documented deployments do not describe that pattern. ## How it compares with Jitsi Meet Jitsi Meet is the obvious comparison, and the difference is architectural rather than cosmetic. Jitsi's media layer is its own stack, built around the Jitsi Videobridge, and a Jitsi deployment is a Jitsi deployment end to end. La Suite Meet delegates media to LiveKit and builds the application around it. The practical effect is that your media-side troubleshooting and tuning follow LiveKit's documentation, not suitenumerique's, and LiveKit's feature set (simulcast, selective subscription, SVC codecs) is what you get. The second difference is the application layer. Jitsi is oriented around rooms and links. La Suite Meet carries a Django backend with accounts, a database and object storage, and the documented public instances gate access through ProConnect. If your organisation already runs identity infrastructure and wants meetings tied to it, that is a better fit than a link-first model. If you want the lowest-friction path to a room, it is a worse fit. The third difference is maturity of documentation. Jitsi has years of deployment material behind it. La Suite Meet's README points you at LiveKit's docs and says the rest is coming. That gap is real and it is the main cost of choosing this project today. It is also narrowing: the repository shows v1.32.0 and v1.32.1 released on 2026-09-25 and v1.31.0 on 2026-09-08, and the last push to main was on 2026-09-28. ## Licence, upgrade cost and what the repository tells you La Suite Meet is MIT licensed, and the LICENSE.md file sits at the repository root alongside a LICENSES/ directory. MIT is permissive: you can run it commercially, modify it and redistribute it, provided the copyright notice and licence text travel with the code. That matters for the deployment question, because it means a company can host this for its own staff or for customers without a separate agreement. This is a description of the licence text, not legal advice; if you are embedding it in a product, have your own counsel read LICENSE.md and the LICENSES/ directory rather than relying on the SPDX identifier alone. Upgrade cost is the harder question, and the repository is more informative here than the README. UPGRADE.md exists at the root, which suggests the maintainers expect upgrades to need instructions beyond pulling a new image. The backend pins dependencies through src/backend/uv.lock and the Dockerfile builds with uv sync --locked, so a given image corresponds to a locked dependency set rather than a floating one. The frontend and mail templates are separate build stages. renovate.json at the root indicates automated dependency updates, which usually means frequent small version bumps rather than rare large ones. The release cadence visible in the repository is steady: three releases in September 2026, two of them on the same day. For an operator, that argues for pinning to a specific tag and reading UPGRADE.md between jumps rather than tracking main. The repository also carries .sops.yaml and a deploy/ directory, which points at encrypted secrets being part of the intended deployment story, though the README does not walk through it. One structural detail worth knowing before you plan a fork: the repository has a .gitmodules file, so at least one component is a submodule and a plain clone will not give you everything. ## Conclusion Adopt La Suite Meet if you need a browser-based meeting service you control, you are comfortable running LiveKit alongside a Django app, and you can read the deployment files because the user-facing documentation is still being written. Do not adopt it if you need an off-the-shelf client for a team that will not touch a server, or if end-to-end encryption is a requirement today, since the README lists it as coming soon. Before committing, verify three things: that you can complete an install from docs/installation/README.md, that recording and transcription work in your environment (the README states their documentation is thin), and that your upgrade path follows UPGRADE.md rather than a guess. ## FAQ ### How do I install La Suite Meet on my own server? The README states that production runs on Kubernetes and that Docker Compose is also supported, and it points to docs/installation/README.md for detailed instructions and examples. Community-contributed methods including Nix and YunoHost are mentioned in the README but not described there. Note that the Makefile warns it is for development only and should not be used for CI or production. ### Is La Suite Meet the same thing as Google Meet? No. La Suite Meet is an open source video conferencing application published by suitenumerique under the MIT License, with a Django backend, a React frontend and LiveKit for media. Google Meet is a separate hosted product with no connection to this project. ### Can I try La Suite Meet without hosting it myself? The README lists public instances, including visio.lasuite.coop, described as a free and open demo where content and accounts are reset after one month. The DINUM and ANCT instances require ProConnect to log in or sign up and are aimed at French public agents. ### Does La Suite Meet support end-to-end encryption? The README lists end-to-end encryption in the feature list with the note "coming soon", so it is not something you can rely on in a deployment today. The same list marks meeting transcription and summary as currently in beta. ### What licence is La Suite Meet released under? It is released under the MIT License, with LICENSE.md at the repository root and a LICENSES/ directory alongside it. MIT permits commercial use and modification as long as the copyright notice and licence text are preserved. ## Sources - [License: MIT](https://github.com/suitenumerique/meet/blob/main/LICENSE) - [Project website](https://visio.numerique.gouv.fr) - [README](https://github.com/suitenumerique/meet/blob/main/README.md) - [Releases](https://github.com/suitenumerique/meet/releases) - [suitenumerique/meet on GitHub](https://github.com/suitenumerique/meet) --- Hysen Labs editorial analysis, written from the project's own repository and release notes. Cite the canonical page: https://hysenlabs.com/projects/suitenumerique-meet