Every great application is built on a foundation of smart architectural choices. For a real-time video conferencing platform, these choices are the difference between a smooth, reliable experience and a frustrating mess of lag, dropped calls, and connection errors.

When we designed plugNmeet, we had a clear set of goals: the platform needed to be high-performance, horizontally scalable, resilient, and easy for developers to build upon. This led us to make two fundamental decisions for our backend: we chose LiveKit for our media server and NATS for our real-time messaging layer.

This article is a deep dive into the "why" behind these critical choices.

Building a video conferencing application sounds like a monumental task. You have to wrestle with the complexities of WebRTC, set up signaling servers, manage STUN/TURN for NAT traversal, and handle the resource-intensive job of routing media streams. The backend infrastructure alone can take months to build and stabilize.

But what if you could skip all of that?

What if you could leverage a powerful, open-source platform that handles all the backend complexity, allowing you to build a fully functional, custom-branded video conferencing app in under an hour? With plugNmeet, you can.

This guide will show you the three core steps to building your own video app using plugNmeet's API-first architecture.