Proton Meet adds waiting rooms so hosts can choose who joins

Proton rolled out waiting rooms and chat threads for Proton Meet on October 14, 2026. Hosts can control admission to a call, while participants can keep chat replies attached to the messages they answer.

The host decides who enters

With waiting rooms, everyone except the host waits to be admitted. Waiting participants are not part of the meeting’s encrypted group and cannot access its content until the host lets them in.

Every Proton Meet call uses the open-source Messaging Layer Security (MLS) protocol for end-to-end encryption. Waiting participants’ names are encrypted too and decrypted on the host’s device, so Proton’s servers cannot see who is waiting.

Replies stay with the question

Chat threads let participants reply directly to a message, keeping each discussion together without disrupting the wider chat. The feature is available to all Proton Meet users on both free and paid plans.

Messages, replies, reactions and the thread structure are all end-to-end encrypted, so Proton’s servers cannot see which messages reply to which. Senders’ identities are also verified through authenticated meeting credentials to help prevent impersonation.

Who gets waiting rooms, and what happens to chat

Waiting rooms are included in every paid Proton Meet plan: Meet Professional, all Workspace plans and the Meet add-on. Free-plan users need to upgrade to use them.

Chat exists only for the duration of the call, has no server-side history and disappears when the meeting ends. If a thread contains decisions or details you will need afterward, write them down elsewhere before the call finishes rather than treating it as an archive.