Comparison

Open vs. LiveKit

LiveKit is the WebRTC and real-time-media SDK. Open is the productized voice agent. The two operate at different layers of the stack.

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LiveKit
Infrastructure
Open
Product
LiveKit build cycle
Months
Open time-to-live
Days

01 — Overview

Open or LiveKit: which is right?

LiveKit is a developer SDK for real-time media (audio, video, data) — used by teams building voice AI from scratch. Open is the finished voice agent, sold as a product. Pick LiveKit if you have a voice-AI engineering team and want to own the stack; pick Open if you want production traffic next week.

LiveKit is genuinely good. The WebRTC and real-time-media stack underpins voice products at OpenAI, Character AI, and many of the voice startups you've heard of. If you're a voice-AI vendor or you're building proprietary voice infrastructure, LiveKit is often what's running underneath. The SDK is solid, the cloud product is reliable, the open-source roots make it future-proof.

But LiveKit is infrastructure, not a finished agent. To deploy a voice AI on top of LiveKit, you build the rest yourself: the LLM-orchestration layer, the tool-calling logic, the integrations to telephony / CRM / calendar / billing, the conversation observability, the compliance plumbing, the analytics. That's six to eighteen months of engineering for a serious deployment, plus ongoing maintenance.

Open is the result of someone else having done that work. Open's runtime sits on top of real-time-media plumbing similar in shape to LiveKit's, but Open's customers don't care about the layer below — they care about the agent. They configure roles, voices, languages, integrations, escalation rules in a dashboard, and Open answers production calls. Time-to-live is days, not months.

Cost difference: LiveKit's pricing is infrastructure pricing — per-minute media plus the cost of the engineering team that builds on top. Open's pricing is per-resolution — you pay when the AI resolves a call. For a single-team buyer, Open is dramatically cheaper. For a voice-AI vendor with engineers to spare, LiveKit + their own model can be cheaper at scale, but the first year of build is heavy.

When LiveKit is the right answer: when you're building a voice-AI product, when you have voice-engineering depth, when you need maximum control over the WebRTC layer, when standardising on a media-server platform across products. When Open is the right answer: when you're a customer trying to deploy voice AI, not build one. The choice is build vs. buy.

LiveKit gives you

  • WebRTC infrastructure

    Best-in-class real-time-media SDK and cloud, used by leading voice products.

  • Open-source roots

    Self-hostable, modifiable, future-proof if your stack outgrows the cloud product.

  • Maximum control

    Build the agent runtime, the model orchestration, the integrations exactly how you want.

  • Build it yourself

    You own the agent, the integrations, the compliance, the observability — entirely.

Open ships

  • A finished voice agent

    Configured in a dashboard, not built in code. Production-ready out of the box.

  • Native telephony, CRM, calendar

    Twilio, RingCentral, Salesforce, HubSpot, Calendar — wired in the platform, not your job.

  • Days to live

    First production calls within hours of trunk setup; full agent live within days.

  • Per-resolution pricing

    You pay when the AI resolves something. Carrier minutes stay on your phone bill.

02 — Why it works

What makes Open the right answer for Open vs. LiveKit

  • Different layer, different buyer

    LiveKit is for engineering teams building voice products. Open is for ops teams deploying voice agents.

  • No build cycle

    Skip the 6-18 months of integration, observability, and compliance work that comes with building on infrastructure.

  • Production-ready integrations

    Twilio, RingCentral, Vonage, Salesforce, HubSpot, Calendar — all native, supported, and tested at scale.

  • Per-resolution pricing

    Per-minute media pricing made sense when you were the engineering team. As a customer, per-resolution scales with value.

03 — Security

Encrypted, audited, refundable

SIP over TLS for signaling, SRTP for media. Every call logged with full reasoning traces. SOC 2 Type II, GDPR-aligned, HIPAA- and PCI-ready. Backed by the Open $2M Refund Guarantee.

04 — FAQ

Open vs. LiveKit questions, answered

Open uses real-time-media infrastructure of similar shape, but customers don't see that layer. The point of Open is to abstract it.

If you're building a voice-AI product, have voice-engineering depth, and want full control of the WebRTC stack. If you're a customer trying to deploy voice AI on your business, not the right tool.

Yes — and a few customers have. Typical migration: keep your Twilio / SIP setup, repoint at Open, port over the integrations and prompts. Most LiveKit-built agents that switch to Open do so because the maintenance burden became too high relative to the differentiation.

LiveKit's Agents framework reduces some of the build cost — it gives you a Python framework for connecting LLMs to LiveKit rooms. It's still infrastructure, not a finished agent: you still write the orchestration, the tools, the integrations, the observability, the compliance.

Both are production-grade. LiveKit's media reliability is excellent. Open's end-to-end reliability (including the application layer) is what we measure and SLA. They're reliable at different layers.

Both. LiveKit Cloud takes some of the infrastructure work off your plate but still leaves the application layer (orchestration, integrations, observability, compliance) to you. Open is the application layer.

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