# LiveKit 24 Hacker News commenters recommended LiveKit and 9 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 9 of 13 months. It meets the Hacker Approved badge rule. **Verdict:** Open-source WebRTC platform for building voice and video calls and AI agents, praised for handling the hard real-time plumbing. Common caveat: self-hosting at scale is hard and painful. ## Why people recommend it - Handles hard real-time media plumbing (3 comments): "With Livekit, you get most of the tricky parts served on a silver platter." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47259225)) "LiveKit was a really nice foundation for video and audio calls." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49758287)) "livekit handles the webrtc video/audio (it’s been rock solid)" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46174107)) - Integrates with many AI models (3 comments): "livekit is just a framework so you can hook it up with any models in the stack" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46741070)) "we gotchu: https://docs.livekit.io/agents/models/tts/inference/inworld/" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46792435)) "Then it'll be really easy to combine InWorld and LemonSlice." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46792002)) - Open source with permissive license (2 comments): "a great open source (MIT licensed) product written in Go" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46779110)) "code available under Apache-2" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46788562)) - Recommended over rolling your own (4 comments): "the correct solution is probably to farm that out to a service. LiveKit or something fatter" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49797126)) "I also moved over to using livekit for the service, and man, I should've done that sooner." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48854672)) "I moved over to using livekit for the service, and man, I should've done that sooner." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48885962)) ## What people warn about - Painful to self-host or scale (4 comments): "The problem with PipeCat and LiveKit (the 2 major stacks for building voice ai) is the deployment at scale." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46381938)) "I'm running a selfhosted livekit deployment at work and it's a major pain in the ass." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47625102)) "even with great OSS, the plumbing was still painful" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46189900)) - Unstable quality and call limits (3 comments): "it is super annoying when speed slows down or speeds up at times when connection is not robust" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48072201)) "depend on stateful services that, at best, place ceilings on call lifetimes" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48841969)) "Livekit is very limited, video quality is a joke." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47045770)) - Data sharing and surveillance concerns (3 comments): "LiveKit's DPA, not their generic user ToS, explicitly classifies LiveKit as an independent controller for operational metrics" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47782318)) "livekit can hand call records to us law enforcement without notifying proton" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47629212)) "ties into VC-funded US tech used for border surveillance" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46788185)) - Breaks after updates (2 comments): "they broke their calling system after changing something to this livekit system" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46110114)) "Could never fix their livekit stuff." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46377129)) ## Alternatives hackers recommend - [WebRTC](https://hackerapproved.com/p/webrtc.md): 21 recommend - [Pion WebRTC](https://hackerapproved.com/p/pion-webrtc.md): 7 recommend ## Cite as Hacker Approved, "LiveKit", https://hackerapproved.com/p/livekit/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).