LiveKit
Hacker ApprovedThe most recommended of 3 webrtc frameworks
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.
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.
33 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 24
- criticize it
- 9
- approval share
- 73%
Recommended in 9 of 13 months
- November 2025: recommended
- December 2025: recommended
- January 2026: recommended
- February 2026: not recommended
- March 2026: recommended
- April 2026: recommended
- May 2026: recommended
- June 2026: not recommended
- July 2026: recommended
- August 2026: not recommended
- September 2026: recommended
- October 2026: recommended
- November 2026: not recommended (month in progress)
Why it carries the badge
- 24 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, met.
- 2.7 recommenders for every criticNeeds 2 to 1 or better, met.
- Recommended in 9 of 13 monthsNeeds 4 or more, met.
The same three rules apply to every product, and the badge can’t be bought. How the badge works
What people say about it
The reasons people give, with the number of comments that give each one. Open a reason to read what they said.
Why people recommend it
Each mark is one comment
Handles hard real-time media plumbing
“With Livekit, you get most of the tricky parts served on a silver platter.”
Comment from 5 Mar 2026 in “Nvidia PersonaPlex 7B on Apple Silicon: Full-Duplex Speech-to-Speech in Swift” “LiveKit was a really nice foundation for video and audio calls.”
Comment from 18 Sep 2026 in “Cloudflare Quick Tunnels” “livekit handles the webrtc video/audio (it’s been rock solid)”
Comment from 6 Dec 2025 in “Show HN: KnockKnock – Circular video calls that bring you closer, faster(macOS)” Integrates with many AI models
“livekit is just a framework so you can hook it up with any models in the stack”
Comment from 24 Jan 2026 in “Ask HN: What's the current best local/open speech-to-speech setup?” “we gotchu: https://docs.livekit.io/agents/models/tts/inference/inworld/”
Comment from 28 Jan 2026 in “Show HN: LemonSlice – Give your voice agents a face” “Then it'll be really easy to combine InWorld and LemonSlice.”
Comment from 28 Jan 2026 in “Show HN: LemonSlice – Give your voice agents a face” Open source with permissive license
“a great open source (MIT licensed) product written in Go”
Comment from 27 Jan 2026 in “France Aiming to Replace Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, etc.” “code available under Apache-2”
Comment from 27 Jan 2026 in “France to ban officials from US video tools including Zoom, Teams” Recommended over rolling your own
“the correct solution is probably to farm that out to a service. LiveKit or something fatter”
Comment from 22 Sep 2026 in “Truman World” “I also moved over to using livekit for the service, and man, I should've done that sooner.”
Comment from 10 Jul 2026 in “Ask HN: What are you working on? (July 2026)” “I moved over to using livekit for the service, and man, I should've done that sooner.”
Comment from 12 Jul 2026 in “Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (July 2026)” - Comment from 5 Mar 2026 in “Nvidia PersonaPlex 7B on Apple Silicon: Full-Duplex Speech-to-Speech in Swift”
What people warn about
Each mark is one comment
Painful to self-host or scale
“The problem with PipeCat and LiveKit (the 2 major stacks for building voice ai) is the deployment at scale.”
Comment from 25 Dec 2025 in “Asterisk AI Voice Agent” “I'm running a selfhosted livekit deployment at work and it's a major pain in the ass.”
Comment from 3 Apr 2026 in “Proton Meet Isn't What They Told You It Was” “even with great OSS, the plumbing was still painful”
Comment from 8 Dec 2025 in “Show HN: Dograh – an OSS Vapi alternative to quickly build and test voice agents” - Comment from 5 Apr 2026 in “Friendica – A Decentralized Social Network”
Unstable quality and call limits
“it is super annoying when speed slows down or speeds up at times when connection is not robust”
Comment from 9 May 2026 in “OpenAI's WebRTC Problem” “depend on stateful services that, at best, place ceilings on call lifetimes”
Comment from 9 Jul 2026 in “Chatto is now Open Source” “Livekit is very limited, video quality is a joke.”
Comment from 17 Feb 2026 in “Use Protocols, Not Services” Data sharing and surveillance concerns
“LiveKit's DPA, not their generic user ToS, explicitly classifies LiveKit as an independent controller for operational metrics”
Comment from 15 Apr 2026 in “Proton Meet Isn't What They Told You It Was” “livekit can hand call records to us law enforcement without notifying proton”
Comment from 3 Apr 2026 in “Proton Meet Isn't What They Told You It Was” “ties into VC-funded US tech used for border surveillance”
Comment from 27 Jan 2026 in “France to ban officials from US video tools including Zoom, Teams” Breaks after updates
“they broke their calling system after changing something to this livekit system”
Comment from 1 Dec 2025 in “Self-hosting a Matrix server for 5 years” “Could never fix their livekit stuff.”
Comment from 24 Dec 2025 in “We Abandoned Matrix: The Dark Truth About User Security and Safety (2024)”
Other webrtc frameworks people recommend
The two most recommended other webrtc frameworks, with the same counts for each, so you can compare like for like. The tick on each bar marks the 2 to 1 line the badge needs.
| Product | Recommend | Criticize | Approval | Months | Owned | Badge |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| LiveKitThis page | 24 | 9 | 73% | 9 | — | Approved |
| WebRTC | 21 | 18 | 54% | 8 | — | — |
| Pion WebRTC | 7 | 0 | 100% | 4 | — | — |
What people said
36 of the 37 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“From that perspective it has worked great.”
“Our platform gives developers everything they need to build, test, deploy, scale, and observe agents in production.”
“Once I wired that up on a real LiveKit + Twilio SIP call”
“high quality e2ee voice/video/screensharing (thanks LiveKit)”
“the correct solution is probably to farm that out to a service. LiveKit or something fatter”
“LiveKit was a really nice foundation for video and audio calls.”
“I moved over to using livekit for the service, and man, I should've done that sooner.”
“I also moved over to using livekit for the service, and man, I should've done that sooner.”
“depend on stateful services that, at best, place ceilings on call lifetimes”
“it is super annoying when speed slows down or speeds up at times when connection is not robust”
“i like livekit for this reason and their ceo is cool”
“LiveKit's DPA, not their generic user ToS, explicitly classifies LiveKit as an independent controller for operational metrics”
“I think LiveKit will handle many things also with that”
“with LiveKit as well, but it's a pain”
“livekit can hand call records to us law enforcement without notifying proton”
“I'm running a selfhosted livekit deployment at work and it's a major pain in the ass.”
“The WebRTC + LiveKit suggestion is spot on.”
“This is the way. This is something I’m working on but for other applications.”
“With Livekit, you get most of the tricky parts served on a silver platter.”
“Livekit is very limited, video quality is a joke.”
“Livekit could at any time change their license and drop support”
“we gotchu: https://docs.livekit.io/agents/models/tts/inference/inworld/”
“Then it'll be really easy to combine InWorld and LemonSlice.”
“code available under Apache-2”
“ties into VC-funded US tech used for border surveillance”
“a great open source (MIT licensed) product written in Go”
“compared to the Livekit-based solution”
“livekit is just a framework so you can hook it up with any models in the stack”
“there will be definitive logs to capture what a user was told.”
“I think they charge 1 cent per minute?”
“The problem with PipeCat and LiveKit (the 2 major stacks for building voice ai) is the deployment at scale.”
“Could never fix their livekit stuff.”
“even with great OSS, the plumbing was still painful”
“livekit handles the webrtc video/audio (it’s been rock solid)”
“they broke their calling system after changing something to this livekit system”
“I prefered the experience with lk”
Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.