Pipecat
Hacker ApprovedShares rank 10 of 28 agent frameworks by recommenders
Open-source framework for real-time voice agents, praised for flexibility and community; critics say deploying at scale needs significant work.
Open-source framework for real-time voice agents, praised for flexibility and community; critics say deploying at scale needs significant work.
17 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 16
- criticize it
- 1
- approval share
- 94%
Recommended in 7 of 13 months
- November 2025: recommended
- December 2025: recommended
- January 2026: recommended
- February 2026: not recommended
- March 2026: recommended
- April 2026: not recommended
- May 2026: recommended
- June 2026: not recommended
- July 2026: recommended
- August 2026: not recommended
- September 2026: not recommended
- October 2026: recommended
- November 2026: not recommended (month in progress)
Why it carries the badge
- 16 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, met.
- 16 recommenders for every criticNeeds 2 to 1 or better, met.
- Recommended in 7 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
Low latency voice connections
“There was a great post the other day showing low latency end to end using Nvidia models on a single GPU with pipecat”
Comment from 24 Jan 2026 in “Ask HN: What's the current best local/open speech-to-speech setup?” “the startup time and buffering has been solved for quicker voice connections too”
Comment from 9 May 2026 in “OpenAI's WebRTC Problem” “If you like Pipecat's focus on speed”
Comment from 5 May 2026 in “How OpenAI delivers low-latency voice AI at scale” Used to build real voice agents
“Piecat is good project i had used for building voice agents but not enterprise ready need to do lot of work to deploy.”
Comment from 11 Nov 2025 in “Is there open source alternative for VAPI or retellai?” “I literally have voice agents via claude agent sdk + Pipecat , who i talk to the entire day”
Comment from 30 Jul 2026 in “Claude Is Down” “The work is based on a repo by pipecat that I forked and modified”
Comment from 24 Jan 2026 in “Ask HN: What's the current best local/open speech-to-speech setup?” Swap in any STT, LLM or TTS
“state of the art building blocks if you want to control every part of the multimodal, realtime agent processing flow”
Comment from 25 Dec 2025 in “Asterisk AI Voice Agent” “You can plug in pretty much any STT/LLM/TTS you want and go.”
Comment from 24 Jan 2026 in “Ask HN: What's the current best local/open speech-to-speech setup?” Open source with strong community
“They have an open source version of voice ai called pipecat.”
Comment from 11 Nov 2025 in “Is there open source alternative for VAPI or retellai?” “pipecat is a great open-source repo and community”
Comment from 4 May 2026 in “How OpenAI delivers low-latency voice AI at scale”
What people warn about
Each mark is one comment
Lots of plumbing to assemble
“it's more plumbing and not a true speech to speech model”
Comment from 4 May 2026 in “How OpenAI delivers low-latency voice AI at scale” “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” Enterprise deployment needs significant work
“Piecat is good project i had used for building voice agents but not enterprise ready need to do lot of work to deploy.”
Comment from 11 Nov 2025 in “Is there open source alternative for VAPI or retellai?” “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”
Other agent frameworks people recommend
The four most recommended other agent 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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Claude Agent SDK | 36 | 25 | 59% | 11 | — | — |
| LangChain | 32 | 79 | 29% | 10 | 1 yr3 owners | — |
| Mastra | 32 | 3 | 91% | 10 | — | Approved |
| LangGraph | 31 | 23 | 57% | 12 | — | — |
| PipecatThis page | 16 | 1 | 94% | 7 | — | Approved |
What people said
17 of the 19 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“I literally have voice agents via claude agent sdk + Pipecat , who i talk to the entire day”
“the startup time and buffering has been solved for quicker voice connections too”
“If you like Pipecat's focus on speed”
“it's more plumbing and not a true speech to speech model”
“I wish I had known about Pipecat a lot sooner.”
“pipecat is a great open-source repo and community”
“pipecat is the best! (imo)”
“There was a great post the other day showing low latency end to end using Nvidia models on a single GPU with pipecat”
“The work is based on a repo by pipecat that I forked and modified”
“You can plug in pretty much any STT/LLM/TTS you want and go.”
“state of the art building blocks if you want to control every part of the multimodal, realtime agent processing flow”
“The problem with PipeCat and LiveKit (the 2 major stacks for building voice ai) is the deployment at scale.”
“Pipecat supports a wide variety of network transports, including the Twilio MediaStream WebSocket protocol”
“Pipecat already supports that natively”
“even with great OSS, the plumbing was still painful”
“Piecat is good project i had used for building voice agents but not enterprise ready need to do lot of work to deploy.”
“They have an open source version of voice ai called pipecat.”
Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.