11st of 17 in Voice and realtime
livekit
WebRTC SFU server for realtime audio, video and AI agent rooms
- Stars
- 22.1k
- License
- Apache-2.0
- Last commit
- Nov 2026
- Last release
- Oct 2026
- Language
- Go
18,155 on 21 Apr 202622,145 on 10 Nov 2026
From GitHub's daily star counts.
Checked on GitHub.
LiveKit is hiring: 30 open roles
Overview
LiveKit server is a distributed WebRTC SFU written in Go on Pion. People, devices and AI agents join the same room as participants, with JWT access tokens, simulcast, SVC codecs (VP9, AV1), end-to-end encryption and SIP telephony. Agent logic lives in the separate LiveKit Agents SDK (Python, Node.js), not in this repository.
Who it is for: Developers building voice, video or AI agent apps on self-hosted WebRTC
Ranked among open-source alternatives to Vapi (#1 of 10).
Strengths
- Single Go binary; also ships Docker images and Helm charts
- Client SDKs for web, mobile, desktop, embedded and server languages
- Distributed and multi-region deployment, with UDP, TCP and TURN connectivity
- Dev mode (livekit-server --dev) starts with a placeholder API key pair
Weaknesses
- Server only: voice agents need the separate Agents SDK and model plugins
- Egress, ingress and SIP are separate repositories to deploy
- Self-hosting has no LiveKit Inference; you wire up provider plugins and keys yourself
- Production setup (TURN, multi-region, scaling) needs networking knowledge
What it needs
- Go
- Docker
Quick answers
Is livekit open source?
Yes. Its code is on GitHub under the Apache-2.0 license.
Can you run livekit with Docker?
Yes. Its repository has a Docker setup: a Dockerfile, a Compose file or a published image.
Head to head
Also in Voice and realtime
See all 17| Rank | Project | Score |
|---|---|---|
| 2 | voice-ui-kitReact components and templates for Pipecat voice agent frontends | 62 out of 100 |
| 3 | pipecat-examplesIntermediate and advanced example bots built on the Pipecat voice framework | 56 out of 100 |
| #4 | agent-starter-nodeNode.js voice AI agent starter for LiveKit Agents | 54 out of 100 |
| #5 | agent-starter-reactNext.js voice assistant frontend for LiveKit Agents | 53 out of 100 |
| #6 | agent-starter-pythonPython voice AI agent template for LiveKit Agents | 51 out of 100 |