LiveKit Agents vs Pipecat

LiveKit Agents9.2Visit Pipecat9.1Visit

Higher score LiveKit Agents #3 in AI Voice Agents 9.2/10 Free plan Free plan✓ 4 of 4 features Visit LiveKit

vs

Pipecat #4 in AI Voice Agents 9.1/10 Open source ✓ 4 of 4 features Visit Pipecat

• LiveKit Agents fits best

  Developers building realtime voice agents

• Pipecat fits best

  Teams building composable voice pipelines

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Side by side

Feature	LiveKit Agents 9.2/10 Visit ↗	Pipecat 9.1/10 Visit ↗
At a glance
Editor score	9.2	9.1
Ranking	#3 in AI Voice Agents	#4 in AI Voice Agents
Best for	Developers building realtime voice agents	Teams building composable voice pipelines
Pricing model	Free plan + paid	Free
Starting price	$50/mo	Free
Free plan	✓ (best)	Not checked yet
Free trial	—	—
Deployment	Self-hosted	Cloud, Mobile, Self-hosted
Integrations	11 integrations	12 integrations
Features LiveKit Agents 4/4 · Pipecat 4/4
Inbound calls	✓	✓
Outbound calls	✓	✓
Human handoff	✓	✓
Custom phone numbers	✓	✓
Specs
Supported languages	Not checked yet	Not checked yet
Concurrent calls	20 calls	Not checked yet
Our review
Pros	Connects pluggable LLM, STT, TTS, and realtime model providers Supports inbound and outbound telephony, transfers, and agent handoffs Includes testing, recordings, transcripts, traces, and logs	Combines audio, video, text, image, AI-service, and transport components Supports multi-agent handoffs, parallel execution, and PSTN/SIP calling Offers CLI deployment workflows plus metrics, traces, and OpenTelemetry
Cons	Building with the framework requires developer-led implementation Ship starts at $50/month; Scale is $500/month The listed feature set may be broader than needed for simple voice bots	Building agents requires assembling pipeline components Pipecat Cloud hosting is priced per active agent minute The listed Cloud profiles range from voice-only to voice-and-video workloads
Our verdict	LiveKit Agents is an open-source framework for building programmable, realtime voice and multimodal AI agents. It is aimed at developers and teams creating conversational voice applications or other realtime AI experiences. Agents can run… Read the review →	Pipecat is an open-source Python framework for developers building real-time voice and multimodal conversational agents. Its composable pipelines cover speech recognition, language models, text-to-speech, transport, tools, and conversation… Read the review →

Strengths and trade-offs

• LiveKit Agents — where it wins

  • Connects pluggable LLM, STT, TTS, and realtime model providers
  • Supports inbound and outbound telephony, transfers, and agent handoffs
  • Includes testing, recordings, transcripts, traces, and logs

  Where it doesn't

  • Building with the framework requires developer-led implementation
  • Ship starts at $50/month; Scale is $500/month
  • The listed feature set may be broader than needed for simple voice bots

• Pipecat — where it wins

  • Combines audio, video, text, image, AI-service, and transport components
  • Supports multi-agent handoffs, parallel execution, and PSTN/SIP calling
  • Offers CLI deployment workflows plus metrics, traces, and OpenTelemetry

  Where it doesn't

  • Building agents requires assembling pipeline components
  • Pipecat Cloud hosting is priced per active agent minute
  • The listed Cloud profiles range from voice-only to voice-and-video workloads

• LiveKit Agents9.2/10 · Free plan

  An open framework for building realtime voice agents, with optional managed cloud plans.

  Visit LiveKitFull verdict →
• Pipecat9.1/10 · Open source

  A composable Python framework for building and deploying voice and multimodal agents.

  Visit PipecatFull verdict →