Open source / Live video & meetings
LiveKit
A set of open-source real-time audio and video components: LiveKit Server routes the media, Egress records and live-streams it. Build your own video meetings or live rooms with it, or use it under AI voice agents and digital humans.
Does it fit your team?
- Consider it if
- You have developers and want video meetings, live streaming or real-time voice AI inside your own product, without paying a cloud service by the minute.
- Look elsewhere if
- You want a meeting app that works out of the box: the interface and login are yours to build, and recording means deploying Egress as well. If you have no domain of your own or cannot open a full UDP port range, skip self-hosting and start on the official cloud’s free tier.
How each industry uses it
- Education
- Live classes and remote hands-on training
- E-commerce & retail
- Live selling
- Can you use it commercially?
- Yes
LiveKit Server, Egress and the Agents framework for voice AI are all Apache-2.0: commercial use and modification are allowed, and you do not have to publish your changes.
- Is it still maintained?
- Active
Last push on 2026-10-15. The repository is not archived.
- How hard is it to deploy?
- Moderate
LiveKit Server: an official config generator (the livekit/generate image) produces Caddy, Redis, docker compose and a startup script in one go; run the script on a Linux VM and it is up. You need your own domain: the main domain and the TURN domain must both point at the machine, and self-signed certificates do not work (Caddy obtains them automatically). Open ports 80, 443, 7881 (TCP), 3478 (UDP) and the whole UDP range 50000 to 60000. Egress: the generator does not cover it. Run it as a separate Docker service (livekit/egress) with the server’s URL and API key, connected to the same Redis as the server. Full-room recording runs Chrome inside the container, which needs the SYS_ADMIN capability or Chrome fails to start. Recordings go to S3, Azure or Google Cloud Storage. Both have official Helm charts for Kubernetes.
- What does it cost?
- Free software; you pay for servers and bandwidth
Self-hosting is free; the money goes on two kinds of machines. LiveKit Server is bound by CPU and bandwidth: in the official benchmark, one 16-core Google Cloud c2-standard-16 handled a 150-person video meeting where everyone sees everyone, at 85% CPU, and the docs recommend compute-optimized machines and 10 Gbps networking for production. Each Egress instance should have at least 4 CPUs and 4 GB; a full-room recording takes 2 to 6 CPUs, and one instance records one room at a time, so you need as many instances as rooms you record at once. If you would rather not run it all, LiveKit Cloud has a free tier with 5,000 participant minutes and 50 GB of transfer a month; paid plans start at $50 a month, with overage at $0.0005 per participant minute and $0.12 per GB.
- What else you need
- At least LiveKit Server and Redis; add Egress to record or live-stream
LiveKit Server is required: it runs the rooms and routes the media. Redis is recommended for production and required once you add Egress; both must use the same one. Egress records meetings to MP4 or HLS, or live-streams them over RTMP to platforms like YouTube Live and Twitch; recordings need an S3, Azure or Google Cloud bucket. You also need a domain of your own. Ingress (bringing outside RTMP streams into a room) and Agents (voice AI) are optional and not needed for meetings alone.
- What to watch out for
- A toolkit, not a ready-made meeting app
The meeting interface, login and permissions are for your own developers to build. The official sample app, LiveKit Meet, is open source, but its README only covers local development, not production. The Chrome inside Egress runs with its sandbox off by default; turning it on takes an extra setting and a seccomp profile.
Last checked: .
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