LiveKit Agents vs Pipecat
Pricing and features, side by side. Checked October 14, 2026.
| LiveKit Agents | Pipecat | |
|---|---|---|
| Starting price | Free; Ship from $50/mo | Free (self-host); Pipecat Cloud from $0.01/min |
| Billing | Plan + per-minute usage | Free open source (BSD-2); optional Pipecat Cloud hosting per minute |
| Best for | Developers building on open-source realtime infrastructure | Python developers who want full control of the voice pipeline and any model provider |
| Key features | Open-source Agents framework and media server you can self-host | Open-source Python framework maintained by Daily |
| LiveKit Inference: LLM, STT and TTS models through one API key, billed per minute | Swap STT, LLM and TTS across 200+ integrated providers | |
| Built-in end-of-turn detection and interruption handling | Interruption handling and turn detection |
Both are open-source frameworks for building realtime voice agents in code, with optional paid cloud hosting. LiveKit Agents is Apache-2.0 licensed; LiveKit Cloud's free Build plan includes 1,000 agent session minutes and 5 concurrent sessions, and Ship starts at $50/mo with 5,000 minutes, then $0.01/min. Pipecat, maintained by Daily, is BSD-2 licensed; Pipecat Cloud charges $0.01 per active minute on its smallest agent-1x profile, with unlimited concurrency, free Daily WebRTC for 1:1 voice sessions and $0.018/min for PSTN dial-in/out.
Pick LiveKit Agents if you want included free minutes, built-in turn detection, and LiveKit Inference to bill LLM, STT and TTS through one key.
Pick Pipecat if you want a Python pipeline you can wire to 200+ provider integrations and pay-per-active-minute hosting with no concurrency cap.
Sources: LiveKit Agents · Pipecat