Pick LiveKit if
voice teams who will burn Build for $0 (1,000 agent minutes, $2.50 inference credits, 1 free number) and only open Ship at $50 when they need a second deploy and email support.
Read the LiveKit pageLiveKit vs Pipecat
Our take
Pick LiveKit if voice teams who will burn Build for $0 (1,000 agent minutes, $2.50 inference credits, 1 free number) and only open Ship at $50 when they need a second deploy and email support. Pick Pipecat if voice engineers who will run OSS for $0 (you pay Deepgram / OpenAI / Cartesia) and only open Cloud when they want pipecat cloud deploy instead of a box.
Best for
LiveKit A voice or video agent with rooms, phones, and traces
Pipecat Orchestrate providers you already pay
Free plan
LiveKit $0 · you host the media server and the agent process
Pipecat $0 · you pay the providers you plug in
Lowest paid
LiveKit Ship $50/mo
Pipecat Transport $0.001
Next step up
LiveKit Scale $500/mo
Pipecat Krisp VIVA $0.0015
Coding agent
LiveKit Voice Agents
Pipecat Agent + Tab inside the editor
Runs where
LiveKit Hosted
Pipecat Hosted
Watch out
LiveKit Build $0 is not free tokens
Pipecat OSS is $0
Last checked
LiveKit 2026-10-22 · livekit.io/pricing
Pipecat 2026-10-22 · daily.co/pricing/pipecat-cloud
Which one, then?
Pick Pipecat if
voice engineers who will run OSS for $0 (you pay Deepgram / OpenAI / Cartesia) and only open Cloud when they want pipecat cloud deploy instead of a box.
Read the Pipecat page