LiveKit Agents: review, pricing, security and alternatives

What LiveKit Agents does

LiveKit Agents belongs to the voice agents family: agents that listen and answer out loud, on the phone or in an app, in real time. On our grid it ranks #2 of the 3 projects of this family listed in the directory.

A framework is not used as is: it is a library developers build into their own code to describe the agent's tools, decision loop and memory. It requires programming skills, but leaves control over every detail.

You use it from: developer SDK and terminal (CLI). Usable models: GPT (OpenAI), Gemini (Google), Claude (Anthropic), and local models (Ollama, llama.cpp, vLLM…). It can run on your own machine or server.

Who is LiveKit Agents for?

It targets companies that want an agent able to hold a spoken conversation, on the phone or in an app. Typical tasks people give it:

• answer simple calls and book appointments
• qualify a caller before transferring
• add a voice interface to an app

It is a good candidate if you are comfortable in a terminal, your data must stay on your machines, and you want the option of a local model, with no API fees.

Access and human control

A framework has no access of its own: the tools you plug in define what the agent can do. Start with read-only tools.

We could not establish whether it asks for human approval before sensitive actions: test it first on an unimportant account or folder.

LiveKit Agents pricing

The code is free, under the Apache-2.0 licence.

Getting started with LiveKit Agents

1. Install it: the project ships as a Python package (install with pip or uv). The exact command is in the repository README.
2. Pick the model: an API key from a provider, or a local model if your machine has enough graphics memory (the VRAM calculator tells you).
3. Start with the minimal example from the docs, then add one tool at a time and check what the agent does with it.
4. Give it a short, checkable task, review the result and its action log, then raise the difficulty step by step.

Security: risk level

A voice agent records voices, which are sensitive personal data: inform callers and check where recordings are stored.

Three habits: least privilege (minimal rights, dedicated keys), human approval for irreversible actions, a sandbox for code execution. The AI agent security check reviews your setup in a few minutes.

Project activity and releases

Created on October 19, 2023, the livekit/agents repository has 14,921 stars, 3,992 forks and 234 open issues, with 4,313 commits in total. It received changes this month.

Over the last 52 weeks: 1,949 commits, an average of 37.5 per week.

380 releases in total; 30 in the last twelve months. Latest release: livekit-agents@1.8.9, on October 24, 2026.

LiveKit Agents and other voice agents at a glance

The 2 best-ranked agents in the same family, 2 of them open source. The score out of 100 only applies to open-source projects; for proprietary services we show the published entry price. A dash marks information the documentation does not state.

How we rated it

Score: 81/100, computed only from public, verifiable data, with no subjective testing or partnership:

• Adoption 26/40: 14,921 stars on a log scale (40 points from about 200,000).
• Activity 30/30: last commit less than a month ago, 30 releases in six months, 1,949 commits in a year.
• Framework 25/30: licence, default human approval, self-hosting, model choice and documentation site.

The score does not say whether the agent will succeed at your tasks: it measures how solid the project is. The full grid is on the method page.