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OpenVidu vs LiveKit#

OpenVidu is an ecosystem of modules for real-time media applications, built around a fork of LiveKit — 100% compatible with its client and server SDKs, so your existing LiveKit code runs against OpenVidu unchanged. It supports both LiveKit's Pion media engine and mediasoup (~2x more efficient than Pion), and it bundles what self-hosted LiveKit otherwise leaves for you to assemble yourself: Egress, Ingress, S3-compatible storage, observability, and an admin dashboard, all wired up by default.

Same SDKs, zero migration cost#

Because OpenVidu is a fork, not a rewrite, this is the same code you'd write for LiveKit itself:

import { Room } from "livekit-client";

const room = new Room();
await room.connect("wss://your-openvidu-deployment", token);
await room.localParticipant.enableCameraAndMicrophone();

import { AccessToken } from "livekit-server-sdk";

const token = new AccessToken(API_KEY, API_SECRET, { identity: "user-1" });
token.addGrant({ roomJoin: true, room: "my-room" });
return await token.toJwt();

Any LiveKit tutorial, any third-party LiveKit example, works against an OpenVidu deployment with only the server URL changed — there's no OpenVidu-specific SDK to learn.

At a glance#

OpenVidu LiveKit (self-hosted)
Identity Fork of LiveKit, 100% API/SDK-compatible The upstream open-source project
Media engine PionCOMMUNITY or mediasoup (~2x more efficient)PRO Pion
Autoscaling Yes: Elastic & HA modesPRO Autoscaling is yours to build and operate
License Apache 2.0COMMUNITY / commercialPRO Apache 2.0
Egress/Ingress Bundled by defaultCOMMUNITY Separate services you deploy and operate yourself
AI agents OpenVidu Agents (on top of LiveKit's Agent framework), speech-processing agent bundled LiveKit's Agent framework, DIY (no agent bundled)
High-level integrations OpenVidu Meet, a ready-to-use videoconferencing application, optionally embeddable in your own app None
Dashboard OpenVidu DashboardCOMMUNITY, with detailed per-room and per-participant viewsPRO No
Observability Bundled Grafana dashboardsPRO Prometheus metrics exposed; dashboards are DIY
Cloud automation One-click automated deployments on AWS, Azure, GCP, DigitalOcean and OCI None — Helm chart or manual VM setup
Pricing FreeCOMMUNITY, flat $0.0006/core/minutePRO Free

LiveKit Cloud, LiveKit's managed SaaS, is out of scope for this table — see Where LiveKit still has the edge for what it does better than any self-hosted option, OpenVidu included.

What OpenVidu bundles that self-hosted LiveKit doesn't#

Deploying LiveKit's Egress and Ingress services yourself means running them as separate processes, each with its own API keys and sizing (LiveKit's own docs recommend at least 4 CPUs / 4GB RAM per instance). None of that is optional plumbing you can skip — recording and streaming simply don't work until it's wired up.

OpenVidu COMMUNITY ships all of it pre-integrated by default:

2x the performance with mediasoup, benchmarked#

OpenVidu's headline performance claim comes specifically from the mediasoup engine integration, not from marketing copy: the OpenVidu team built its own load-testing tool (openvidu-loadtest ) after finding that SDK-simulated clients understate real-world load compared to real browser clients. Benchmarked on identical hardware (an AWS m6in.xlarge, 4 vCPU), mediasoup handles roughly 2x the media tracks that stock LiveKit (Pion) does on the same server. Concretely:

  • Single Node, 4 CPU: up to 50 simultaneous 8-participant video conferences.
  • Streaming: 1 publisher + 1000 subscribers in a single Room, 4 CPUs.

See the full methodology and numbers in Performance.

Where LiveKit still has the edge#

To be direct about it: LiveKit Cloud's distributed global mesh — a proprietary orchestration layer LiveKit built specifically so a single session isn't bound to one server, targeting "millions of real-time participants per session" — has no equivalent in either open-source LiveKit or OpenVidu today. Self-hosted OSS LiveKit (like OpenVidu) is capped at whatever a single node can handle per room; that mesh capability is exclusive to LiveKit's paid, hosted product.

If you're weighing the underlying media engine rather than the platform, see OpenVidu vs mediasoup for the equivalent honest account of when raw mediasoup is the right call.

Pricing#

OpenVidu COMMUNITY is free, forever, and so is self-hosted LiveKit. The difference is at the top end: OpenVidu offers first-class, production-ready Elastic and HA self-hosted deployments on a pay-per-core basis, which self-hosted LiveKit does not.

OpenVidu PRO's pricing is a single number: $0.0006 per core per minute, billed while your cluster is running. See our worked examples for concrete monthly costs at several cluster sizes.

Combined with the mediasoup engine, that pricing gives OpenVidu a hard-to-match price/performance ratio.

12+ years building real-time media#

The OpenVidu team has spent more than 12 years building real-time media services and applications:

  • Low-level media engines. Some OpenVidu engineers worked on Kurento Media Server — the background that made swapping a Go media engine for a C++ one a tractable project rather than a gamble.
  • Developer experience. We built OpenVidu to make life easier for developers building media services, and that shows in everything shipped around our LiveKit fork: Egress, Ingress, S3-compatible storage, automated deployments for five clouds, and more.
  • End-user experience. Ultimately we all want to ship applications our users love, so we put real effort into helping developers get there.
  • Ready-to-use videoconferencing apps. We recently released OpenVidu Meet - a standalone, brandable application you can use as-is or embed directly into your own product.
  • Applied research. We keep pushing real-time media into new territory through applied research.

Frequently asked questions#

Is OpenVidu compatible with LiveKit?#

Yes. OpenVidu is a fork of LiveKit and is 100% compatible with its client and server SDKs and its API. Any application built for LiveKit works against an OpenVidu deployment with no code changes — only the server URL needs to point at your OpenVidu deployment instead of LiveKit. Even AI agents developed for LiveKit work seamlessly in OpenVidu.

Can I migrate an existing LiveKit app to OpenVidu?#

Yes, and there's no real "migration" work involved beyond redeploying: your existing LiveKit client and server code, and any third-party LiveKit tutorials or examples you've already integrated, run unmodified against OpenVidu.

Does OpenVidu have a hosted or cloud option?#

No. OpenVidu is self-hosted only, in both its free COMMUNITY edition and its paid PRO edition. There is no OpenVidu-hosted SaaS equivalent to LiveKit Cloud — every OpenVidu deployment runs on your own infrastructure or cloud account.

However, OpenVidu does provide production-ready single-node, Elastic and HA deployments for the five major cloud providers, which you run in your own cloud account. See the deployment types page for details.

Why does OpenVidu use mediasoup instead of LiveKit's own engine?#

LiveKit's own media engine (Pion) is written in Go, which requires a garbage collector and a relatively heavy runtime — a real cost in a performance-critical media server. OpenVidu supports Pion, but it can replace it with mediasoup, a C++ media engine, while keeping every other part of the LiveKit stack (SDKs, API, token model) unchanged. OpenVidu's own benchmarks show roughly double the media-track capacity per server as a result.