LiveKit Agents vs PolyAI (2026)

LiveKit Agents and PolyAI both sit in the voice-agents category, but they come from opposite starting points. LiveKit Agents is an Apache 2.0-licensed, fully open-source framework from real-time infrastructure company LiveKit. Founded in 2021 as an open WebRTC project, it now powers OpenAI's ChatGPT Advanced Voice Mode alongside customers like xAI, Salesforce and Tesla, backed by a $1B valuation on $181.3M raised (a $100M Series C led by Index Ventures, January 2026). You write agent code in Python or TypeScript, wiring together your own speech-to-text/LLM/text-to-speech pipeline (or LiveKit's managed Inference gateway), and can self-host the entire stack or run it on LiveKit Cloud. PolyAI is the category's pre-LLM-era incumbent: founded in London in 2017 by Nikola Mrkšić, Shawn Wen and Eddy Su, growing out of Cambridge machine-learning research, now valued at $750M (an $86M Series D in December 2025, with NVIDIA's NVentures among the backers) with 200+ enterprise customers running thousands of live deployments across 75+ languages in 25+ countries. Its proprietary Raven dialog model now also runs alongside GPT-5, Claude and Gemini. PolyAI was sales-led only for its first eight years; a May 2026 platform opening briefly introduced a self-serve on-ramp: a no-code Poly Agent Builder plus a developer-focused Agent Development Kit (ADK), free for the first two months from just an email address. Re-verified live in August 2026, that on-ramp is gone from PolyAI's own site: access is sales-led again.

Pricing is where the two diverge hardest. LiveKit publishes a full, transparent ladder: Build is free (1,000 agent-session minutes/month, 5 concurrent sessions, $2.50 inference credit, no credit card required), Ship starts at $50/month (5,000 minutes included, then $0.01/min, 20 concurrent sessions), Scale starts at $500/month (50,000 minutes included, up to 600 concurrent sessions), and Enterprise is custom above that. Every tier's numbers are on the public pricing page today. PolyAI publishes no public rate card at all: every deployment, including its largest (PG&E's, handling 16 million calls a year), runs through a custom-quoted, sales-led engagement billed per minute, bundling ongoing tuning, maintenance and 24/7 support; third-party estimates put typical contracts starting around $150,000/year.

The access model is the other real fork. LiveKit Agents is a framework and SDK, not a turnkey dashboard: you write and deploy real code, choosing your own providers or LiveKit's managed gateway, which suits engineering teams that want full ownership and no vendor lock-in. PolyAI offers two paths once an engagement is underway: the no-code Poly Agent Builder, which PolyAI claims can produce a production-ready agent in under 10 minutes from a natural-language description, and the ADK for engineers who want a Git-based, code-first workflow with 130+ pre-built Connect Portal integrations, but reaching either now starts with a sales conversation, not a signup form. PolyAI also brings deeper enterprise proof at scale today (a Forrester-modeled 391% three-year ROI for a composite customer, SOC 2/HIPAA/GDPR/PCI DSS compliance out of the box, and named production deployments most vendors in this category can't match), while LiveKit's open-source model means you can inspect, modify and audit every line running your voice agent yourself.