LiveKit Agents vs PolyAI

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. Until May 2026, PolyAI was sales-led only; it then opened a genuine 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.

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's self-serve tier is free for two months, but what happens after that period is not publicly disclosed anywhere; its largest deployments (PG&E's, handling 16 million calls a year) still run through a separate, custom-quoted, sales-led engagement billed per minute, bundling ongoing tuning, maintenance and 24/7 support with no public rate card.

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 now offers two paths since its May 2026 opening: 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. 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.