Open Source Daily Alternative

Why choose an open-source Daily alternative

Daily provides WebRTC video and voice infrastructure as a hosted API, billed per participant-minute. That works well until usage scales or a product needs custom media routing, at which point per-minute pricing becomes a significant cost line. An open-source, self-hosted WebRTC platform removes the per-minute billing model entirely: infrastructure cost becomes server capacity instead of usage-based fees, which is cheaper at scale and easier to budget for.

Self-hosting also gives control over data residency, since media never leaves infrastructure the team owns, and over the media pipeline itself, including custom recording, transcription hooks, or AI agent integration at the SFU layer rather than through a vendor's exposed API surface.

What to look for

A real-time communication alternative to Daily needs a selective forwarding unit (SFU) architecture for efficient multi-party audio and video, SDKs across web, mobile, and native platforms, and support for data channels alongside media. Given how much of this space now overlaps with AI voice agents, check for built-in support for streaming audio to speech-to-text and text-to-speech pipelines, a common use case beyond plain video calling.

LiveKit as a Daily alternative

LiveKit is an open-source WebRTC platform built around a Go-based SFU, with SDKs for JavaScript, React, Swift, Kotlin, Flutter, and other platforms. It handles the same core job as Daily: real-time audio, video, and data channels between participants, with server-side recording and composite output. LiveKit can be self-hosted on any Linux server or Kubernetes cluster, or used through LiveKit Cloud if a team prefers managed infrastructure while keeping the option to migrate to self-hosting later. It has also become a common infrastructure layer for AI voice agents, with an Agents framework for wiring speech-to-text, LLMs, and text-to-speech into a live call, a use case that has driven a large share of its recent adoption alongside traditional video calling.