LiveKit vs Daily vs 100ms: Real-Time Video SDKs for Apps 2026

Real-time video is no longer a nice-to-have feature. Telehealth platforms, remote education tools, live commerce apps, and AI-powered meeting assistants all depend on low-latency, high-quality video that works across devices. The SDK you pick determines your latency floor, your infrastructure costs at scale, and how fast your team can ship new features.

All three platforms in this comparison sit on top of WebRTC, the open standard for peer-to-peer audio and video in the browser. WebRTC handles media capture, encoding (VP8, VP9, H.264, AV1), DTLS encryption, and ICE connectivity. But raw WebRTC gives you peer-to-peer only, which breaks down past 4 to 6 participants. That is where Selective Forwarding Units (SFUs) come in. An SFU receives each participant's media stream and selectively forwards it to every other participant without decoding or re-encoding. This keeps latency low (typically under 200ms) while scaling to dozens or hundreds of participants. All three SDKs use SFU-based architectures, but they differ sharply in how much of the stack you control, what you pay, and what comes out of the box.

If you are building a video calling app from scratch, this comparison will save you weeks of evaluation. We have deployed production video features using all three platforms, and each one fits a different set of constraints.

LiveKit is the open-source option. Its server is written in Go, the codebase lives on GitHub under the Apache 2.0 license, and you can self-host it on your own infrastructure. That single fact sets LiveKit apart from Daily and 100ms. If your product has data residency requirements (HIPAA, GDPR, government contracts), running LiveKit on your own servers means video streams never touch a third-party cloud.

Architecture and Performance

LiveKit's SFU supports simulcast (each publisher sends multiple resolution layers so the server can forward the right quality to each subscriber), adaptive bitrate control, and dynamic codec switching between VP8, H.264, and AV1. A single LiveKit server instance can handle roughly 300 to 500 concurrent participants in a room before you need to shard across nodes. For larger deployments, LiveKit provides a multi-node architecture with Redis-based coordination. End-to-end latency in production sits between 100ms and 250ms depending on geography and network conditions.

Developer Experience

Client SDKs are available for React, JavaScript, Swift (iOS), Kotlin (Android), Flutter, Unity, and Rust. The React components library (livekit-react) provides prebuilt UI components for video tiles, participant lists, and device selectors, cutting initial integration time to a few days. Server-side SDKs exist for Node.js, Go, Python, and Ruby. The API surface is clean but lower-level than Daily. You write more code, but you have more control over every aspect of the call experience.

AI and Agents Framework

LiveKit's standout feature in 2026 is its Agents framework. You can write server-side Python agents that join rooms as participants, consume audio/video streams, run them through AI models (speech-to-text, LLMs, text-to-speech), and publish results back into the room. This makes LiveKit the strongest choice for AI-native products: real-time transcription bots, AI meeting copilots, voice AI assistants, and automated moderation. The Agents framework handles the complexity of real-time media pipelines so your team focuses on the AI logic, not the plumbing.

Pricing

Self-hosted: free (you pay your own infrastructure costs). LiveKit Cloud: $0.004 per participant-minute for audio, $0.016 per participant-minute for video. For a 60-minute call with 10 video participants, that is roughly $9.60. Egress (recording and streaming): $0.024 per composed minute. Compared to Daily and 100ms, LiveKit Cloud pricing is competitive, and the self-hosted option drops your marginal cost to infrastructure only.

Daily is a fully managed video API. You do not run servers, manage TURN infrastructure, or worry about scaling. Daily's pitch is straightforward: the fastest path from zero to production video. For teams that want to ship a working video call in a week, Daily delivers.

Architecture and Reliability

Daily operates a global SFU network spanning 12+ regions. Their infrastructure automatically routes participants to the nearest server and handles failover. TURN servers are built in, so calls work reliably behind corporate firewalls and restrictive NATs. You get 99.99% uptime SLA on their Scale plan. Under the hood, Daily uses a custom SFU built on top of Pion (Go-based WebRTC library), with simulcast and adaptive bitrate enabled by default.

Developer Experience

This is Daily's real strength. Their JavaScript SDK (daily-js) is around 250KB gzipped, and their prebuilt UI component (Daily Prebuilt) gives you a complete video call interface with a single iframe embed. Prebuilt is customizable through a dashboard: you can toggle participant controls, set layouts, add branding, and configure recording without writing frontend code. For deeper customization, their call object mode gives you full control over rendering and interaction.

Mobile SDKs for iOS (Swift) and Android (Kotlin) are well-documented and actively maintained. React Native support is first-class, not a community wrapper. Daily also provides a REST API for room management, recording control, and usage analytics.

Recording and Transcription

Daily's cloud recording produces MP4 or WebM outputs with configurable layouts (grid, speaker-focused, custom). Live transcription via Deepgram integration is available as a toggle. Real-time transcription results are delivered as events you can render in your UI or pipe to downstream services. For teams building a telemedicine platform, this combination of recording and transcription covers clinical documentation needs without third-party integrations.

Pricing

Free: 10,000 participant-minutes/month. Scale: $0.008 per participant-minute for video (200 participant cap per room). Recording: $0.018 per recorded minute. Transcription: $0.02 per transcribed minute. A 60-minute call with 10 video participants costs $4.80 on the video side alone. Daily is more expensive per minute than LiveKit Cloud, but you pay for zero ops overhead and a polished developer experience.

100ms was founded by former engineers from Disney+ and Facebook Live. Their platform focuses on large-scale interactive video: live streaming with viewer participation, virtual events with thousands of attendees, and education platforms where hundreds of students watch a teacher while selectively raising hands or joining breakout rooms.

Architecture

100ms uses a role-based permission system that is baked into the SDK. You define roles (host, speaker, viewer, moderator) in the dashboard, and each role gets specific permissions for publishing audio, video, screen shares, and sending chat messages. This role system is more opinionated than LiveKit or Daily, but for apps with complex participant hierarchies, it saves significant backend logic.

Their SFU supports up to 10,000 participants per room in "large room" mode (most as viewers consuming a few publisher streams). For interactive calls where everyone publishes, the practical limit is around 100 participants. Simulcast, adaptive bitrate, and automatic quality degradation are handled server-side.

Developer Experience

SDKs are available for JavaScript, React, React Native, Flutter, iOS, and Android. The React SDK (@100mslive/react-sdk) uses a hooks-based API that feels natural for React developers. Integration is faster than LiveKit's lower-level approach but slightly more complex than Daily Prebuilt. 100ms provides prebuilt UI components, though they are less polished than Daily's iframe solution.

Live Streaming and Recording

100ms has strong built-in support for HLS (HTTP Live Streaming) and RTMP output. You can take an interactive room and simulcast it to YouTube, Twitch, or a custom HLS endpoint without additional infrastructure. This makes 100ms a natural fit for hybrid events where some participants are interactive and thousands more watch a live stream with 5 to 10 second latency. Cloud recording outputs MP4 with customizable layouts, and beam recording (server-side browser rendering) lets you capture exactly what participants see.

Pricing

Free: 10,000 participant-minutes/month. Professional: $0.004 per participant-minute for audio, $0.008 per participant-minute for video. Recording: $0.02 per composed minute. SRT/HLS streaming: $0.005 per viewer-minute. For the same 60-minute, 10-participant video call, 100ms costs $4.80 for video. At the per-minute rate, 100ms is cheaper than Daily for video and comparable to LiveKit Cloud, making it attractive for high-volume use cases.

Here is how the three platforms compare across the dimensions that matter most when you are building a production video product.

Open Source and Self-Hosting

• LiveKit: Fully open-source (Apache 2.0). Self-host on AWS, GCP, bare metal, or use LiveKit Cloud.
• Daily: Proprietary, managed only. No self-hosting option.
• 100ms: Proprietary, managed only. No self-hosting option.

If you need to run video infrastructure in your own VPC or on-premises, LiveKit is your only option among these three. This matters for healthcare (HIPAA with full data control), government, and financial services.

Mobile SDK Quality

All three offer native iOS and Android SDKs, plus React Native and Flutter support. In our experience, Daily's mobile SDKs have the fewest edge-case bugs around backgrounding, Bluetooth audio routing, and CallKit/ConnectionService integration. LiveKit's mobile SDKs are solid but require more manual configuration for production polish. 100ms sits in the middle, with good defaults but occasional quirks around Android audio focus handling.

Screen Sharing

LiveKit supports screen sharing with audio on Chrome, Edge, and Electron, plus system-level screen capture on iOS and Android with platform-specific APIs. Daily supports screen sharing across all desktop browsers and mobile via their prebuilt UI. 100ms supports screen sharing with a focus on high-resolution capture (up to 1080p at 15fps) for use cases like code review or design collaboration. All three handle tab sharing with audio in Chromium browsers.

Background Effects

Background blur and virtual backgrounds are table stakes in 2026. Daily offers built-in background blur via their SDK with a single API call. 100ms provides virtual background through their plugin system. LiveKit leaves this to client-side implementation, though community libraries (like mediapipe-based solutions) work well. If you want background effects with zero custom code, Daily wins.

Cost at Scale

Consider a product with 50,000 monthly active users averaging 3 calls per month at 30 minutes each, with 4 participants per call. That is 18 million participant-minutes per month.

• LiveKit Cloud: ~$288,000/year at list price (negotiable at volume). Self-hosted: $20,000 to $50,000/year in infrastructure depending on region distribution.
• Daily: ~$1,728,000/year at list price (volume discounts apply, but still the most expensive).
• 100ms: ~$1,728,000/year at list price for video, though aggressive volume discounts bring this down significantly.

The cost gap between self-hosted LiveKit and managed platforms widens dramatically at scale. For a startup doing 100,000 minutes/month, the difference is negligible. For a platform doing tens of millions of minutes, self-hosting saves six figures annually.

The most interesting shift in video SDKs over the past year is native AI integration. Real-time video is no longer just about connecting two cameras. Products now expect live transcription, AI-generated meeting summaries, automatic highlight clips, real-time translation, and intelligent noise suppression.

LiveKit: AI-First Architecture

LiveKit's Agents framework is the most advanced AI integration among the three. Agents are server-side processes that participate in rooms just like human users. They can subscribe to audio tracks, run them through Whisper or Deepgram for transcription, feed transcripts into an LLM, and publish synthesized speech back into the room. The framework handles all the real-time media plumbing: audio chunking, VAD (voice activity detection), stream synchronization, and backpressure. If you are building an AI voice assistant, a real-time interpreter, or an AI meeting notetaker, LiveKit gives you the most flexibility. For more on building products with these patterns, see our real-time features guide.

Daily: Practical AI Integrations

Daily takes a more practical approach. Their Bots framework (powered by Pipecat, which Daily sponsors) lets you build voice AI agents that join calls. Daily also offers native integrations with Deepgram for live transcription, and their REST API makes it straightforward to trigger post-call processing (summarization, action item extraction) after a recording completes. Daily's AI story is less flexible than LiveKit's but requires less custom engineering to get working.

100ms: AI as a Plugin

100ms offers live transcription as a built-in feature and has been expanding their AI capabilities. Their transcription runs server-side and delivers results via WebSocket events. For custom AI processing, you can use their webhook system to pipe recording URLs to your own pipelines. 100ms is investing in AI features, but their platform is still catching up to LiveKit's agent-native architecture and Daily's polished integrations.

Noise Suppression

All three support AI-powered noise suppression. Daily uses Krisp's AI model built into their SDK. LiveKit offers a noise suppression plugin based on RNNoise. 100ms integrates noise cancellation at the SDK level. In our testing, Daily's Krisp integration produces the best results for suppressing keyboard noise, background conversations, and construction sounds, but all three perform well enough for production use.

After deploying all three in production for clients across healthcare, education, and SaaS, here is our honest take.

Choose LiveKit If:

• You need self-hosting for compliance, data residency, or cost control at scale
• You are building an AI-native product (voice agents, real-time transcription bots, AI copilots)
• You have backend engineers comfortable with infrastructure management
• Your product will exceed 5 million participant-minutes per month and cost optimization matters

Choose Daily If:

• You want the fastest time-to-market with the least engineering effort
• Your team is frontend-heavy and you want prebuilt UI components that work out of the box
• You need polished mobile SDKs with minimal edge-case debugging
• Your scale is moderate (under 5 million participant-minutes/month) and you prefer predictable managed costs over ops complexity

Choose 100ms If:

• Your product mixes interactive video with large-scale live streaming (virtual events, webinars, live commerce)
• You need a role-based permission system for complex participant hierarchies (teachers, students, moderators)
• HLS/RTMP simulcasting to external platforms is a core requirement
• You want competitive pricing with strong default features and less infrastructure responsibility

The Honest Truth

For most startups building a standard video calling feature in 2026, Daily is the safest bet. You ship faster, debug less, and the per-minute premium is negligible at early-stage volumes. As your product matures and your video usage grows, you can evaluate migrating to LiveKit for cost savings and AI flexibility.

If your product IS video (not just includes video), start with LiveKit. The upfront investment in understanding its lower-level APIs pays off when you need custom recording pipelines, AI agent integrations, or multi-region self-hosted deployments.

If your product centers on live events, broadcasts, or education with large audiences, 100ms gives you the best out-of-the-box support for hybrid interactive-plus-streaming architectures.

No matter which SDK you choose, the integration work is real. TURN server configuration, opting into the right codecs, handling permission prompts across browsers, building reconnection logic, and testing across network conditions all take time. If you want help evaluating these platforms for your specific use case or need a team to build the integration, book a free strategy call and we will walk through the right approach for your product.