LiveKit Agents vs Ultravox (2026): which should you pick?

Pick LiveKit Agents if

• Fits if you are a developer who wants to build and ship a voice agent in one place
• Works for teams that start on the free plan and add phone lines later

Look elsewhere if

• Not for you if you want no-code: you build agents in code
• Tight if you leave the free plan: 1,000 minutes, 5 concurrent sessions
• Pricey if you add it up: sessions, phone lines and models are billed per minute on top of the plan
• Watch out: private links, role-based access and HIPAA reports start at Scale, $500 a month

Pick Ultravox if

• Fits if you are a developer who wants one model that listens and speaks
• Makes sense if you will pay by the minute and build your own call flow

Look elsewhere if

• Not for you if you want a no-code builder: it is APIs and SDKs
• Watch out: the site says Ultravox has been acquired by Inworld, and plans and pricing may change
• Tight if you scale on Pay as You Go: it is capped at 5 concurrent calls
• Watch out: the pricing page marks prices as an annual rate and shows no monthly-billed price

LiveKit Agents

• The plan prices are 'starting at' and add per-minute charges for agent sessions, telephony and model use.
• An estimator on the pricing page gives about $0.0479 a minute for one sample phone-call setup; model choice changes it.
• Private links, role-based access and HIPAA reports start at the Scale plan.

Ultravox

• The site announces that Ultravox has been acquired by Inworld; future plans and pricing may change.
• The pricing page marks prices as an annual rate; a monthly-billed price is not shown.
• Pay as You Go is capped at 5 concurrent calls.
• Threads pricing is $2.00 per 1M uncached input tokens and $15.00 per 1M output tokens.

LiveKit Agents

Agents framework

An open source framework for building and testing voice agents in Python or Node.js.

LiveKit Inference

One API key for speech-to-text, language and text-to-speech models, billed by model per minute.

Agent deployment

Hosts agents on LiveKit Cloud with rollback, deployment metrics and a global network.

Telephony

Phone numbers and SIP integrations so an agent can take or place calls.

Observability and simulations

Session recordings, event logs and text simulations for testing agents.

Ultravox

Speech-native model

Processes audio directly so tone and cadence are not lost in transcription, and the vendor runs its own inference stack.

REST APIs and SDKs

Developer APIs plus kits for web and mobile platforms.

Telephony

Built-in telephony support, with SIP calls priced from about half a cent per minute.

Outbound call scheduler

Schedules outbound calls; available on Pro and Enterprise.

RAG corpora

Attach knowledge corpora to an agent: 2 on Pay as You Go and 20 on Pro.

LiveKit Agents

• Build$0

  1,000 agent session minutes, 5 concurrent sessions, $2.50 of inference credits, community support.

• Ship$50

  per month, starting at

  5,000 session minutes then $0.01 a minute, 20 concurrent sessions, team access and email support.

• Scale$500

  per month, starting at

  50,000 session minutes, up to 600 concurrent sessions, roles, region pinning and HIPAA reports.

• EnterpriseCustom

  Volume pricing, SSO, a support SLA and a shared Slack channel.

Ultravox

• Pay as You Go$0

  per month, plus $0.05 per minute

  30 free minutes, then 5 cents a minute; up to 5 concurrent calls and 2 RAG corpora.

• Pro$100

  per month, billed yearly

  No hard cap on concurrency, outbound call scheduler, 5 custom voices and 20 RAG corpora.

• EnterpriseCustom

  Priority SLA, org support and customizable limits.