ANALYSIS VERDICT
LiveKit leads on autonomy (72 vs 70), while Cartesia starts at $0/mo. Select LiveKit for industry standard for ultra-low latency multimodal streaming; consider Cartesia if you prioritize unmatched sub-100ms audio generation speed.
| Metric / Feature | LiveKit Visit livekit.io ↗ | Cartesia Visit cartesia.ai ↗ |
|---|---|---|
| Autonomy Score (AES) | 72/100 Core 87 · -15 setup | 70/100 Core 80 · -10 setup |
| Value-to-Cost Ratio | 7.52 | 5.01 |
| Starting Price | $0/mo | $0/mo |
| Pricing Model | freemium | freemium |
| Primary Strengths |
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| Tradeoffs |
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| Common Integrations | No direct shared integrations recorded. | |
| Unique Integrations | ||
Pricing tier comparison
LiveKit tiers
Build
$0 /month
- 1,000 agent session minutes included
- 5,000 WebRTC minutes included
- 1 free US local phone number (50 inbound mins included)
- Agent deployment, observability, and simulations
- Global edge network & community support
Ship
$50 /month
- 5,000 agent session minutes included (then $0.01/min)
- 150,000 WebRTC minutes included (then $0.0005/min)
- Team collaboration
- Custom voices
- Instant rollback to a previous agent deployment
- Email support
Scale
$500 /month
- 50,000 agent session minutes included (then $0.01/min)
- 1.5M WebRTC minutes included (then $0.0004/min)
- Role-based access
- Metrics export APIs & region pinning
- Private links
- Security reports (SOC 2 Type II) & HIPAA compliance
- Inference discounts
Enterprise
Custom /custom
- Volume pricing, including inference
- Shared Slack channel
- SSO
- Support SLA
Cartesia tiers
Free
$0 /month
- 20K credits / month
- $1 prepaid agents / month (~33 agent minutes)
- Text to Speech (Sonic-3.6, ~27 min)
- Speech to Text (Ink-2, ~1h 51m)
- 2 concurrent TTS requests, 8 concurrent STT requests
Pro
$5 /month
- 100K credits / month
- $5 prepaid agents / month (~2h 47m)
- Commercial use license
- Instant voice cloning
- 3 concurrent TTS requests, 12 concurrent STT requests
Startup
$49 /month
- 1.25M credits / month
- $49 prepaid agents / month (~27h 13m)
- Pro voice cloning (2 slots)
- Organizations support
- 5 concurrent TTS requests, 20 concurrent STT requests
Scale
$299 /month
- 8M credits / month
- $299 prepaid agents / month (~166h 7m)
- Priority support
- High concurrency limits (15 TTS, 60 STT)
- Pro voice cloning (4 slots)
Enterprise
Custom /custom
- Custom credits & agent usage
- Volume pricing
- Custom concurrency limits
- DPAs and BAAs for compliance
- Shared Slack channel & SSO
Neither quite right? Tell us your team and budget and we'll pick the top 3.