Recently, I participated in a hackathon where I had the chance to try out LiveKit. Since I had also used ElevenLabs quite extensively in some of my previous hackathons, I started wondering:
Which one is actually better for building voice agents?
So I thought, why not compare the two?
This is not meant to be an objective or production-focused comparison. These are simply my personal impressions from using both tools in hackathon projects.
I've mainly used them when the goal was to build something quickly, get a prototype running, and have a working demo by the end of the hackathon. So keep that context in mind!
Your experience might be very different if you're evaluating these tools for a production application.
Developer Experience
Let's start with the developer experience.
At first glance, the two platforms feel surprisingly similar.
The dashboard follows a very similar structure. You can configure your agent, select different voices, configure tool calling, etc.
If you've used one of them before, you'll probably feel comfortable navigating the other.
Honestly, at times it almost feels like they copied each other. That is not necessarily a bad thing, though. Once you understand the concepts in one platform, there isn't much of a learning curve when switching to the other.
ElevenLabs vs LiveKit Dashboard
Learning Resources
There is one area where I think ElevenLabs clearly has the advantage: tutorials and learning resources.
When I'm learning a new tool, one of my first steps is usually to search for YouTube tutorials.
And this is where ElevenLabs really shines.
Both platforms have tutorial videos, but I found the ones from ElevenLabs to be much more extensive and useful. They provide a lot of concrete examples that you can follow along with, making it relatively easy to go from watching a tutorial to actually building something yourself. The tutorials also tend to get to the point quickly, which is especially useful when you're working under the time pressure of a hackathon.
LiveKit, on the other hand, was... meh.
I found myself having to piece together information from different sources rather than simply following a tutorial from start to finish. For a hackathon, where you often don't have much time to figure out a new technology, this makes a noticeable difference.
Integration with phone number
If you're building a voice agent, there's a good chance that at some point you'll want to connect it to an actual phone number. And this is where the two platforms start to differ quite a bit.
Inbound Calls
For inbound calls, LiveKit has a pretty big advantage. LiveKit provides one free phone number out of the box that you can use to receive calls. ElevenLabs, on the other hand, requires you to buy a phone number from Twilio. It's around $1.50/month, which isn't much, but it's not free either. So if your goal is simply to get a phone number quickly that people can call and interact with your agent, LiveKit is the clear winner.
Outbound Calls
For outbound calls, things get a little more complicated. With LiveKit, you need to integrate with an external provider such as Twilio.
The documentation for this is actually quite good, but the process itself is fairly complex and error-prone. I had to install the Twilio CLI, configure quite a few things on the Twilio side, and then integrate everything with LiveKit.
To be fair, this might not really be LiveKit's fault, since a lot of the complexity comes from configuring Twilio itself.
ElevenLabs offers a much better experience here. They abstract almost everything away. I just need to provide the phone numbers in the ElevenLabs portal, and everything works directly from there.
For a hackathon, this is exactly the kind of abstraction I want.
Free Tier
Another important factor, especially when you're experimenting with a new tool, is how much you can actually do for free.
ElevenLabs offers 10,000 free tokens.
That sounds pretty generous at first, but in practice, I didn't find it to be enough to really experiment with the platform. Its around 5 to 10 minutes of audio. If you're building a voice agent and testing it repeatedly, those tokens can disappear surprisingly quickly.
So while you can definitely try the platform for free, you'll probably need to spend some money if you want to use it extensively.
LiveKit is more generous when it comes to its free tier. You get more audio minutes, but the number of agents is limited to one. Still, for a hackathon, one agent should be more than enough.
Features
When it comes to the actual features, both platforms take a slightly different approach. One thing I immediately noticed is that ElevenLabs offers a much larger selection of voices. If having a wide variety of voices is important for your project, ElevenLabs definitely has the advantage here.
LiveKit, on the other hand, seems to focus more on the underlying STT, LLM, and TTS pipeline. This gives you more flexibility in choosing and connecting the different components of your voice agent.
That said, with the rise of realtime models that combine these capabilities into a single model, I'm not entirely sure how relevant this architecture will be in the future. It will be interesting to see how this space evolves.
UI Components
Both platforms also offer their own UI component libraries, which can be integrated into your application to quickly build interfaces for your voice agents. Interestingly, both are built on top of Tailwind CSS and shadcn/ui.
ElevenLabs UI
I tried it out while working on a hackathon project, and I was really impressed by how easy it was to use. There are a lot of components available, and the examples are excellent. Especially in a hackathon context, this is incredibly useful.
You can basically find an example that's close to what you need, copy & paste it, and adjust it to your use case. That's exactly the kind of developer experience I want when I'm trying to build something quickly.
My favorite component is probably the Orb. It's a simple but really nice-looking component that works particularly well for voice interfaces.
LiveKit Agents UI
One thing LiveKit does particularly well is platform support. They provide components not only for React, but also for Android, Flutter, and SwiftUI.
They also offer a lot of React hooks, which give you more control over how the agent and UI are configured.
I can imagine this being really useful in production, especially for niche use cases that require extensive control. However, for hackathons, I personally prefer the abstraction that ElevenLabs UI provides. I want something that works out of the box without having to configure everything myself.
LiveKit also has fewer components, and I think their examples could be improved.
So if you need flexibility and control, LiveKit might be the better choice. If you want something polished that you can quickly integrate, I would pick ElevenLabs.
ElevenLabs vs LiveKit UI Components
Conclusion
After using both platforms, I don't think there is a single clear winner.
It really depends on what you're trying to build.
For me, ElevenLabs is the better choice when the goal is to build something quickly.
The overall developer experience feels very polished. The tutorials are great, the UI components are easy to integrate, phone number integration is incredibly simple, and there are plenty of voices to choose from.
For a hackathon, these things matter a lot.
You usually don't have the luxury of spending hours configuring infrastructure. You want to focus on your idea and get a working prototype as quickly as possible.
And this is where ElevenLabs really shines.
LiveKit, on the other hand, gives you more control.
Its approach feels more focused on giving developers the building blocks for creating their own voice agent pipeline.
The free tier is also more generous, and the support for different platforms and extensive configuration can be valuable if you have more specific requirements.
I could therefore see myself choosing LiveKit for a production application where I need more control over the underlying architecture.
So if someone asked me during a hackathon:
"Which one should I use if I just want to build a voice agent right now?"
My answer would probably be ElevenLabs. At least for now.
The voice AI space is moving incredibly quickly, and things can change significantly within just a few months. I'm excited to see how both platforms evolve.