LiveKit Agents vs OpenAI Realtime API

as AI assistants see them, week of 2026-09-21

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LiveKit Agents outscores OpenAI Realtime API in this comparison, 16 to 8 overall, and shows up far more often too: 18 of 60 answers versus just 9 of 60. LiveKit Agents gets swept in for every "best AI voice agent platform" and "best open-source voice AI agent framework" question (3 of 3 each), while OpenAI Realtime API's strongest showing is lowest latency, named in 2 of 3 answers. Head to head, LiveKit Agents is named more often on 6 questions against OpenAI Realtime API's 1, with 13 ties. Neither is mentioned for enterprise contact centres, receptionist, or small-business phone agent questions.

Head to head

metric	LiveKit Agents	OpenAI Realtime API
score	16	8
questions won	12	8

By assistant

LiveKit Agents

assistant	score	named in, this week	usual spot, this week
ChatGPT	15	20% of answers	#3.5
Claude	28	60% of answers	#8.4
Gemini	not sampled this week
Perplexity	6	10% of answers	#5.5

OpenAI Realtime API

assistant	score	named in, this week	usual spot, this week
ChatGPT	3	5% of answers	#7.0
Claude	22	40% of answers	#6.5
Gemini	not sampled this week
Perplexity	0	0% of answers

Where they differ

Only LiveKit Agents gets named for

What's the best open-source voice AI agent framework?
What's the best AI voice agent that can transfer to a human?
Which AI voice agent platform is cheapest per minute?
What's the best voice AI platform with its own phone numbers and telephony?

Only OpenAI Realtime API gets named for

nothing exclusive

More comparisons

Not sold on either?

Scores count how often each assistant names a product, weighted by position. How the score works · Full AI voice agents leaderboard