Real-time Video & Voice

Hosted SFUs (free tiers)

• ★ LiveKit — open source + hosted; free tier covers many indie use cases. The default for new projects building Zoom-style or Discord-style features. SDKs for everything.
• Daily — generous free tier, polished embeds, low-code prebuilt UIs.
• Stream Video — free tier; great UI components.
• 100ms — competitor SFU; free tier.
• Twilio Video — being deprecated for new accounts; Daily/LiveKit are the replacements Twilio recommends.
• Agora — the legacy big player; decent free tier.
• Vonage Video API — less common today.

Self-host SFUs

• LiveKit Server — open source; deploy to Fly / Hetzner / EKS.
• mediasoup — Node-based, very flexible, lower-level. You build the signaling.
• Janus — C-based, mature, big install base.
• Jitsi — open source video conferencing platform; full UI included.
• OvenMediaEngine — also handles low-latency live streaming.

Peer-to-peer (no SFU)

• simple-peer — small WebRTC wrapper.
• PeerJS — pure-P2P, includes a free signaling server.
• wrtc — WebRTC bindings for Node.

Prebuilt UI / embeds

• LiveKit Components — React + Svelte components.
• Daily Prebuilt — drop-in iframe; fastest path to a working call.
• Stream Video React Bindings — UI included.
• Whereby Embedded — free tier; iframe embed.

Recording / transcription

• ★ LiveKit Cloud Egress — call recording, RTMP out, HLS export.
• Daily Recording — bundled.
• Stream Recording, 100ms Recording — bundled.
• See Transcription for live transcripts.

Signaling protocols

• WebRTC + your own signaling — simple-peer + WebSockets.
• WHIP (WebRTC-HTTP Ingress Protocol) — emerging standard for ingest into RTMP/HLS.
• WHEP (WebRTC-HTTP Egress Protocol) — playback counterpart.

Pick this if…

• Default video calls / rooms, hosted: LiveKit Cloud or Daily.
• Want polished prebuilt UI fast: Daily Prebuilt or Stream Video.
• Self-host SFU: LiveKit Server.
• You want full Zoom UI for free: Jitsi (self-host).
• 1-on-1 P2P, no media server: simple-peer or PeerJS.