head to head · open source
LiveKit vs cadence
LiveKit has 20,973 GitHub stars, 2,347 forks, 189 open issues and last shipped yesterday. cadence has 9,444 stars, 913 forks, 205 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. LiveKit leads on adoption by 122% (20,973 vs 9,444 stars). LiveKit is written in Go under Apache-2.0; cadence is written in Go under Apache-2.0. LiveKit has attracted 11% as many forks as stars, cadence 10%. LiveKit was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (golang), so they are genuine substitutes rather than adjacent tools.
Two open source projects, one decision. Both are free and self-hostable — the differences are community size, license terms, language stack and release pace.
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Side by side
| LiveKit | cadence | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 21K | ★ 9.4K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Go | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-09-16 |
| Forks | ⑂ 2.3K | ⑂ 913 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick LiveKit if
- You weight community size — 21K stars and counting
- You want the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick cadence if
- You want the cadence feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and cadence fits your workflow better
About LiveKit
LiveKit is an open source realtime infrastructure project for voice, video, and physical AI agents, and it lives in the WebRTC, media server, and voice AI ecosystem. The repository contains the LiveKit server, a scalable distributed WebRTC SFU written in Go and built on Pion WebRTC. It moves realtime audio, video, and data between people, devices, and AI models, while SDKs, agent frameworks, and companion services are provided separately.
read the full LiveKit overview →
About cadence
Cadence is an open source orchestration engine for running asynchronous, long running business logic in a fault tolerant way. Written in Go under the Apache 2.0 license, it lives in the distributed systems and workflow automation space, and the project has been open source since 2017. This repository holds the core engine plus supporting tools: the CLI, schema management, a benchmark suite, and a canary. Client libraries for Go and Java are official, while Python and Ruby SDKs come from the community, and iWF can be layered on top as a DSL framework.
read the full cadence overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is LiveKit or cadence more popular?
LiveKit has 20,973 GitHub stars and cadence has 9,444. LiveKit has the larger community by that measure.
Are LiveKit and cadence free?
Both are open source. LiveKit is licensed under Apache-2.0 and cadence under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between LiveKit and cadence?
LiveKit is written in Go and cadence in Go. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, LiveKit or cadence?
Choose LiveKit if you want the larger community (20,973 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose cadence if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.