Open Source Stream Alternatives

LiveKit provides scalable multi-user conferencing built on WebRTC, together with the client SDKs needed to put video, audio and data into an application. It removes the months of work that go into assembling media servers, signalling and connectivity before a first call ever connects.

The server is written in Go on top of the Pion WebRTC implementation and runs as a distributed selective forwarding unit. Deployment is a single binary, a Docker image or Kubernetes, and JWT authentication is built in for production use.

The feature set covers what live calls tend to need once they leave a demo.

• Networking: UDP, TCP and TURN, with distributed multi-region deployments for participants spread across the world.
• Media handling: simulcast, selective subscription, speaker detection and SVC codecs including VP9 and AV1.
• Security: end-to-end encryption, plus moderation APIs for managing participants in a room.
• Egress and Ingress: record or multi-stream rooms and export tracks, and pull in RTMP, WHIP, HLS or OBS Studio sources.
• Agents: a separate SDK for code-first realtime voice agents in Python and Node.js, bundling STT, LLM, TTS, turn detection and telephony.

Client SDKs cover JavaScript and TypeScript among other languages, with declarative UI helpers for React. Live demos include a meeting app, a spatial audio room and livestreaming from OBS Studio, each with published source you can read before committing to the stack.

Ethora packages real-time messaging, AI bots and the backend behind them into SDKs you drop into an existing application. The repository itself is a monorepo that gathers every SDK, tool and sample app as a git submodule, so one clone gives you the whole ecosystem to navigate.

Messaging runs over XMPP with a REST API in front of it. A set of hosted services covers the web app, the API, the XMPP gateway and a playground for trying the React chat component and exporting code before writing any of your own. Every SDK also supports pointing at a self-hosted server.

The clients are published separately and tracked against a shared feature matrix.

• React: a JavaScript chat SDK for embedding conversations in any web app.
• React Native: one component covering iOS and Android.
• Android: a native Kotlin SDK.
• iOS: a native Swift SDK.
• WordPress: a plugin that adds a chat widget with no code.
• Bots and agents: an XMPP and LLM bot framework, RAG demos, a site crawler and an MCP server for IDE and agent integration.

Shared capabilities include sending, editing, deleting and replying to messages, reactions, typing and delivery indicators, paginated history, media, one to one and group rooms, unread counters, push notifications, prebuilt UI and an offline cache, with coverage varying by platform. A setup command scaffolds a project, and the matrix is reviewed monthly.

SAMA is a chat server and a messaging protocol written as a deliberate alternative to XMPP, which its authors call the only widely spread standard in this space. It arrives as a server plus working clients rather than a specification to implement yourself.

The server runs on Node.js with uWebSockets, keeps its data in MongoDB and uses Redis for cluster coordination. Nodes find each other through Redis records carrying each node's WebSocket address, establish links with a ping and pong handshake, and retry on a widening delay when a connection breaks. When a node vanishes for good, a surviving node clears the records it left behind, so user and device state does not go stale.

The API is documented one area at a time.

• Users: accounts, authentication and the calls around a user record.
• Conversations: creating and managing conversations between users.
• Messages: sending, delivering and retrieving message history.
• Activities: presence and status for connected devices.
• Address book: contact lists reconciled against server side users.
• Push notifications: delivery to devices that are not currently connected.

The server is GPL 3.0, and clients exist for the web and for Flutter in their own repositories. Local development, full deployment and end to end tests are documented on the project's docs site, and the whole stack can be exercised on a public cloud instance before anything is installed.