OpenVidu 3.0 Is Generally Available: LiveKit's SDKs, Mediasoup's Performance

OpenVidu 3.0 has reached General Availability, and as co-founders of the project we're glad to share what that actually means. GA closes out the beta program that ran from OpenVidu v3's first beta in June 2024 through beta2 and beta3, and it marks the biggest architectural shift OpenVidu has gone through: Kurento is retired as the core media server, and OpenVidu is now built on the open-source LiveKit stack, with mediasoup available as a PRO alternative engine. Full details are in the GA announcement; the highlights:

A rebuilt core

OpenVidu is now built on LiveKit's open-source stack — 100% compatible with LiveKit's own API and SDKs — and extends it with everything OpenVidu itself brings on top: ready-to-use components, sample applications in several languages, documentation, and support. Community Edition runs on LiveKit's own default engine, Pion; PRO adds mediasoup as an alternative engine you can choose instead, for teams that need its lower-level performance. Mediasoup itself moves from an experimental option to a production-ready one, and the numbers back that up: roughly 2x the performance of stock, open-source LiveKit for teams who opt into it.

Simpler pricing

GA also simplifies the commercial side: the separate ENTERPRISE edition is gone, folded into a single commercial tier, PRO. Features that used to be ENTERPRISE-only — mediasoup support and High Availability deployments among them — are now available directly in PRO.

The road here

This didn't happen overnight. OpenVidu first experimented with mediasoup as an alternative to Kurento back in 2021, and OpenVidu PRO had been pinned to an old mediasoup version since 2023 while compatibility work caught up; GA ships on a current one (3.19.x) instead. The public beta program itself ran about five months, three releases, before the team was confident enough to call it stable and production-ready.

Should you migrate from OpenVidu 2?

If you're still on OpenVidu 2, yes. OpenVidu 2 won't receive further security patches or feature upgrades going forward; all of that work now goes into OpenVidu 3. Migrating isn't just about the performance and pricing improvements above; it's what keeps your deployment on a supported, maintained platform.

What migration actually takes

An OpenVidu 2 deployment can't be upgraded in place; OpenVidu 3 has to be deployed fresh, and the two can run side by side until you cut your application over. How much work that cutover takes depends on your edition.

If you're on PRO or Enterprise, OpenVidu 3 ships a v2compatibility module built specifically to make this transition painless. Enable it when you deploy OpenVidu 3, then update your application's dependencies — for the most part, that's a straight package swap, not a rewrite:

• openvidu-browser:2.X.X -> openvidu-browser-v2compatibility:3.X.X
• openvidu-webcomponent-2.X.X.js/.css -> openvidu-webcomponent-v2compatibility-3.X.X.js/.css
• openvidu-angular:2.X.X -> openvidu-angular-v2compatibility:3.X.X
• Server-side SDKs (openvidu-java-client, openvidu-node-client) also have a compatibility version, though updating them is recommended rather than required.

Point your application at the new OpenVidu 3 server URL and secret, and in most cases that's it — no code changes required, just updated imports. (React Native, native Android, and native iOS don't have a compatibility layer yet, so apps on those platforms need a full integration against the new API regardless of edition.)

For Community Edition: worth the effort

Community Edition doesn't get the v2compatibility module; it's a PRO/Enterprise feature. Migrating means integrating directly against OpenVidu 3's own API, which has genuinely changed since v2. That's real code, not just an import swap.

It shouldn't be a heavy lift, though: the underlying concepts — Sessions, Connections, publishing and subscribing — carry over directly, so most of the work is updating calls to match the new API rather than rearchitecting anything. And it's the only path forward: OpenVidu 2 isn't getting further updates, so this integration work is what keeps you on a maintained platform going forward.

Full migration steps are in the official migration guide.

Whether you're moving from OpenVidu 2 or evaluating OpenVidu for the first time, this is the release to build on: it's the foundation the project is building on going forward, not an incremental version bump. The full changelog is in the GitHub release.