What is Daily (daily.co)?

Updated

Daily is a developer platform for realtime voice, video, and AI. It combines three things: Pipecat, an open-source orchestration framework for voice and multimodal AI agents; Pipecat Cloud, a hosted way to deploy those agents on Daily's infrastructure; and Daily's WebRTC infrastructure, for running realtime calls. It is aimed at developers building either human-to-human calls or AI voice agents, and the company says it has been building realtime infrastructure since 2016.

The three products, and when each applies

Product What it is Use it when
Pipecat A vendor-neutral, 100% open-source framework for orchestrating realtime voice and multimodal AI agents You want to build an agent pipeline yourself and keep control of the components and vendors
Pipecat Cloud A deployment target for Pipecat-built agents on Daily's global infrastructure You've built with Pipecat and want to run it in production without managing the infrastructure
Daily Infrastructure WebRTC-native SDKs and a global mesh network for realtime calls You need realtime audio/video transport, including human/human calls, or a transport for Pipecat agents

The distinction matters: Pipecat is the orchestration layer, Daily's infrastructure is the transport and network layer, and Pipecat Cloud sits between them as the hosting option. You can use Daily's infrastructure without Pipecat, and Pipecat is vendor-neutral, so it isn't tied to Daily as a transport.

What the platform claims on performance and scale

Daily publishes several infrastructure figures on its site:

  • 13ms median first-hop latency for realtime audio and video
  • 75+ global points of presence on a multi-cloud architecture
  • 4× better video resolution than Agora in real-world network tests, per Daily
  • 2× faster connection times
  • 99.99% service uptime

These are vendor-reported numbers, so treat them as claims to validate against your own network conditions rather than independent benchmarks.

Security and compliance

For teams with regulated workloads, Daily states it offers true end-to-end encryption, signed HIPAA BAAs, and operation under the EU-US Data Privacy Framework. It lists SOC-2, GDPR, and HIPAA among its compliance positions, and offers enterprise-grade security with uptime SLAs. If your project touches health data or EU personal data, these are the specific items to confirm directly during evaluation.

Open source and standards involvement

Daily is a W3C WebRTC Working Group member and maintains Pipecat, which the site lists as a Python project with roughly 3,415 GitHub stars at the time of the source page. It also contributes to Mediasoup and GStreamer. That matters if you care about the long-term health of the framework you'd be building on: an actively maintained open-source core with standards-body participation is a different risk profile from a purely proprietary SDK.

How to decide whether it fits

  • Choose Pipecat alone if you want an open-source agent framework and intend to pick your own transport and hosting.
  • Add Pipecat Cloud if you've built on Pipecat and want managed deployment on Daily's network.
  • Use Daily Infrastructure directly if your core need is low-latency realtime audio/video for human calls, or a transport for agents.
  • Look elsewhere first if you need no realtime component at all, or if vendor-reported performance and compliance claims can't be independently verified for your use case.

Pricing is published on separate pages for Daily Video and Pipecat Cloud, so check those for current plan details before committing. The site offers a free start and a docs entry point for building.