Pion (started by Sean DuBois in 2018) is the canonical pure-Go WebRTC implementation. Unlike mediasoup or Janus, which are SFUs out of the box, Pion is a library — you import its packages and build whatever you need: an SFU, a one-to-one bridge, a recorder, a TURN server, a signalling proxy. The MIT license makes it usable in commercial products without copyleft constraints.
Pion's design appeals to Go-first teams. WebRTC's classical implementation in C/C++ is heavy and hard to integrate cleanly with Go services; Pion makes WebRTC feel like a normal Go library with idiomatic concurrency, channel-based event handling, and standard error semantics. Cloudflare Calls' SFU is built on Pion. Twitch's Studio software uses Pion for its WebRTC contribution path. Many smaller services use Pion for custom WebRTC topologies.
Pion's tradeoff is that you do more yourself. Where LiveKit gives you Room/Participant/Track and a full deployment story, Pion gives you peer connections and asks you to assemble the rest. For teams comfortable with the WebRTC primitives this is freeing; for teams that want product abstractions LiveKit or mediasoup are faster. The Pion community is active, the codebase is well-tested, and the project ships regular releases through 2026.
