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.
The book · Volume 3 of 7
Video Streaming: A Complete Guide to Video Delivery: From ABR and CDNs to Players, WebRTC, DRM, and the Economics of Streaming
Pion gives Go teams a complete WebRTC stack as a library, so you can build an SFU, recorder or bridge, but every piece of media logic becomes your code to own. This volume covers WebRTC in detail for teams building on Pion, with SFU design, real-time latency, simulcast, congestion control and the cost of operating media servers. Written by Nikolay Sapunov, CEO at Fora Soft.
Building a custom SFU, recorder or bridge on Pion?
Tell us what you are building on Pion and we will give you an architecture review with media flow, scaling limits and the parts worth taking from existing SFUs. 250+ video products shipped since 2005.
