Both Velt and Liveblocks are solid choices for adding real-time collaboration to your app, but the right pick depends on whether you want to build features from scratch or ship them fast. The document collaboration decision often comes down to your team's development resources and timeline constraints. We'll help you understand which factors matter most for your specific situation and provide a clear framework for making this choice. Here's the breakdown of development time, feature completeness, and total cost considerations that will determine the best fit for your team.

TLDR:

• Velt offers 25+ pre-built features, while Liveblocks provides primitives for 5 features that you need to build yourselves

• Velt's integration is a simple, low-code setup, whereas Liveblocks' toolkit requires a dedicated engineering project to create a polished UI

• Velt provides complete, production-ready features, while Liveblocks offers backend APIs and a toolkit of frontend primitives for building custom interfaces

• Velt offers enterprise-ready options like self-hosting, custom encryption, and a 99.999% uptime SLA, providing more robust compliance and reliability than Liveblocks

What Liveblocks Does and Their Approach

Liveblocks is a developer toolkit that provides APIs and building blocks for embedding real-time collaboration features into products. The platform offers building blocks for collaboration, presence, broadcast, comments, permissions management, and conflict-free data types, with customizable pre-built components including AI Copilots, Comments, Multiplayer Editing, Presence, and Notifications.

Liveblocks targets developer-centric use cases, integrating deeply with popular frontend frameworks and libraries to embed real-time collaborative experiences into any product.

But Liveblocks requires substantial frontend development work since they primarily focus on backend infrastructure. Teams need to build most frontend UI from scratch, including commenting thread features, user avatars, notification systems, and interactive elements.

This approach works well if you have significant dedicated engineering resources and want maximum control over your collaboration UI. However, it can be a major time sink for teams that just want to ship collaboration features quickly. We've seen teams spend months building what should be basic commenting functionality.

The Liveblocks vs Tiptap comparison shows similar patterns: infrastructure-focused solutions require substantial development investment to create polished user experiences.

What Velt Does and Our Approach

Velt is a complete collaboration layer that drops into any JavaScript stack with 25+ premium features. Our component SDK and low-level APIs cover everything from multiplayer presence to asynchronous comments, all backed by scalable and secure WebSocket infrastructure.

Velt SDK lets developers add AI-powered collaboration features ridiculously fast, distilling the best collaboration features of Figma, Google Docs, Loom, and Slack into modular components. On average, it takes developers less than 1 hour to integrate with Velt and add collaboration features to their product.

Unlike backend-only solutions, Velt provides both frontend SDK and backend APIs in one integrated package. We abstract out all layers and provide beautiful, prebuilt, fully functional features as components that developers can just add to their products.

Our platform targets product-led SaaS companies building editors, dashboards, design tools, or data apps that need world-class multiplayer and commenting without maintaining CRDT or WebRTC infrastructure themselves.

The key difference? We believe collaboration features should be plug-and-play, not month-long development projects. With extensive customization options, you get the best of both worlds: speed to market and the ability to match your brand perfectly.

Feature Comparison: Core Features

Liveblocks provides basic infrastructure components including real-time data synchronization, user presence, and storage. They provide solid building blocks for adding collaboration to text editors, including document storage, version history, and integration features with comments and notifications systems.

However, the feature gap shows up when you need complete collaboration tools. Teams often need additional features like live video huddles, video recording, AI transcription, and contextual features that go beyond basic commenting.

Velt offers features including Figma-style contextual comments, Loom-style recording with AI transcription, Slack-style huddles, live cursors with follow-me mode, in-app notifications with email fallbacks, view analytics, and complete access control.

Instead of cobbling together multiple solutions, you get everything from basic commenting to advanced collaboration tools in one integrated package. Our use cases show how teams across different industries use these complete features.

The implementation complexity differs greatly. While Liveblocks provides solid backend infrastructure, teams often underestimate the overall development required to build complete polished collaboration experiences and workflows. Velt's pre-built components can be integrated with minimal code, unlike infrastructure-only solutions that require a major engineering investment.

With Velt, a single engineer can add comments in a few minutes without help from Product or Design teams, thanks to clear documentation and pre-built components that work out of the box.

Scalability and Performance Comparison

Liveblocks provides WebSocket infrastructure built to handle traffic on collaborative experiences and scale to hundreds of thousands of users, with architecture designed for high-performance real-time applications.

Velt is best in class with 200M comments and 2,000GB in our base plans, providing much more generous limits for growing applications. Our infrastructure automatically handles reconnection, offline queuing, and stale-session cleanup built into the client.

Base plan limitations can be a real constraint for scaling applications. Beyond raw numbers, consider how much engineering time will be spent maintaining and optimizing collaboration infrastructure, and how quickly new collaboration features can be added as user needs evolve.

Our webhooks and API infrastructure scales automatically, and our security features include self-hosting options for compliance-sensitive customers. This means you can start small and scale without hitting arbitrary limits or needing to rebuild your collaboration stack.

The performance difference becomes especially apparent in document-heavy applications where users generate lots of comments and collaborative interactions. Velt's generous limits mean you won't hit scaling walls as your product grows.

Pricing and Total Cost Analysis

When comparing platforms, it's crucial to look beyond the sticker price and consider the total cost of ownership. This includes the initial price, the cost of development time, ongoing maintenance, and how the pricing scales as your application grows.

Liveblocks offers several tiers, including a free plan to get started. Their paid plans are primarily based on Monthly Active Users (MAUs), meaning any user who logs in and loads the collaboration features counts towards your bill. While this model is straightforward, it can become expensive for applications with a large number of viewers who may not be actively collaborating.

This is a critical distinction for many SaaS products. A pricing model based on Monthly Active Collaborators (MACs), which counts only the users who actively create or edit, often aligns far better with the value your customers receive.

Velt offers a MAC-based pricing model with generous caps on comments and storage, plus the option to self-host for maximum control. When you factor in engineering time, the math changes dramatically. A solution that requires your team to spend 3 to 6 months building features is a major opportunity cost that delays your core product roadmap.

Our pricing reflects the value of shipping world-class collaboration features in hours, not months.

Velt as the Better Choice for Document Collaboration

The most cost-effective approach often involves platforms that provide both frontend SDK and backend APIs in one package, eliminating the need to coordinate multiple vendors and integration points. Velt tackles the key limitations of infrastructure-only solutions by providing complete, production-ready features rather than just building blocks.

While Liveblocks requires extensive frontend development and integration work, Velt allows complete collaboration experiences in minutes. With Velt, a single engineer can add comments in a few minutes without help from Product or Design teams, with clear and straightforward documentation.

For document collaboration, Velt offers contextual comments that attach to any DOM element, threaded discussions with mentions and reactions, resolution workflows, and integrated notifications. The platform also includes advanced features like AI transcription for recordings, follow-me mode for live presence, and other collaboration features.

Teams choosing Velt can focus on their core product instead of rebuilding collaboration infrastructure. We've seen companies ship collaboration features in their first sprint with Velt, compared to quarters of development with infrastructure-only solutions.

If you're considering making the switch, our migration guide walks through the process step by step.

How to Decide the Best Document Collaboration Platform

When choosing between Velt and Liveblocks for document collaboration, consider your development resources and timeline requirements. If you have dedicated engineering, PM, and design resources for collaboration roadmap development, Liveblocks' infrastructure approach offers flexibility but requires major development investment.

For teams focused on speed to market and complete features, Velt provides the full solution. The reality is that most teams need a solution where a single engineer can add comments and collaboration features in a short period of time, rather than a couple of months or even quarters.

You should use Velt if you need:

• Full-featured document collaboration with minimal development effort

• Extensive customization options without rebuilding from scratch

• Generous usage limits that won't limit growth

• Integrated features like comments, notifications, recordings and huddles

• Data self-hosting options for compliance and security requirements

Choose Liveblocks if you prefer building custom interfaces and have major engineering resources available dedicated to building collaboration features. Our implementation comparison breaks down the technical differences in more detail.

Most teams underestimate the complexity of building polished collaboration experiences. What seems like "just adding comments" quickly becomes a multi-month project involving real-time infrastructure, conflict resolution, notification systems, and user management.

FAQ

How long does it take to implement each platform?

Velt typically takes under an hour to get basic collaboration features working, with full customization possible in a few days. Liveblocks requires weeks to months of frontend development to create polished collaboration experiences, since you're building most UI components from scratch.

Which platform offers better customization options?

Both platforms offer customization, but in different ways. Liveblocks gives you complete control since you build the frontend yourself, but this requires a lot of development time. Velt provides extensive customization through template variables, custom data, conditional display, and custom behavior while maintaining the speed of pre-built components.

Final thoughts on choosing the right collaboration platform

The choice between these platforms comes down to whether you want to build collaboration features or buy them ready-made. For most teams shipping document collaboration in 2025, the speed and comprehensiveness of a complete solution like Velt outweighs the flexibility of building from infrastructure components. You can check out our collaboration SDK comparison to see how the platforms stack up feature-by-feature.