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Concepts

Liveblocks is the collaboration layer for your product. It provides the architecture, realtime backend, and ready-made features that let humans and AI collaborate inside your app—both in realtime and asynchronously. Think of Liveblocks as the collaboration architecture your product never had. This page introduces the core concepts behind Liveblocks so you understand how everything fits together.

Liveblocks collaboration infrastructure

What is Liveblocks?

Liveblocks is the collaboration layer for your product. It’s built on a small set of foundational concepts list below. These concepts work together to let people and AI collaborate inside your app, without changing your existing authentication, backend, or data model.

ConceptDescription
ProjectsTop-level container for your application
TenantsCompartmentalize rooms and notifications per organization
RoomsSpaces in your product where collaboration happens, such as documents
CollaboratorsPeople (users) and AI agents doing work together
Ready-made featuresCollaboration building blocks like Comments, Multiplayer, Notifications, and AI Agents
PlatformThe realtime backend, admin dashboard, and SDKs that make collaboration possible at scale
Liveblocks structure

Projects

A project is the top-level container in your Liveblocks team workspace that usually maps to an application. Each project includes things like API keys, rooms, AI agents, usage metrics, event logs, webhook settings, notification settings, region and environment settings, and more.

Regions

You can choose to locate a project in one of the following regions. The region cannot be changed once the project has been created.

RegionData hostedAvailability
EarthGlobally on Cloudflare edge servers and AWS us‑east‑1All plans
USUS only with Cloudflare FedRAMP and AWS us‑east‑1Enterprise plan
EUEU only with Cloudflare EU and AWS eu‑central‑1Enterprise plan

Environments

You can assign one of the following environment tags to a project. The environment tag cannot be changed once the project has been created. Teams typically create separate projects for production, staging, and development. Encrypted keys and higher limits apply to production environment projects.

EnvironmentDescription
DevelopmentFor development, testing, and prototyping
ProductionFor production

Tenants

Tenants allow you to compartmentalize Liveblocks resources, such as inbox notifications, rooms, and everything associated with rooms such as comment threads, realtime data stored, and more. Each tenant represents a separate organization or customer in your system, meaning you can easily add a workspace/org switcher to your application, with each workspace having its own notification inbox. Each project can have multiple tenants, though only one is required.

Rooms

A room is the space where people and AI collaborate together. Inside a room, you can enable things like presence, shared state for multiplayer interactions, contextual comment threads, @ mentions and actions that trigger notifications.

Liveblocks rooms. The space where people and AI collaborate.

Rooms typically map to artifacts people and AI can create inside your product, such as text documents, workflow diagrams, spreadsheets, whiteboards, forms, 3D files, video editors, design files, presentations, and more.

Ready-made features

Liveblocks includes a set of collaboration building blocks you can use individually or together. These ready-made features provide pre-built components, hooks, and APIs that handle the complexity of realtime collaboration, allowing you to focus on building your product’s unique experience.

Collaborators

Collaborators are the entities that do work together in your application. Liveblocks provides the infrastructure and ready-made features they use to collaborate. There are two types of collaborators: users (people) and AI agents.

Users

Users are the authenticated people using your application. Liveblocks only needs a userId to identify them. Users can:

  • View and edit content.
  • See presence and activity.
  • Leave contextual comments.
  • @ mention users, groups, and AI agents.
  • Receive notifications.

AI Agents

AI agents are AI-driven collaborators that can act inside your product. Liveblocks supports two types of agents: Liveblocks AI Copilots and framework agents (private beta).

Liveblocks AI Copilots

Configured directly in the dashboard. Ideal for chatbot-style assistive behavior.

  • Works with any LLM (OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, or custom).
  • Supports RAG knowledge from PDFs, images, websites, and text.
  • Fully compatible with the <AiChat /> component.
  • Acts on behalf of a user to take actions inside your app.
  • Accessed through chat (not via @ mentions).

Framework agents (private beta)

Use external agents powered by your own infrastructure or tools like n8n, LangChain, Crew AI, and more. Framework agents behave like true collaborators.

  • They appear in rooms with presence.
  • Users can @mention them in comments or text documents.
  • Room events (mentions, edits, messages) are sent to your webhook endpoint.
  • Your agent returns actions that update UI, create comments, or drive workflows.

Platform

The Liveblocks Platform powers collaboration at runtime through a realtime back end, using WebSocket infrastructure to handle presence, connection management, low-latency messaging, and room orchestration. Async pipelines manage notification delivery, webhooks, and event batching and grouping. An admin dashboard provides usage and monitoring, project and API keys management, webhook management, notification channel management, hosting regions, and event logs. The platform also includes a DevTools browser extension and a comprehensive set of SDKs and packages.

SDKs and packages

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