Overview

Most teams stitch a job together across several tools: one product to chat with an AI, another to draw a workflow, a third to build the app, a fourth to run agents. LiveContext collapses that stack. You build once, and the same automation can be driven from a chat, drawn as a visual workflow, wrapped in a shareable app, and handed to a scheduled agent. Every step stays visible, every agent is scoped and budgeted, and every run is recorded.

The four surfaces

These are not separate products. They are four views of the same automation: start in any one of them and the others come along.

Around those four surfaces, the workspace gives you a few more places to work:

• Studio generates images, video clips, voices, audio, and music from a prompt. It sits next to Chat on the home screen (the Chat / Studio switch). See Studio.
• Chat channels link Telegram, Slack, Discord, WhatsApp, or Microsoft Teams, so approvals and agent questions reach you outside the app. See Chat channels.
• Tasks & board tracks work handed to people and agents, and the Agenda shows every scheduled automation on a calendar. See Tasks & board and Agenda.

One model underneath: workflows, nodes, triggers

Whichever surface you start from, the underlying object is the same: a workflow, a graph of nodes connected by edges. A trigger starts a run. Nodes execute in dependency order, and data flows forward through template expressions like {{prefix:label.output.field}}. Agents, interfaces, and tables are not bolted on beside the workflow: they are all kinds of node.

Every node is identified by a normalized prefix:label key, and the prefix tells you what kind of node it is:

Core concepts covers the full mental model (runs, edges, ports, signals, versions, credits). Node reference is the catalog of every node type, and Triggers details the eight ways a run can start.

How a build flows

1. 1
   Describe the job in chat
   Say what you want done in plain language.
2. 2
   LiveContext drafts a workflow
   A graph of connected nodes appears in the conversation, ready to run, branch, or extend.
3. 3
   Wire an interface
   Wrap it in a web page so people, or agents, can interact with it.
4. 4
   Put an agent in the loop
   Give it the exact tools and credit budget the job needs, and nothing more.

Triggers (a webhook, a schedule, a chat message, a new table row, another workflow finishing) can start the whole thing on their own, and every run is recorded so you can see exactly what happened.

Start here

Cloud or self-hosted

LiveContext runs as a managed cloud service or as a self-hostable Community Edition (CE) that you run on your own infrastructure. Both run the same workflow engine. What differs is how you run and operate it:

The Community Edition runs the backend as a single application plus the web app, with a few helper services (web search, page screenshots, and the bridge for command-line AI agents). It needs a PostgreSQL database with the pgvector extension (all your data), Redis (coordination and caching), and S3-compatible object storage such as MinIO for files. It is distributed under the LiveContext Sustainable Use License, a source-available license. See Self-hosting for how to run it, and the public source repository.

A self-hosted instance runs fully on its own. Linking it to a cloud account adds four things: cloud-hosted models (model calls relayed and billed to that account instead of your own keys), model catalog updates, the cloud's shared skills, and the cloud marketplace (browse, install, and publish). You can disconnect the link from your instance, or revoke the instance from your cloud account, at any time. If the cloud is unreachable, your instance keeps working and only the cloud-dependent features pause.

Marketplace: publish and install

A marketplace publication is the whole working stack, not a screenshot: the workflow together with its agents, interfaces, tables, and files. Credentials are stripped at publish time, so your secrets never travel with it. Acquiring a publication clones the entire stack with fresh IDs into your own workspace as a run-only application. To change it or publish your own version, use Create an editable copy first.

Map of the docs

The guides follow the order you meet LiveContext in, from your first run to sharing and hosting it: