It's rather hard to compare. My understanding is that LMDB is a library which accesses a shared memory-mapped file; kivaloo is a collection of daemons which are accessed via the network or a unix socket. I guess you could place a network protocol front-end on top of LMDB and compare that to kivaloo?
And sure, small values and a lack of transactions are intentional limitations which allowed me to improve performance for the use case I cared about. Of course there's nothing stopping you from constructing that functionality in other ways; in fact I'm planning on releasing a daemon which provides key-blob storage by storing large objects in Amazon S3 and using the core kivaloo functionality as an indirection table.
Limiting values to 255 bytes is quite constraining, to say the least.
Also, it seems that there are no transactions in kivaloo. That makes a big difference.