OBS Studio

OBS Studio is the free, open-source software that most of the livestreaming world runs on. It captures your screen, game, camera and mic, mixes them into scenes, and sends the result to Twitch, YouTube, Kick or any RTMP service — or records it locally. There is no free tier and no paid tier: everything is free, distributed under the GPL v2 license, and funded by sponsors and community donations rather than subscriptions.

It's the default starting point for new streamers for good reason. What commercial tools charge for — hardware encoding, unlimited scenes, filters, a plugin ecosystem — OBS gives away, with no account, no watermark and no feature gating. The trade-off is that it's a tool you configure rather than a service that hosts you: there's no built-in overlay marketplace, no cloud anything, and no hand-holding wizardry beyond a service login.

OBS also can't multistream on its own — it sends one stream to one service. To broadcast to several platforms at once you add a free community plugin like Multiple RTMP Outputs or Aitum Multistream (which sends one copy per platform from your own upload bandwidth) or relay through a third-party service.

How OBS Studio works

A typical setup looks like this:

1. Download OBS for Windows, macOS or Linux — no account needed.
2. Build scenes from sources: game capture, display capture, webcam, browser windows (that's where overlays and alerts live), images and text.
3. Mix audio per source — apply noise suppression, noise gate, compressor or VST plugins to your mic.
4. Connect your platform (Twitch, YouTube, Kick or custom RTMP) and set bitrate and encoder — NVENC, QuickSync, AMF or VideoToolbox offload encoding to the GPU.
5. Go live and switch scenes with hotkeys, or preview first in Studio Mode.
6. Record locally at the same time — separate audio tracks let you remix game, mic and music afterwards.

Key capabilities

Scenes and sources — Unlimited scenes built from game/window/display capture, webcams, images, text, browser sources and capture cards.

Audio mixing — Per-source mixer with noise suppression, noise gate, compressor, limiter and gain, plus VST plugin support.

Studio Mode and Multiview — Preview scenes before they go live, and monitor up to 8 scenes at once.

Recording — Local recording to MP4/MKV at full resolution and frame rate, with multiple audio tracks.

Hardware encoding — NVENC (NVIDIA), QuickSync (Intel), AMF (AMD) and VideoToolbox (Apple Silicon) keep the CPU free for the game.

Plugins and scripts — Hundreds of community plugins plus Lua and Python scripting; anything HTML works as a browser source, so overlays from StreamElements or Streamlabs drop straight in.

Hotkeys — Scene switches, start/stop, mute and push-to-talk from the keyboard.

Virtual camera — Output any scene as a webcam to Discord, Zoom, Meet or Teams.

OBS Studio pricing explained

OBS Studio is free. Full stop. There is no paid plan, no watermark, no account and no feature tier — the project is open source under GPL v2 and funded by sponsors and donations.

What you might spend money on around it is your choice of extras, not OBS itself: paid overlay and alert packs (though free ones abound), a multistream relay service if the free plugins don't suit, music licensing for your stream, and hardware — a capture card for console play or a dedicated streaming PC for demanding setups.

The genuinely free ecosystem is deep: community plugins, free overlay galleries from StreamElements and Streamlabs, and free chatbots mean a complete professional-looking stream can cost £0 in software.

The OBS ecosystem

OBS matters beyond its own download count. Its codebase sits underneath much of the commercial streaming world — Streamlabs Desktop is built on OBS-derived technology, and the browser-source standard it pioneered is why overlay services like StreamElements can drop interactive alerts into any stream with a URL. The plugin and script API (native plugins, Lua and Python) has produced hundreds of community add-ons for captions, NDI workflows, multistreaming and more — most of them as free as OBS itself.

Who OBS Studio is for

New streamers — the standard starting point, free forever.

Streamers who want control — every encoder setting, filter and scene is yours.

PC gamers — hardware encoding keeps game performance intact.

Creators who record as well as stream — local recording with separate audio tracks.

Who should look elsewhere

If you want an all-in-one app with overlays, tipping and themes built in, Streamlabs packages that on top of an OBS-derived app. If you want browser-based streaming with guests and no software to install, look at browser studios. And if you only want quick gameplay clips rather than live production, a clip recorder like Medal is a lighter fit.

Getting the most out of OBS Studio

Run the auto-configuration wizard first — it picks bitrate and encoder settings from your hardware and upload speed.

Use a hardware encoder (NVENC, QuickSync, AMF or VideoToolbox) so encoding doesn't compete with your game.

Add alerts and overlays as browser sources — free galleries plug straight in.

Learn Studio Mode early: previewing scenes before they're live hides every mid-stream fumble.

For multistreaming, weigh a free plugin (uses your upload for each platform) against a paid relay — plugins cost nothing but bandwidth.