Pros
– OBS
OBS is an amazing streaming program. It’s simple to use and doesn’t require much coaching to at least get familiar with its mechanics. OBS provides many different features such as recording videos, studio mode to make transitions easier, and overlay options. It makes setting up video scenes simple, and transitioning to those scenes is clean with Studio mode. The scenes feature allows you to add browser overlays (provided by many different platforms), webcam overlays, and gameplay overlays. The easy interface allows you to move the overlays you choose easily to fit what you’re trying to show. That with the ability to add images to your video makes OBS an amazing program for streaming and video recording.
– Streamlabs OBS
Now let’s look at Streamlabs OBS. You can imagine Streamlabs OBS to be a spin-off of the original OBS, with some added ease as far as the overlays go. Streamlabs is an overlay platform, so their version of OBS has a bunch of overlay options pre-installed into their OBS program. You can do basically everything OBS provides with a better user interface and a cleaner feel. The overall look and feel of Streamlabs OBS is what gives it an edge over the original OBS. Plus, with the added pre-loaded overlays, Streamlabs OBS gives you a little extra when it comes to streaming.
Cons
– OBS
OBS is considerably more involved when it comes to customization. To add overlays you must look all over the internet for browser sources. OBS also doesn’t have any pre-loaded overlays or themes, so it’s just a touch harder to make look how you want it. OBS is smooth as far as it’s functionality, but a lot of the features are hard to navigate. Much harder to navigate than Streamlabs OBS. The UI (user interface) is also not as user friendly as Streamlabs OBS, and takes a bit more research and messing around with to understand. By the end, you’ll have a large mess of scenes that you’ll have to go through and delete to set up the program how you want.
– Streamlabs OBS
The biggest complaint I have about Streamlabs OBS is how slow it is. OBS is very fast and can connect to your streaming platform with ease. However, Streamlabs OBS takes much longer and crashes way more than I would prefer. Although the UI is good, the program takes way more energy attempting to make a good UI than it does to make it functional. I’ve used both OBS and Streamlabs OBS, and, personally, I’d take the speed of connection over a clean UI. As far as the overlays go, the most I can say is that they’re functional. They don’t look clean unless you force them to. It’s much better to find an external overlay option for the chat flow than to use the one that Streamlabs OBS provides. However, if you want an easier alternative to OBS, I’d say to go ahead and download Streamlabs OBS. There are many bugs they could fix with their program, however, it does what it tries to do, if only on the somewhat functional level.
Conclusion
In the end, if you’re looking for a good program to stream with, I’d say just use OBS. Streamlabs OBS is geared more toward streaming to Twitch than any other platform, so if that’s all you plan on streaming to, you can use Streamlabs OBS. However, if you want a simple, easy to use program that’s fast and has a large number of customization options, I would highly recommend just going for the original OBS. It’s been worked on for much longer than Streamlabs OBS and is virtually bug-free as far as I’ve seen In the end, it’s up to you what you want to use. I would recommend checking both programs out and testing them out for yourself before making a definitive decision. They’re both free programs available to you right now, so what’s the harm in trying out both? Personally, I’m an original OBS fan. However, I have tried out both programs and have noticed a much larger amount of bugs when it comes to Streamlabs OBS. All I can say is proceed with caution. It’s up to you in the end.
