OBS Studio

OBS Studio is the standard free software for live streaming and screen recording. Streamers on Twitch and YouTube, teachers recording lectures and anyone producing webinars or product demos use it. There is no free plan as such because there is no paid one: the whole application is open source and free, with no watermark and no time limit.

What the free plan gives you

• Full streaming to Twitch, YouTube and any RTMP or WHIP destination, plus local recording in H.264 or other codecs
• Unlimited scenes with custom transitions between them
• Sources for windows, displays, webcams, capture cards, images, text and browser pages
• An audio mixer with per-source filters such as noise gate, noise suppression and gain, plus VST plugin support
• Studio Mode for previewing changes before they go live, and Multiview for watching up to 8 scenes at once
• Hotkeys and a plugin and scripting API in Lua or Python
• Builds for Windows 10+, macOS 12+ and Linux

Where the free plan stops

Nothing is held back behind payment, so the limits are practical ones:

• It runs on your machine and uses your CPU or GPU for encoding, so a weak laptop will drop frames on a 1080p60 stream.
• There is no cloud, no built-in multistreaming to several platforms at once, and no hosted overlays; you add those through plugins or third-party services.
• Setup is manual. Scenes, audio routing and encoder settings take time to learn.

Companies that build on OBS sell hosted extras on top, but OBS itself has nothing to buy.

Who it suits

OBS is right for anyone who streams or records regularly and is willing to spend an hour learning it. People who want a one-click experience with built-in overlays and alerts may prefer a commercial wrapper, which usually still runs OBS underneath.