OBS Studio — Free Alternative to Streamlabs Ultra

At a glance

GitHub repo

obsproject/obs-studio

GitHub stars

79,300 (checked 11 November 2026)

Licence

GPL-2.0

Main language

C

Replaces

Streamlabs Ultra

Paid price it replaces

$27/month ($189/year, about $15.75/month)

Best for

Streamers, online teachers and anyone recording tutorials who wants professional livestreaming for free.

Prices were checked on the vendor's pricing page on 11 November 2026 and may have changed since. Star counts are a snapshot from the same date.

What OBS Studio does

OBS Studio is the free standard for livestreaming and screen recording. It mixes multiple video sources — screen, webcam, microphone, images, browser windows — into scenes, switches between them live, filters audio, and streams to Twitch, YouTube and Facebook at the same time. It is the tool streamers, online teachers and meeting hosts actually use, and it costs nothing.

The comparison is Streamlabs Ultra at $27 a month ($189 a year, about $15.75 a month) for multistreaming, premium themes and its Pro toolset. The honest context is that Streamlabs Desktop itself is built on OBS, so paying for Ultra mostly buys convenience features and themes around the same core engine. OBS has its own huge plugin community, so most of those extras exist free as plugins.

OBS is also lighter on your machine than the commercial forks built on it, and nothing is locked behind a paywall: every feature in the download is yours. The learning curve is real — scenes, sources and audio filters take an evening to learn — but the Auto-Configuration Wizard sets sensible defaults on first run, and the workflow becomes second nature quickly.

For anyone starting to stream, teach online, or record tutorials, OBS Studio is the default answer. It is free, it is the industry standard, and the paid alternative is, in large part, a wrapper around it.

Why it is worth using for free

• The industry standard for livestreaming and recording — free, with no feature locked behind a paywall
• Lighter than commercial forks, with a huge free plugin community
• Multistream to Twitch, YouTube and Facebook, with scenes, transitions and audio filters
• Streamlabs Desktop itself is built on OBS — Ultra mostly adds themes and convenience

How to use OBS Studio

Download OBS Studio for Windows, macOS or Linux from obsproject.com and install it. Run the Auto-Configuration Wizard on first launch — it picks streaming or recording settings for your machine.

Then add sources: your screen, webcam and microphone. Arrange them into scenes, press Start Streaming with your platform's stream key, or Start Recording for a local video file.

Frequently asked questions