Run a Better Twitch Stream With These Tools

Twitch channels rarely grow popular by accident. Far more often, fame and attention are the result of long hours, innovative ideas, and tireless dedication to making quality content. That’s why it’s so important to make sure your stream looks good, and automate tedious tasks that can distract you from entertaining your audience.

That said, you’ll be happy to hear that there’s a wide array of tools out there to help you run a smoother, more professional stream, and some of them are even completely free! Pick out a game that Twitch viewers are sure to love, and manage your stream with some of the best plugins, applications, and chat bots at your command.

Chat Bots

Chat bots hang around your channel’s chat just like any other user, and can be controlled by simple commands, or even set to automate certain tasks like filtering and moderation. Check out these popular options.

Moobot

Created by Twitch Admin Moocat, Moobot is a popular browser based chat bot that you’ll see in many streams. Its basic functionality is free, but to get some of the more advanced features, you’ll need to make recurring monthly payments. If all you need are standard features like chat moderation or recurring links to your schedule or social media accounts though, you should be able to get by without paying anything.

Nightbot

There’s nothing locked behind a paywall when you use Nightdev’s Nightbot, so it’s become another very popular option. Alongside standard moderation features, it can fetch music from SoundCloud as well as YouTube, giving your stream a wider array of options than bots that only use YouTube. Poll and raffle functions provide rich opportunities for interaction with your viewers, and chat stat tracking can help you spot anomalies in your traffic and moderation patterns.

DeepBot

Deepbot is only available in a closed, paid beta at the moment, but one unique feature makes it stand out from other bots. DeepBot can host minigames right in your chat!

For example, one popular DeepBot minigame is the bank heist. Participants gain loyalty points for visiting your channel or participating in your chat, which they can then bet to rob a virtual bank using chat commands. Some banks are better protected than others, but also offer larger point payouts.

These minigames do tend to generate extra spam in your chat, so make it worthwhile by coming up with things your viewers can spend their points on. Maybe you’ll let them spend points to vote on which game you play next, or on song requests to play behind your stream. These little rewards can keep viewers coming back day after day.

BetterTTV

BetterTTV is a popular Chrome plugin from the makers of Nightbot that adds a bunch of viewing and streaming quality of life improvements to your Twitch experience. The moment you turn on its dark gray theme, you’ll never want to look at your chat on the standard white background again.

You can also make BetterTTV highlight chat messages with your name in them (or any other word for that matter) so that it’s easy to tell the viewers who are addressing you from the ones talking amongst themselves. Alternate emotes, chat support for Google Translate, polling, and more round out a package that provides a richer, easier Twitch experience.

Teeboard

Need deeper options to make your stream look more professional? Teeboard is a powerful Twitch toolbox hosted by the folks who made the free and easy to setup Open Broadcaster Software (OBS). Though it’s only in beta at the moment, it’s already feature packed!

For starters, it acts as a desktop substitute for the Twitch dashboard, letting you take care of all of the management you’d otherwise do from your browser. Beyond that, you can also add flourishes you’ve likely seen used on lots of popular Twitch channels, including follower, subscriber, and donation notifications, “Now Playing” displays to share your music, and quick templated images for attractive info panel headers.

Multitwitch

Looking for a simple way to show off fun multiplayer games from each player’s perspective? Provided they’re all willing to stream on their respective channels, you can make a Multitwitch link that lets viewers enjoy everything from a single browser tab.

To setup your link, just type “multitwitch.tv/” followed by each streamer’s Twitch handle, separated by a forward slash. Then copy and paste that link into your chat, or make it a recurring message from your bot, to invite your viewers to see everyone at once with easy access to each player’s chat.

Since having several streams playing audio at once is likely to produce an unlistenable mess, you’ll want to run a voice chat client so your audience can hear every player regardless of whose stream they leave unmuted.

Multitwitch is also great for just keeping up with several streamers at once. In the example pictured, I wanted to recap the latest episode of The Technophilia Podcast, but also have my eye on RiptidePow‘s Dark Souls 2 boss fights. That’s no problem at all with the convenience of Multitwitch.

Better Tools, Better Broadcasts

Do you think this article is missing any bots or tools that are clearly way better than these? We’re all ears! Add your recommended bots and tools down in the comments, and tell our community what sets your options apart from the competition.

Looking for a Twitch alternative? Broadcast in Steam instead!