Integrating Streamlabs with OBS Studio creates a streamlined workflow for creators who want robust overlays, alerts, and donation tracking without sacrificing streaming performance. This guide walks you through the setup process step by step, ensuring your scenes look polished and your alerts fire reliably the moment someone follows or subscribes.
Why Combine Streamlabs with OBS
OBS provides the core encoding and streaming engine, while Streamlabs excels at visual customization and audience engagement tools. By connecting them, you gain access to thousands of animated alerts, chat commands, and dashboards that would be time-consuming to build from scratch. The result is a setup that feels professional, responsive, and fully branded to your channel identity.
Preparing Your Accounts and Sources
Before diving into OBS settings, make sure both your Streamlabs and Twitch (or YouTube) accounts are ready. You will need to authorize the connection so that Streamlabs can trigger alerts based on your stream events. Completing this step first prevents troubleshooting later when you test alerts during an actual broadcast.
Authorize Streamlabs to Your Streaming Platform
Log in to Streamlabs and navigate to the Connections section.
Select your streaming platform, such as Twitch or YouTube, and click Authorize.
Follow the prompts to grant permissions, ensuring you allow alerts and chat access.
Return to OBS only after you see a confirmed connection status in Streamlabs.
Setting Up the Streamlabs OBS WebSocket Plugin
OBS communicates with Streamlabs through a WebSocket plugin, which allows real-time data exchange for alerts and chat. You need to install this plugin inside OBS and configure it with the correct port and password from your Streamlabs dashboard. Without this link, alerts will not appear when viewers interact with your stream.
Install and Configure the Plugin
Open OBS and go to Tools > WebSocket Server Settings.
Enable the WebSocket server and note the port number, usually 4455.
Copy the password, as you will enter it into Streamlabs in the next steps.
Save settings and restart OBS if you are prompted to apply changes fully.
Generating and Entering the Streamlabs Stream Key
Your stream key is the secure token that identifies your channel to the streaming service. In Streamlabs, you link this key so that scenes and sources update correctly when you go live. It is important to distinguish this from the OBS stream key, because mixing them up can cause the stream to fail or duplicate outputs.
Add the Stream Key in Streamlabs
In Streamlabs, open Settings and select Stream.
Choose Custom and enter the stream key provided by Streamlabs, not directly from your platform dashboard.
Test the connection by starting a preview stream in Streamlabs to verify it reaches the platform.
Once confirmed, you can rely on Streamlabs to manage the broadcast while OBS handles video output.
Adding Streamlabs Widgets and Alerts to Your Scenes
Streamlabs provides browser sources that you can drop into any OBS scene, such as chat panels, event alerts, and viewer goals. Because these are web-based, they update in real time and remain responsive even when your game performance fluctuates. You can position them precisely on your canvas to match your layout design.
Insert a Browser Source for Alerts
In OBS, click the plus sign under Sources and choose Browser Source.
Name it clearly, such as Streamlabs Alerts, and create a new page.
Enter the Streamlabs alerts URL generated from the Widgets tab.
Adjust width and height to fit your scene, and set the refresh rate to ensure smooth animations.
