StreamYard Review 2026

What is StreamYard?

More than 12 million creators have used StreamYard according to its homepage, and most of them meet the same wall: the free studio works, but it carries a logo and streams to only one place. This streamyard pricing and free plan limits review sets out what each tier really gives you in October 2026, what changed after the 2024 sale to Bending Spoons, and whether the jump from $0 to $44.99 a month is justified for an Indian creator, coach or small agency.

StreamYard is a live studio that runs in Chrome or another modern browser. You open a studio, send a guest invite link, and up to six people (ten on paid plans) appear on screen without installing anything. From there you go live to YouTube Live, Facebook Live, LinkedIn, X, Twitch, Kick, Vimeo, Instagram, TikTok or any custom RTMP target, or simply record a podcast episode. Hosts work in the browser; guests can also join from the StreamYard Guest app on iPhone and iPad.

Three public tiers and a sales-led Business plan

The pricing page currently shows Free, Core and Advanced, each paid tier with a lower per-month rate on yearly billing. Business plans sit behind a request to book a meeting with StreamYard's sales team. Here is the side-by-side, taken from streamyard.com/pricing and the help centre:

On yearly billing, Core costs about $432 a year and Advanced about $828, a saving of roughly 20% and 22% against twelve monthly payments. Both paid tiers show a 7-day free trial button, the first charge carries a 7-day money-back guarantee, and if you cancel you keep access until the billing cycle ends.

A note on the older Teams plan. When StreamYard reshuffled its line-up in August 2024, the help centre says Basic and similar plans became Core, Professional became Advanced, and Premium and Growth customers moved to Teams. Teams still appears in billing documentation but is not listed on the public pricing page, so new buyers choose between Core, Advanced and Business.

StreamYard free plan limitations you will hit first

The free tier is genuinely usable for a weekly show with a co-host, but the help article "Feature Limits on the Free Plan" spells out the catches:

• One destination only. No multistreaming and no custom RTMP, so you choose YouTube or Facebook, not both.
• A monthly hours cap. StreamYard does not publish the number. Your included streaming and recording hours for the month show on the Billing page, so check it before booking a long session.
• The streamyard logo watermark appears on every free stream.
• Thin recording. Live streams are not saved automatically, you get 2 hours of local recordings a month, storage is capped at 5 hours, and free recordings cannot be downloaded. Anything older than 12 months is deleted.

For a creator testing the format, that is fine. For a business running a paid masterclass, the logo and the single destination usually decide the matter within a month.

Removing the logo and getting 1080p means Core

There is no setting or trick that hides the branding on the free plan. The only official route is upgrading: Core drops the logo, gives clean thumbnails and adds branded overlays, custom logos, backgrounds, AI backgrounds, intro and outro videos and a chat overlay. Core is also where Full HD 1080p output is listed, along with cloud recording, AI clips for short-form repurposing and 16-plus layouts. If you need 4K, that applies to local recordings on Advanced and Business.

Two practical limits stay even on paid tiers. A single cloud recording on Core or Advanced stops at 10 hours, and Business raises that to 24. The destinations also impose their own caps: StreamYard's help centre lists 8 hours for Facebook and 4 hours for LinkedIn, while YouTube keeps only the last 12 hours of a very long stream.

Running a first YouTube show from the browser

Getting a YouTube Live broadcast out takes about ten minutes the first time. Enable live streaming on your channel inside YouTube (a first-time request can take up to 24 hours). In StreamYard, open Destinations, connect YouTube with your Google account, then create a broadcast with a title, description and thumbnail, or attach an existing YouTube event. Enter the studio, check camera and mic, and paste the guest invite link into WhatsApp or email for your co-host. Pick a layout, add a banner, and press Go Live.

While live, on-screen comments are the feature audiences notice. Click a viewer's YouTube or Facebook comment and it pops onto the stream as a styled card, which makes Q and A sessions feel interactive without a producer. Instagram needs a Professional account and works in portrait only; TikTok is portrait too.

StreamYard vs Restream for multistreaming

Restream also offers a browser studio with guests and multistreaming, so the two overlap heavily. The main differences, according to each company's pricing page:

• Free tier. Restream's free plan streams to 2 channels at once with Restream branding and 6 people on screen. StreamYard's free plan allows one destination. If free multistreaming matters more than anything else, Restream wins.
• Entry price. Restream's Standard plan is $19 a month on monthly billing, well below Core's $44.99. Restream's cheaper tiers stay at 720p in the studio, though, and Full HD arrives on its Professional plan.
• Studio feel. StreamYard is widely used for interview shows because guest joining, comment cards and layouts are simple. Restream puts more weight on sending one feed to many channels.

The fair summary: for a talk show with guests, StreamYard's studio is easier to run; for pushing one feed to many channels cheaply, Restream gives more for less money.

StreamYard vs OBS when you have a powerful PC

OBS Studio is free and open source on Windows, macOS and Linux, with no plans to pay for. It handles scenes, game capture, plugins and hardware encoding far beyond anything a browser studio does. What it lacks is a built-in way to bring remote guests on screen with one link; that needs extra tools and a stable upload connection on your side.

StreamYard needs nothing beyond a browser on the host side, so a modest laptop on a decent connection can run a small panel. Plenty of creators simply split the work, keeping OBS for solo gaming and StreamYard for interviews. If your budget is zero and your show is solo, OBS is the stronger answer to the free-alternatives question. Other free options include Restream's free tier and YouTube's own browser streaming.

StreamYard price in India and paying in rupees

The pricing page publishes USD figures only, but it says payment is accepted in US dollars or Indian rupees, so Indian buyers can be billed in INR at checkout. Expect the final rupee amount to be shown there rather than on the public page. Stripe processes card payments, with Google Pay and Apple Pay on mobile; PayPal is not accepted for Core, Advanced or Teams.

For many Indian creators, Core's $44.99 monthly price is a real cost when ad revenue is modest, so the yearly rate of $35.99 a month is where the numbers start to work. Agencies running client webinar streaming should check one rule first: the help centre says business or company email domains require the Business plan, and since December 2025 accounts that qualify under its Plan Usage Policy are moved to Business at their next renewal.

What Bending Spoons ownership means for your data

Bending Spoons, the Milan-based technology company, agreed in April 2024 to acquire StreamYard Top Corp, the renamed Hopin business that had paid $250 million for StreamYard in January 2021. The current Terms of Service name Bending Spoons Operations S.p.A. in Milan, and the Privacy Policy (updated 1 October 2026) names Bending Spoons US Inc. as controller. Since the sale, plan names have changed and the help centre confirms that prices rose for most users at the August 2024 switch.

On data: hosts keep ownership of their content, the terms grant StreamYard a licence to use it to run and improve the service, and the privacy policy says some cookie-based sharing with ad partners may count as a sale under US state law, with an opt-out link in the footer. The policy does not mention AI model training either way. The host terms do not spell out commercial use and point to each plan's permitted uses instead, while guests and viewers get a personal, non-commercial licence under separate user terms.

Where this streamyard pricing and free plan limits review lands

StreamYard suits podcasters, coaches, churches, small marketing teams and anyone who wants a polished multi-guest recording or live show without learning broadcast software. It is not the cheapest route to multistreaming, and solo gamers will get more from OBS. Start on Free, run two or three shows to see whether the guest experience and comment cards matter to you, then move to Core on yearly billing if they do. Pick Advanced only if you need 8 destinations, backstage guests or On-Air webinars.