TL;DR

Twitch Studio provides a nicely integrated solution for creating layouts and streaming to the Twitch platform. However, it's missing a few key features that make it difficult to do more advanced scene setups.

What I Like About Twitch Studio

• The UI of Twitch Studio is an improvement from OBS aesthetically, but sometimes it can be a bit confusing how certain parts work.

  • I had to do a lot of mucking around to figure out how certain parts of the app work. Especially working with audio inputs!

• Cropping and moving layers around is pleasant to work with. Adding layers is very straight-forward and moving them is easy too.

• Supports desktop audio out of the box on Mac.

• Chat and activity is available and feels like you're on Twitch.

• Built-in alerts support that are relatively customizable.

• Supports local recording

To sum it up, there is a lot there to work with, especially for newer streamers. I enjoy the ease of use and the UI feels like Twitch so it's nice to feel like you're in the same eco-system.

What I Dislike About Twitch Studio

• No support for NDI sources. These source types make it a lot easier to add guests to your streamers.

• No support for a chat source. It's very common to want to show your chat on screen and I'm very surprised this wasn't supported in the beta.

  • I ended up using a browser source and a React + GraphQL app to power chat.

• No way to copy scenes or layouts. For more complex stream setups, this creates a lot of repetition and makes it easier to miss something when you decide to update your layout. You may have to update in multiple places and miss something.

• No transitions when switching scenes. In OBS you get more of a video production experience where you can queue up scenes and do nice transitions like fades.

Wrapping up, there is a lot of functionality that makes it hard to use Twitch Studio for very complex stream scene organization and use, or if you have guests.