What is a Twitch chatbot?
Imagine having a powerful ally in your streaming journey, a tool that not only adds fun features but also keeps your chat clean and spam-free. This is the power of a Twitch bot, a vital tool that empowers you to provide your viewers with crucial information about your stream with a simple command.
Twitch chatbots come in two different forms: web-based chatbots and standalone programs. Both have pros and cons, but it all depends on what you want to get out of your chosen chatbot. There are free Twitch bots and some that you have to pay for, but only one of the bots I will go over in this article is a premium Twitch bot.
What can a Chatbot be used for?
As said above, chatbots can be used to moderate your chat and inform viewers using Twitch commands. Some chatbots also have features that can manage viewer polls, handle giveaways, play games with viewers in chat, display alerts, and much more!
How you choose your chatbot depends solely on how you use it. For example, you wouldn’t use a chatbot that can’t manage giveaways when another chatbot does.
What Chatbots are available?
There are a plethora of chatbots available right now. Rather than going through them all and overloading you with information, I will choose the top chatbots being used right now, including some newer bots bursting at the seams with features that make them much more than a simple chatbot.
Both software and cloud-based options are available, each with pros and cons. I will take my top three best Twitch bots from each and explain them below.
My top 3 recommendations for a chatbot are as follows:
Software-based
Cloud-based
Features and Ease of Use
I’ve touched on it briefly, but this section will explore both sides of these chatbots. First, I will admit that I no longer use any form of cloud-based chatbot, but I did for the first few years of my streaming career.
Below is a Twitch bot list with the most basic features you want your chatbot to have. There are many features for the software chatbots, but I will only review the most common thought-about features when choosing a chatbot.
What bot is best for me?
So, after seeing that table, you would expect me to say something like, “Well, that’s it, Nightbot is the best live streaming bot and most feature-packed”, and you would be wrong.
You would be wrong because although, yes, Nighbot does seem like it has the most features on paper, the other bots also have much, much more to offer than just the seven most commonly used features listed above.
For example, if you have alerts on your stream, they are most likely from Streamlabs or StreamElements. They have all those features and provide extra features such as overlays, alerts, channel reward alerts, widgets, shoutout commands, and more. What’s best is that they are effortless to set up and use, so they have a 4 out of 5 rating for ease of use.
Then, moving on to software chatbots, they also have incredible punching power in the feature department. Yes, they may miss out on things like chat logs, spam filters, or song requests, and they are not the easiest to use (for new users). Still, they have all the necessary tools from moderating your chat by setting up those rules manually to incredibly advanced options to fully take control of your OBS and allow chat to have commands or channel redeems that also alter your OBS.
The three software chatbots I mentioned, Aitum, Streamer.bot, and Mix it Up, can all have custom alerts, too; there is just more work behind them than the cloud-based alternatives. For example, I use Aitum and Streamer.bot in tandem with each other because 95% of my stream is fully controlled and automated by Aitum, from simple commands like !first to things like giving my mods the power to change my scene if I had forgotten or even END MY STREAM by gifting a certain amount of subs.
I use Aitum and Streamer.bot because I have absolute control over my alerts and stream features with them. If I want an alert to come up and have certain aspects delay or play at certain times, I can do that. You are truly only limited by your imagination when you have these two chatbots in play.
You are not only limited to controlling OBS with Aitum either. There is an ever-growing integration list, which includes Streamlabs Desktop, TikTok, YouTube, Elgato, VTube Studio, StreamElements, Pulsoid, and many other integrations.
These software chatbots are ranked so low in the ease of use category because they aren’t very user-friendly to new users. Once you have watched a few videos, looked at the documentation, and mastered the basics, you will never look back! Then, when you lean more and more into the chatbots, you will learn some incredibly advanced techniques where you can do things you didn’t even think were possible.
A quirky little thing I have in my stream is that whenever somebody gets banned from my stream, I use Streamer.bot to grab their profile picture and put it in my OBS as a browser source. Then, an overlay in the style of Dark Souls III comes up, saying, “Your Banned.”
Although it sounds simple on paper, you will see how I did it below. It has a lot more to it than you would expect, and it provides excellent chat content to watch as it happens.
So, as you can see, it’s not as obvious to say that you should choose X chatbot because it’s the best on paper and has the most common features. You must select a chatbot based on how you want to implement it.
If you are new to streaming and would like an easy-to-use chatbot that does most things well with very little input needed for customisations, then I would 100% tell you to choose StreamElements, Streamlabs Cloudbot, or NightBot in a heartbeat. The reason for this is that you are new to streaming and want to get set up with all the spam filters, alerts (if you’re using StreamElements or Streamlabs), and all the default commands, it is plug-and-play, and you will be good to go within minutes.
However, if you want total control of your stream and are willing to learn the software I suggest you check out Aitum, Streamer.bot, and Mix it up bots, in that order too! I may be slightly biased because I use Aitum and Streamer. bot. Still, I can say with my hand on my heart that if it wasn’t for those two bots (especially Aitum), my stream would not have anywhere close to the interactiveness or fun/quirky things it does, and it wouldn’t stand out whatsoever.