Ecamm Live vs StreamYard - Livestream Software for Mac Review and Demo

Which livestream software for mac reigns supreme? I take a deep dive into Ecamm Live Vs Streamyard and compare the pair…so you can decide which is better for your live streaming needs.

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🕒Timestamps 🕒
0:00 Start
1:52 Similarities
5:41 Streamyard differences
9:48 A look inside Streamyard
12:43 ECamm differences
17:12 A look inside eCamm Live
21:39 My experience with eCamm and Streamyard
23:02 Q’s

📙Resources mentioned📙
Get Restream: https://saranguyenonline.com/restream
Streamyard : https://streamyard.com?fpr=sara38
Ecamm Live : https://www.ecamm.com/mac/ecammlive/?fp_ref=sara64

Ecamm Live vs StreamYard – Livestream Software for Mac Review and Demo – Video Transcript

Hello, and welcome to the live stream! Whether you are joining live with me now, or if you’re catching us on the replay. I’m really glad that you could be here today. We are going to do a comparison. We are going to compare the pair between Ecamm Live and StreamYard.

I’ve been really reluctant to do a review of these two providers, because in my view, in the world of Sara, I feel like they’re quite different. But I’ve had so many questions about, you know, which one should I use? And I only want to go with one.

I don’t, I don’t want to pay for two. I’m going to compare the pair. We’re going to look at Ecamm Live. We’re going to look at StreamYard. What’s different? What’s the same so that you can come up with the decision for yourself on which one would work best for you.

I’m really excited for today’s live stream. For those of you who don’t know me, my name is Sara Nguyen, and I help coaches, consultants and creative pros build their business using video on social media with ease. Now whether you are watching the replay or you’re joining live with me now, if you have any questions, please drop them in the comments or in the chats.

And I’ll answer them as soon as I can. Super excited. All right, let’s get into it. Let’s get into it. When we talk about Ecamm and StreamYard, I’ve been reluctant to do a review on comparing these two directly because personally, I don’t feel they’re the same. I feel that, you know, Ecamm live is like a software that you install on your computer and StreamYard is a web-based live streaming software provider.

I don’t think it really is apples and apples, but I understand, you know, wanting to see what the differences are between them. That’s what I’m going to give you today. I’m going to talk about both of these, and we’re going to have a look at how I use both of these.

You can kind of figure out for yourself, which one works best for you. Let’s start with that said talk a little bit about what’s similar between Ecamm live and StreamYard, right? Ecamm live and StreamYard, they both offer free and paid plans, right?

With StreamYard, they’ve got a free plan where you can live stream for free, but you get the watermark and it’s a limited amount of hours per week or month. And they’ve also got less features. Ecamm doesn’t have like a free plan, so to speak, but they have a free trial.

You can try it out for 14 days, push your computer and see if it actually works and see how it works for you. Let’s have a bit of a look at the pricing because I always get comments about what does the pricing look like? Talk about the pricing.

As I said, Ecamm live has three plans. They’ve got a 14 day trial, which is their equivalent of the free plan. You can download the software and use all of the paid features for 14 days. And that is plenty of time for you to, you know, get up and streaming and start pushing the limits of Ecamm.

They’ve also got a standard plan, which, you know, for the most part is enough for most people. And they’ve got a pro plan, and on the pro you get features such as 4k livestreaming, and you know, all the bells and whistles.

Now, the StreamYard side of things, they’ve got three plans. They’ve got a free plan where you can stream a lot. You can stream 20 hours per month, which is a lot of hours. If you’re doing 20 hours per month, and let’s say you do one hour live streams, like that’s, you know, four or five live streams a week.

That’s a lot of live streams that they’ll let you have for free, but you get the StreamYard logo on it as a watermark, which you have to understand, like it’s free and it’s, you know, they’re providing a service so you’ve got to give them something.

They’ve also got the basic plan, which is 25 a month. And the pro plan, obviously the pro plan is the higher end of the plans, which gives you access to more features. In that sense, they’ve got these, you know, the basic and the pro plan for both Ecamm live and for StreamYard.

And those are the pricing there. I don’t typically like to talk about pricing because pricing changes. Check out the pricing. If it’s changed, since I’ve done this recording, I don’t apologise for it because I have no control over that, but this is what it is.

Let’s go back and let’s talk a bit more about what else is similar about them. Both Ecamm live and StreamYard, let you live stream to all the live streaming platforms, Facebook, YouTube. They’ve also got the ability to do custom RTMP.

You can connect up things like Amazon live and it all works. You can stream to all the platforms that are available. All of both Ecamm live and StreamYard would also let you show comments on screen.

That’s a nice way of getting some engagement. You’ve got viewers and you’ve got, you know, comments happening. You can display that on-screen so that you can have a bit of engagement with your actual audience. They also allow you both allow you to screen share.

Show your screen. They’ll both allow you to have multiple guests, so you can bring people on and do, you know, have multiple people on the live stream, which is really cool. They both allow you to do overlays like this thing that you see which side, Oh, the thing that you see on the screen right now, like they both allow you to do overlays to different points.

And we’ll talk a bit more about them when I go into depth. And then they also allow you to have backgrounds on both of them. Also allow you to have a recording of the live stream.

After you live stream, either on Ecamm or StreamYard, there’s a copy of the live stream recorded on StreamYard, you download it from their, you know, your site. And with Ecamm, they save a copy on your computer. Those are the key similarities that I find between them.

Now let’s talk a little bit about the differences between them, and we’ll also look at the actual software as well. I’m going to start with StreamYard in terms of the differences, the key differences I find between the StreamYard and Ecamm.

And yes, I do use both. Why do I use both? I don’t know. I use both because I like to understand the live streaming options out there, and I also teach live streaming. I’d like to know what people are actually using. I’m not sponsored by StreamYard or Ecamm, so I’ll say what I want.

This is like a completely honest review. Anyway, let’s go with that. I digress. Let’s talk about some of the key differences I find with StreamYard that they have that Ecamm doesn’t have. The first big difference is that StreamYard is browser-based.

You don’t need to install any software on your computer. You just need a browser. Chrome browser pretty much works the best, and you can use that to live stream with. And that’s a great option to have, because it means you don’t need to have a souped-up computer.

And it means that, you know, if your computer is a little bit old, it can still potentially run a live stream. Whereas Ecamm is a bit more of a processing hog and you do need to have, you know, a computer that can handle all of the processing of a live stream. With StreamYard as well, they include multi-streaming.

I mentioned that both of these platforms allow you to live stream. Technically Ecamm does enable you to multi-stream so you can live stream to Facebook, YouTube Periscope at the same time, but you need to connect Restream with that. You need to pay additional, and then that’s how you would do it through Ecamm.

It’s not included directly in Ecamm. You need Restream to connect you to do multi-streaming. Whereas StreamYard, they’ve got the ability within their software, and it’s included in the monthly pricing, for you to do multi streaming. That’s, that’s a big difference.

I find with StreamYard in terms of the learning curve and in terms of being intuitive, I find StreamYard, hands down, is easier. Just easier for people to get their head around because it is web-based and we will look at it in a minute.

And that makes a big difference, particularly if you are not technical, particularly if you don’t have time to learn, and particularly if you just want something that is easy to use, StreamYard is definitely I find the easier of the two to learn.

And there’s less of a learning curve with StreamYard. With StreamYard, marginal difference, but whenever you live stream, it will save it to the cloud. The recording of the live stream is store, depending on which plan you have, either for 15 days or 30 days, depending on the plan.

And that, you know, whereas Ecamm just saves it onto your computer and you can delete it whenever you’re ready. With StreamYard, you get to have 10 guests on a live stream, which is a lot of people if you ask me, for this introvert person who doesn’t like big groups, but you get to have 10 guests on the stream.

Whereas with Ecamm live, you can have up to four people, which is plenty if you ask me, but you know, it depends on what your needs are. If you have lots of people all the time this could be the option for you. I find that with adding guest, StreamYard does it really well.

Ecamm’s made a lot of changes recently and they brought in like interview mode. And that has definitely changed the way that you, you know, bring guests on, but it’s still not intuitive in my view, it’s still a lot of configuration.

But I find that StreamYard wins the day when it comes to being able to add more guests and add them in easily. The other thing that StreamYard does that Ecamm doesn’t do is that you can live stream on a mobile device technically with StreamYard but you can’t do that with Ecamm live.

Why? Because when you are using StreamYard, you can actually load it on your computer, on Safari, sorry, load on your iPad, or load it on your mobile device, using Safari.

And that will technically work. You can use that to live stream with, whereas Ecamm live, it’s on your Mac and it’s Mac only. And if it doesn’t work, if you don’t have a mobile, if you have a mobile, you can’t actually use Ecamm live to live stream with.

That’s a big difference between the platforms. Let’s, you know, now that I’ve talked a bit about it, let’s actually have a look at what it looks like inside StreamYard. We’re just going to enter quickly the broadcast studio, because I think it’s one thing to talk about the differences, but it’s another thing to, you know, show you guys.

We’re entering the studio now. I get to choose my camera and microphone. Last time I did this, it did weird things to my camera. I’m hoping this will all work, please. I forgot to make my offering to the demo gods, but please work today.

You can set the camera that you want. You can set the audio that you want. Green screen if that really is your thing. I don’t do green screen. And then you would enter the broadcast studio. It’s really easy to get started. And then you would add yourself to the stream.

There I am. I’m going to remove myself. You don’t see duplicate of me. And then like all of the things that you need to do within StreamYard are either across the bottom here. Oh, you can’t see that because I’ve got the overlay. Let’s remove that overlay.

They’re either at the bottom here. You can control the settings here. You can control the layouts here, and then you’ve got, you know, comments that you can see on the right-hand side. You can add banners really easily on the right-hand side, in terms of customising and changing colour schemes.

That’s all in the brand section. In terms of overlays, it’s all here. It’s not really like you don’t have to go to lots of places to figure out where things are and you don’t have to go to lots of places to add things to the live stream, which I think makes a big difference because when you’re on a live stream, there’s a lot going on.

You’re trying to present content, you’re trying to monitor, you know, the feed. You’re making sure that everything’s coming through properly. You have to remember your name and remember what you’re going to say.

The easier software is to use and the less you have to remember, the better your live streams will be. That’s my, that’s my view of things anyway. That’s a bit of a look into StreamYard, just this really elegant, easy way of, you know, live streaming.

And in terms of adding a guest, incredibly easy. All you need to do is click on this invite button here. And then you get this link and then you send that to your guests. And then they pretty much join via that. It’s like literally a couple of clicks, couple of clicks here and there to do stuff.

And incredibly easy. I also find, let’s go back to me now, ’cause it’s all about all about me. I also find that with these live streaming software providers, there’s big communities, right? There’s big Facebook groups for Ecamm live. There’s big Facebook groups with StreamYard, and there’s a lot of support.

There’s a lot of support, both in terms of if you’re having problems, then there’s a lot of community support to help you troubleshoot. And also StreamYard support have been pretty good for, you know, any questions that I’ve had.

That’s how I feel about StreamYard. Now let’s have a look at Ecamm live, some of the big differences with Ecamm live and we’re going to be creative and hopefully Ecamm works with me today. But some of the big differences with Ecamm versus StreamYard is yes, Ecamm is Mac only.

It won’t work on a PC. Whereas with StreamYard, you have the option of being able to use it on any computer because it is web based, big difference. Yeah, I don’t know what else to say about that. They don’t have any plans that, you know, I’ve heard about to add it to PC or to Microsoft and really why would you?

But it’s Mac only. It only works on Mac — biggest difference. I think one of the big things that I get asked all the time is how do you add yourself as a little circle at the bottom of the screen?

And I can do that in Ecamm Live. I’m really surprised by how many questions I get about ‘how do you make yourself as a circle in the corner of the screen?’ I can do that in Ecamm Live because it allows me to do picture and picture. And I’ve got a couple of, I’ve got a couple of shapes to choose from.

I can do as a circle. I can do myself as that little, you know, rectangle or anyway. You get the option to do picture on picture. You do that as well in StreamYard, so to say, but in Ecamm Live, you can do it as a circle, which seems to be a big deal for people.

That is a big win of Ecamm Live. Everyone thinks you’re, you’re a magician because you appear as a circle in the bottom of the screen.

One of the big things for me why I go with Ecamm Live is that it allows me to live stream in 4k because I’m pretty much just vain. That’s the truth of it. I want, I have a 4k camera. I want to use the 4k capability.

It’s not, I wouldn’t say it’s important, but I say it’s something that I want to do. Ecamm Live allows me to do that. On StreamYard, they have high definition on 1080p, so you can live stream in HD, but you don’t get 4k at the time of this recording.

If you have figured out how to do 4k on StreamYard let me know ’cause I’m interested. But at the moment, Ecamm’s the only one that allows you to do 4k and you know, I want to see all of this in 4k.

That’s why, that’s why I choose 4k. And that’s why it’s, you know, something that I, I like to have. Now with Ecamm live, one of the things that you can also do is you can also easily play sound effects and music. With StreamYard, because they’re browser-based, you can still technically play music and you can technically still play sound, but it’s a bit of a workaround.

It’s not easily done directly within their software, right? Directly within StreamYard. You’d have to get either an audio interface to play the music through either a physical one or a digital one.

Or there are little hacks that you have to work around in order to get sound to play. And for some people that’s a big deal-breaker. But other people who are really creative, like Pete Johns from Studio Live Today, I figured out how to make it all work.

There are definitely ways to do it, but in Ecamm it’s a little bit easier in my view, you can download the tracks and then just add them to sound effects. And we’ll have a look at that in a minute. One of the things that I really like about Ecamm is that they also make it easy to share your screens, whether that’s an iPad or your devices, whether that’s your iPad or your iPhone, there’s a nice integration where you can just bring it in and show it all.

You know, and I do, I do that quite a lot when I’m doing tutorials, when I’m showing people how to use different software on a device, for me, that’s quite important. And the thing that people ask me about all the time that never ceases to amaze me is how do I do animated overlays?

Right? Things like my lower third, let me turn this off. You know, everyone’s always like, how do you do that movie bubbly thing with the circles? Once again with the circles. And I can do that through Ecamm live. How do I technically do it?

The animated overlays are created in after effects and they’re exported as a transparent mov file and then I can just upload it to Ecamm live. That’s a big thing for me, not a big thing, but that’s a thing that I think I like to have because I like the colour.

I like the movement. I don’t feel that it’s a deal-breaker because people can go overboard with animations and it takes away from the live stream. I like to have it here and there, you know, I like to have it in my lower third.

I like to have it, you know, from time to time as, you know, text, explain a text, but I’m not, I don’t have the whole thing animated. I feel it’s a little bit like Christmas in Vietnam. And if you’ve ever been to Asia during Christmas, you know what I mean?

It’s a bit, it’s a bit overload for the senses. And I can say that because I’m Vietnamese. These are the main differences between Ecamm. Now let’s have a look at this baby. Let’s have a look at how I, Oh, that’s a bit weird. Oh, I know why that’s happening.

Let’s have a look at, how Ecamm live actually looks and make a little offering here. Now in theory, you should be able to see what my Ecamm live set up looks like, right and you can. This section here is the camera feed.

Obviously I can see everything that’s going on. Now, this section here is my overlays and I drew that really badly. But this is where I add all of the, you know, scenes that you can see where there’s texts and images. This is where I’ve add all of my little animation.

It’s all in this overlays tab here. This is where I just preload everything before I go live. That during the live stream, I just click through them. Okay. Next to it, I’m drawing really bad, is these scenes. And scenes is kind of where I set up the cameras, the different camera feeds.

You saw that I had this picture and picture here, and then I had this scene of me and just face to camera. I set this all up once again, before the live stream. During the live stream, I can just play the overlay and I can just play the scene as I need it.

That’s where that all happens here. Then sound effects happen here, right? And with sound effects, these include like MP3 files. They can be songs as long as you have the right to use them of course. And they can also be, you know, whether they’re sound effects or whether they’re actual tracks. I like my little evil kid laugh. I always have my intro music that I can play that I have during the intro and the outro.

That all happens here. And also to note like this is the layout that I personally have. I don’t know if there’s an optimal layout, this is just the one that I use, but you can move these windows to be wherever you want on the screen, but this is the layout that I have and that I kind of sit with.

I’ve got my sound levels here in this section here. And it allows me to, you know, monitor my sound. I might be a little bit loud, but that’s okay. And I can also see the sound that comes through if I have a guest. And I could also see the sound that comes through when I play the sound effects.

That’s really cool. A little monitor there. And as you can see in this section here, this is where I’ve got all of the comments that you guys are, you know, commenting.

I can see the comments that are coming through and I can also add them to the actual live stream, just like that. And then I can see everything that’s happening in this main window here. That’s pretty much a crash course of how I’ve laid out my Ecamm live.

Oh, there’s one more. In this section here, these are the camera effects, right? And in the camera effects, you’ve got the ability to play with green screen. I can do a little bit of zoom action, zoom and pan with my camera, which I’m not going to do now because I’ve just set it up perfectly, don’t want to ruin the illusion that my life is not perfect on the screen.

And then you can also play with the picture settings. With the brightness, the temperature, the saturations that, that all kind of happens in this section here. There are a lot more features in Ecamm live.

I think I use probably, I would generously say 40% of them, but that’s enough for me. They’ve got many options. It’s a little bit overwhelming in my opinion, but this is Ecamm live and how I set it up. A lot of people are like, why don’t you use all of the features?

I’m like, well, I think, you know, it’s kind of like a Swiss army knife. You take what you need. And if you had everything out at one go, it’d be like this Frankenstein. And do you really need all of it? No, you just use the bits and pieces that you actually need.

Let me end now. They’ve got this cool feature as well, where you can actually do this live demo mode and show people behind the scenes of your actual, yeah, live stream. That was a look at Ecamm live and how I kind of use it.

You can kind of see it’s significantly different to StreamYard. That’s why I’ve always been reluctant to compare the pair because they’re completely different offerings, but I get it. You know, some people are looking to choose one or the other and it really depends.

It really depends on what you want and what’s important to you. And if you go back through the features, you say the key ones that I’ve outlined, I can’t possibly outline every single difference between both of the software providers like this live stream will probably be 12 hours and ain’t nobody got time for that.

I just took the key ones that I feel are most important for the most part. And yeah, I just showed it to you. That essentially is my wrap of, you know, Ecamm live versus StreamYard, I look behind the scenes, you know, battle of the live streaming software.

No, not really. In my experience, what would I say is better? I’m really reluctant to say better because I don’t think there’s, you know, one that’s better than the other. I think it’s more about, what’s better for you. What’s better for your needs.

I think if things like animated overlays, streaming in 4k, being a Mac person is important to you, Ecamm live is probably the way to go. If things such as just pure simplicity, the ability to just go live, the ability to add guests really easily is important to you, StreamYard, you know, is the one that I advocate in that sense.

And to be honest, I kind of like them both, as I said, I’m not sponsored by either one of them so I’ll say what I want. And that’s, that’s my personal view of both of the livestream providers.

I’m just going to check on the comments now, Jade starr. Hey, good to see you here. Desiree. Hey, Desiree. Nice to see you here. Desiree’s another great, you know, StreamYard trainer and she does lots of great tutorials on StreamYard. Good to see you here.

Jade Starr said, ‘Ecamm is more like OBS for Mac’ and I would have to agree with that, but we know my feelings about OBS. OBS and I just struggle. We don’t have a good relationship, but Ecamm Live and I think we’re in a good place where I use them all the time.

Yeah, just checking the questions. Pete says, ‘Sara! Sunday afternoon, live streaming. Hello everyone!’ Yes. I decided go live on this today or it was meant to be a bit later, but I was like, you know what, I’m ready now.

Let’s just do it. And that’s the power of live streaming. Right? You can do it when you’re ready and kind of when you want, pretty excited about that. And Pete says, ‘Pete Johns allows you to invite yourself and use your own mobile as a second camera, which is super handy’.

Yes, that’s very handy as well. Definitely. I like how they’ve, they’re starting to make the move from what I can see to be a lot more mobile-friendly. The ability to, you know, use your mobile to stream with their software, the ability to use your mobile camera and all that stuff.

I liked, I liked the direction that they’re going in. Activate LA, Hey, Ray. Nice to see you on the live stream. All right. Pete John says, ‘top-notch info. Thumbs up for Sara folks’. Thank you guys.

Thanks for being here. OG kitch. Hi. Thanks to, good to see you on the live stream. Now, Jade starr says, ‘I wonder if both Ecamm and OBS have been updated for my new M1 Mini Mac. I saw a live stream that the Ecamm guys did, and I believe that they are ready.

I think there are still minor little issues, but I did see them do like this whole hour and a half long live stream where they talked about the M1 and you know, compatibility. I think for the most part, it’s ready. It’s ready, Jade. Give it a go. Gigi from Giga Art, ‘Hello.

I thought I’m super early, but I’m actually late’. No, that’s me. Totally me. I changed the time on everyone. Sorry, sorry. I just felt like going live. And you know, when you have the urge, you got, you got to go, if you have the urge

you just got to go. Pete says, I was just thinking I should try Ecamm now that I have a Mac’. I think you should give it a go Pete. I think you would like it. I think you would like adding all of the music tracks really easily and being able to play them, you know, just via a little button there.

I think that’s definitely good. Jade says, ‘it says on the Ecamm they’re working on M1. No, but they haven’t specified if it’s been optimised natively’. Yeah.

There’s definitely some issues with big Sur. During the live stream during this week, weird stuff happened with my camera, you know, stuff just strangely happening. I think it’s the settling period after they, after Mac come out with these beat up, OS updates that kind of, you know, really happens. Pete John says, ‘OBS and I struggle’.

We do, we really, really do. Jade Starr says, ‘I have a StreamYard and I struggled.’ you know, we all have our struggles, we all have our struggles and you know, we’re not here to judge each other. Right. All right. That essentially, I think wraps us up.

Thanks for everyone for joining me today. Oh, we’ve got one more question. ‘Do you have a video to show how to connect a Yeti to StreamYard? In theory, Carol, you should be able to just plug the Yeti ’cause it’s a USB mic to your computer and that should show up as, you know, a microphone source. That’s how it should actually work. Oh, yeah.

OG Kitch says, ‘Would it be better to have Ecamm rather than kick-ass tuber animations? Yes. I understand you’ve been having some issues with kick-ass tuber, which is like plays animations and stuff.

I think it would be easier to just create the animations in a tool, whether it’s after effects, Canva, and then you can just play them in Ecamm which I think for the most part, I’ve found that in terms of being flexible and robust, Ecamm kind of wins the game when it comes to playing your animations and having animated overlays because everyone wants animation.

Yeah. That’s basically is it, so thanks guys for being here and hope you’re having a wonderful weekend. Thanks for joining me. Hope that you got a lot of value out of this. Now, if you found this video useful give me a thumbs up and don’t forget to subscribe to the channel if you haven’t already, where I do lots more live stream tutorials, social media training, and we have a lot of fun.

And if you haven’t already got it, make sure you grab a copy of my Facebook Live Cheat Sheets. It’s a super simple guide to get you up and streaming on Facebook live, even if you’ve never hit record before.

I drop a link to that in the description as well as on the screen somewhere. Thanks, everyone for being here. Always a blast to live stream and engage with you guys. I’ll see you in the next live stream and bye for now.