OBS Blade vs Stream Deck vs Touch Portal

Three tools come up whenever streamers ask how to control OBS without alt-tabbing: the Elgato Stream Deck (dedicated hardware buttons), Touch Portal (a general macro/automation app for phones and tablets that supports OBS among many other things) and OBS Blade (our app, built only for OBS). They overlap, but they're answering different questions.

At a glance

	Stream Deck	Touch Portal	OBS Blade
What it is	Hardware keypad with LCD keys	Macro deck app for phone/tablet	OBS remote app for phone/tablet
Cost	Hardware purchase - check Elgato's current pricing	Freemium - check their current pricing for the upgrade	Free core; optional Pro (sub or lifetime)
OBS depth	Actions via OBS plugin	OBS connection among many integrations	Full dashboard: scenes, sources, mixer, stats, preview
Beyond OBS	Whole-PC hotkeys, huge plugin ecosystem	Automation for many apps and services	Stream chat: Twitch, YouTube, Kick, Owncast
Shows live state	Per-key icons	Custom button pages	Live preview, meters, stats, chat - the full picture
Account / cloud	Optional software account	Depends on setup	None. Direct LAN connection, no account

Elgato Stream Deck

The Stream Deck is the default answer for a reason. It's a small keypad with an LCD behind every key, an OBS plugin, and an ecosystem of plugins for everything from Philips Hue to Spotify. It sits on your desk and it just works, every stream, for years.

Where it genuinely wins: tactile buttons. Physical keys you can hit without looking are something no touchscreen will ever fully replicate, and muscle memory on a Stream Deck is real. It also controls your whole PC, not just OBS - if you want one button box for everything, this is the mature option.

The trade-offs: it's another box to buy (check Elgato's current pricing for the model that fits you), another USB cable, and each key is a single action with a tiny icon. It can tell you a scene name - it can't show you the scene, your audio levels or your stream health.

Touch Portal

Touch Portal turns a phone or tablet into a grid of custom buttons. It's free to start with a paid upgrade (check their current pricing), and OBS is one of many things it connects to - it's closer to a programmable remote for your whole setup than to an OBS tool.

Where it genuinely wins: breadth and flexibility. If you enjoy building your own button pages - mixing OBS actions with system macros, app launches and other integrations in one custom grid - Touch Portal gives you far more raw material than a purpose-built app ever will. It's a tinkerer's tool, and a good one.

The trade-offs: you build your dashboard yourself, and what you build is buttons. OBS-specific depth - a real audio mixer with live meters, scene preview, stream statistics, chat - isn't what it's for.

OBS Blade

OBS Blade is a remote control for OBS Studio and nothing else. It connects to the WebSocket server built into OBS 28+ and gives you a full dashboard instead of a button grid: scenes with studio mode, show/hide for every source, a live audio mixer, stream and record controls, live stats with a saved session history - plus your Twitch, YouTube, Kick and Owncast chat in the same app.

Where it genuinely wins: depth on OBS specifically, and information density. Because it's not a grid of buttons, it can show you what's actually happening - which scene is live, which source is muted, whether you're dropping frames - while you control it. It's also the privacy-clean option: no account, no cloud, your phone talks straight to your PC over your LAN. The core remote is free, forever; Pro adds native, combined multi-platform chat with full moderation. And it treats tablets as first-class, with side-by-side layouts made for a big screen on a stand.

The trade-offs: it's a touchscreen - no tactile keys. It controls OBS and your chat, not your whole PC. And it's used by hundreds of thousands of streamers, but it isn't hardware you can buy once and keep forever; it lives and updates as an app.

Which one for you

Want physical buttons and one box for your whole PC? Get a Stream Deck. It's excellent at exactly that.
Love building your own macro pages across many apps? Touch Portal will make you happy.
Want the deepest OBS control with your stream's live state and chat on a screen you already own? That's what OBS Blade is for - and since it's free, it costs nothing to find out.

Plenty of streamers run two of these side by side - a Stream Deck for reflex actions and a tablet with OBS Blade for monitoring and chat. They're complements as much as competitors. If you're going the tablet route, read how to set a tablet up as a stream deck, or start with the five-minute phone setup.