- What is that hair? Hat on for this video. Being able to quickly
and easily control things on your livestream is one
of the most important skills you'll need to develop as a live streamer, whether it's changing scenes, muting your microphone,
swapping camera angles or just keeping up with
your chat and alerts, there are many different balls
that you'll need to juggle as a live streamer while still trying to be engaging with your audience. That is why tools like the Stream Deck and Stream Deck XL from Elgato have become almost essential for streamers as it makes controlling and managing your live
stream that much easier. But these tools don't come cheap. At the time of recording this video, the Stream Deck, the
original 15 key variant, costs almost $150 and the Stream Deck XL,
I think costs almost $250 and that's even if you
can find them in stock. But thankfully there
are some alternatives, instead of investing in a
completely new piece of hardware, most of you will already have something in your pockets that you can use instead. Yes, your smartphone. Today we'll be testing and
comparing the three best apps that you can install on your
iPhone, your Android phone or even a tablet that
will help you control all the different aspects
of your live stream. Let's go. (upbeat music) Before we jump into the video, I would like to give a big
thank you to the sponsor, Nerd or Die. Throughout this video, wherever we have been able
to customize the icon set, we have been using icons
from the Nerd or Die website which you can download for free. Nerd or Die have also just dropped a new pack called Iridescent which is one of my absolute
favorites that they've done. It has an ultra contemporary design, smooth material background loops and loads of different color options for you to customize however you want. Head over to nerdordie.com and grab yourself a new
design for your live streams. The first 100 of you to
go over and use code, GamingCareers50 will get
50% off your purchase and if you lost that race then
you can always get 15% off by using coupon code GamingCareers. The first app that
we're going to be diving into is Touch Portal, which
has quietly become one of the most popular
choices for live streamers looking to use an app to
control their live streams. Touch portal has two different versions, a Free version and a Pro version. The Free version is just
limited to two different pages each with eight buttons on. So it's useful to test out the app but it's definitely too limited if you're going to be using it as your controller app of choice. The upgrade to the Pro
version costs $12.99 and that is a lifetime license. So you just pay that once and you'll get all the updates to Touch Portal in the future. It completely removed that
restriction of just two pages. You can have unlimited amount of pages and you can customize how
many buttons are shown on the screen all the way
up to 110 buttons per page. Touch Portal has a decent
amount of integrations and apps that you can control in its library. From a streaming app perspective, this includes OBS Studio,
Streamlabs OBS and Xsplit. Changing scenes, muting microphones or enabling and disabling
sources are of course amongst the actions that
you can add to your phone or tablet with Touch
Portal but there's also some more advanced OBS
controls that you get with Touch Portal that you
don't see from other apps, things like setting specific
source volumes or enabling and disabling filters on
different scenes or sources. It is worth noting though that to get that
extra level of OBS control you will need to install a web
socket for getting into OBS. There's also a really detailed integration for those of you that
are streaming to Twitch. We can do basic things like
sending a message in chat, running an advert for a certain amount of time or creating a clip all the way to more advanced things
that can trigger based on when somebody takes an
action on your channel like subscribing to you or
redeeming some channel points. For example, you can have
your background lights change when somebody subscribes to your channel or you could even have chat control with scene US streaming
through some chat commands. Something I see
implemented incredibly well on Mr.Gregles drumming stream that his viewers can apply effects and change camera angles through his chat. These extra controls and deep
integrations that you get with both OBS Studio and
Twitch through Touch Portal is one of the biggest selling points. However, one of the biggest negatives is probably the UI of the desktop app. This is where you actually set up all the actions for your device and it's not necessarily hard to use but for a first time user, it can be a bit overwhelming
jumping in, getting connected and creating your first few pages. Touch Portal uses what they
call the Spider Web navigation between each page that you create which basically just
means that any one page that you create can be
linked to any other page, you just need to create a button that links those two pages together. This is useful because you
can quickly customize exactly where each page takes you to but this definitely does
take some getting used to and if you're not careful, you can easily end up creating a page, forgetting to put any
navigation controls onto it and then you're stuck there. Thankfully, there is an
option in the settings that we'll always add a navigation button to each new page that you create which will take you back to the main page. One thing that I like
to do with navigation especially if you're on a bigger device like a tablet is reserving a
whole row just for navigation where you can have buttons that link to various different pages that way you're only ever
really one click away from any action that you need
whilst you're live streaming. One negative that all apps will suffer from over a physical
Stream Deck is it's hard to always know when
you've pressed the button. You don't get that tactile feedback that you do off a physical Stream Deck. Touch Portal have aimed
to solve this issue with the option for some haptic feedback, which basically vibrates the device when you have clicked a button but this really he doesn't
implement too well, I don't think it feels more
like an aggressive vibration that you get when you get, say
a text message on your phone rather than a simulated click. Touch Portal also has options outside of just having on and off
states for certain buttons. So you can toggle things based on whether you are holding or
releasing a button as well. So you can have like a Push to Mute button that if you need to cough or someone needs to come into your room, you can hold down a button
on the Touch Portal app which will keep your microphone muted and as soon as you release it,
it will then unmute your mic. You can, of course
customize all of the buttons on your Touch Portal app to look exactly as you want to with
custom colors and texts, icons, even gifts if you want to and you can set two different
button styles depending on if the button is on and off so you can easily see at a glance the current state of your stream. The last couple of things
that I want to mention on Touch Portal that came up in my testing is when you are using the app and creating buttons on the desktop PC, you quite often need to click
this little Refresh button to update your device
to reflect the layout and designs that you've
just chosen on the app. It would be nice if this
just happened automatically as does with other apps. Also, I found that with newer iPhones that have a notch at the top, which I believe is from the 10 onwards, the app doesn't always
account for the notch when it's being used in landscape mode, which I find quite annoying. You can of course set
up custom border sizes on the desktop app to fix this but it'd be nice if it was automatic like most iPhone apps are. Right. That's enough talking about Touch Portal. Let's move on to our second
app, Streamlabs Deck. Streamlabs Deck has not surprisingly been developed by the
team over at Streamlabs and giving content creators
greater control over at Streamlabs OBS. Probably the biggest advantage of this app is that it is completely free and it is incredibly
quick and easy to set up. All you have to do is download the app onto your phone or tablet from
the app or Google Play Store then simply scan a QR code to sync it, which can be found in the
Streamlabs OBS settings under Remote Control. Once you've done that, you'll automatically get
given one scrollable page with all the controls available to your currently selected scene. So buttons for things like starting or stopping your streams or recordings, swapping scenes, enabling
and disabling sources or muting microphones are
automatically populated and updated to reflect whichever scene you currently have selected. This does however mean
that there is no way to create custom pages with
your own custom controls. You're literally given everything that Streamlabs OBS can
control on that current scene in one scrollable page. You can go into the settings
and rearrange certain icons and hide ones that you don't want to see. but yeah, there's really no way to create custom pages
of your own controls. If you do get some zoom
in and zoom out controls to change how many buttons are shown on this scrollable page all the way up to 200 buttons for you tablet users but there's no way to customize what these buttons look like. Similarly to Touch Portal, there is the option for haptic feedback and unlike Touch Portal, this does now feel much
more like a simulated click so I'd definitely
recommend turning this on. And there's some advanced options for controlling your audio sources. So if you press and hold
down on any audio source, you'll get given a slider control to really fine tune the
volume of that audio source. That unfortunately though is I think where the positives end for this app. The biggest limitation of this is that it's locked
down to Streamlabs OBS. So you can't even use this with OBS studio and the integrations with
platforms like Twitch really don't offer much control at all. The app does feature
a couple of other tabs so you can keep on top of your stream chat and your recent events which is nice especially if you're a single monitor user and you need one app that can do all of these different things like controlling the streaming application
as well as keeping up with Twitch Chat and recent events. To his credit, the UI
of the actual buttons that you'd get given
automatically does look good and it's incredibly quick to set up. You can seriously get set up with this app in like 30 seconds
because it auto generates all the buttons for you but it's so limited with it just working with Streamlabs OBS that
I'd only really recommend it if you're already using
that streaming app. Our third app is Elgato's
Stream Deck Mobile which is Elgato's official offering of the Stream Deck
experience in a mobile app. Now I have high hopes for this app because it's Elgato's official app and the Stream Decks
are so universally loved but have they been able to nail that experience on mobile as well? So let's start with the price. Now, maybe not surprising
Elgato's Stream Deck Mobile is the most expensive of the
three apps that we're comparing but thankfully it's nowhere near the $150 you'd have to shell out
for a physical Stream Deck. You can choose between either paying $2.99 per month or $24.99
per year to have access to Elgato's Stream Deck Mobile. But there is also a 30 day free trial so that you can test out
its functionality limit-free for one month before committing to either the monthly
or annual subscription. Just like with the original Stream Deck, you get 15 keys in a five by three grid, which can be displayed
in either a portrait or landscape mode but annoyingly, there is no way of changing
this limit of 15 keys. So if you're on a tablet
or a larger device, you're still stuck with 15 keys. You can of course use folders and then folders within folders. So you're technically never limited by the number of buttons but really if you're on
a bigger screen device and you're just getting 15
keys that are really large, it's not a great experience. Now Stream Deck Mobile uses
the exact same desktop app as the physical Stream Decks, which makes adding actions and folders as simple as dragging and dropping which is then instantly
reflected on your device. Adding your device is a similar process to what we saw in Streamlabs Deck, where you simply scan a QR code with your phone through
the Stream Deck Mobile app and everything should be synced. I much preferred the desktop interface when compared to Touch Portal's. Everything is laid out
as you'd expect it to and it makes changing things
like text or icon super simple. There is a big selection of streaming apps that are supported with actions
through Stream Deck Mobile, OBS studio, Streamlabs OBS,
Stream Elements OBS Live, Nvidia ShadowPlay, Elgato Game Capture and even Twitch Studio are all supported. It is however worth noting that the officially supported integration with OBS Studio isn't as deep
as it was with Touch PortaL. There are also integrations
with streaming platforms like Twitch and YouTube,
where similar to Touch Portal you could create clips, you
could send chat messages, you could run adverts, all
those kinds of controls. If you've bought into Elgato's
ecosystem of products, such as their key lights
or their wave microphones, then you do get some
additional functionality you can control through the app. With either Elgato's lights or products from companies like Phillips Hue, you can turn lights on and off, control things like the
brightness, color temperature or even RGB like I do with
my Phillips Hue Lights behind my setup. With Wave microphones, you can control all aspects of your audio like adjusting volumes, totaling monitoring and changing the mix and balance of your stream audio. Elgato also has a rich and open API for developers to build
their own integrations into the Stream Deck app which has seen controls
introduced for all kinds of apps including things like
ShareX, Voicemod, Voicemeter with plenty of new controls
being added every month. There's even an OBS Tools App which has been built by a community member which gives more control
over OBS functions. So it kind of brings it on par with what you could do
through Touch Portal. This developer API is
one of the best things about Stream Deck mobile
because any company that's looking to build an integration into a physical Stream Deck, you'll also be able to benefit by having those available to
you in Stream Deck Mobile. There's also a neat option in
the Stream Deck application that allows you to set automatic
profile switching based on apps that are focused on your computer. What this means is that
you can set a full layout of buttons in your profile
on Stream Deck Mobile that will only show when you have OBS open or one that will only show
when you have Discord open and there'll be shown automatically as soon as you switch to the application which might save you a button press. Similarly to the other two apps, there is haptic feedback
enabled by default which lets you know when
you've pressed a button but they haven't really taken
advantage of the touch screen with any additional functionality. On iOS devices, they have
added the option to use Siri to control certain actions on your stream. Personally, I think this is
more of a gimmick than a feature because it wouldn't exactly
be a great viewer experience if you're constantly talking to Siri, asking them to change
scenes and mute microphones for you and your stream
can hear all of that. So more of a gimmick for me but I can certainly see a use case where if you're maybe
running a cooking stream or something like that, you
need to be able to communicate with the software to change scenes without using your dirty hands and touching the touch screen. Just like with Touch Portal, you can set custom icons or
even gifts for your buttons and have different states
for enabled or disabled. One thing that I noticed actually way back when Stream Deck Mobile was released and still hasn't been fixed
is that on retina screens particularly you can see some jagged edges on any of the curved corners of buttons. You would have thought that
this would be an easy fix but it's existed since the app came out. The other thing that I've noticed is that there is sometimes a
delay on pressing on a button particularly when you're
opening up a folder which contains lots of
integrations inside. It's not a deal breaker. It's not like seconds that you're waiting but it is noticeable and I
thought it'd be worth mentioning. By far my biggest gripe with
Elgato's Stream Deck Mobile though is the limit to
15 buttons per page. It just makes it useless for
those of us wanting to use a tablet as the device of our choice because you're just going
to get 15 huge buttons whereas all of that space could be saved and used over you know, 50 plus buttons and it'd be a lot more useful. My guests there is probably
the Elgato want this to be sort of a gateway
app into purchasing a physical Stream Deck or Stream Deck XL. And if they offered you the ability to have like 50 buttons on
a tablet of your choice, then maybe they would sell
less $250 Stream Deck XLs which is probably true. In terms of compatibility
for all three of these apps, they have versions for
both Android and iOS and the desktop companion can be installed on either Windows or Mac OS. If you're wanting to install the app on an iPad or an Android tablet, technically all three apps support that but like we've just
mentioned Stream Deck Mobile still limits you to just 15
keys whereas the other two apps at least you can display
more buttons per page. So if you want to install it on a tablet, I would maybe steer clear of
Elgato's Stream Deck Mobile. All three of these apps work by connecting to the same network as your PC. So if your PC is say hardwired connected to a router and then
your phone is connected over wifi to that same router, these should all work
and connect seamlessly. Touch Portal technically does
also offer USB connection but it's only with Android
devices and Windows PCs. And actually in my testing, I found that the wifi
connection was much more stable. So let's summarize
exactly what I've learned over the last few weeks
of testing these apps and which one would I recommend to you? Or maybe not surprisingly, it's going to completely
depend on your use case. If you are somebody that really wants the most control of Twitch and OBS Studio and don't mind having a
slightly more complicated setup but you can customize all the things about how many buttons are shown on screen and exactly how those buttons look, then Touch Portal is probably
the best choice for you. If however, you just want
something easy to get you started and you always plan to upgrade to a physical Stream Deck at some point or maybe you already own some
of Elgato's other products like the Key Lights or
the Wave microphones, then I would say that Elgato's
Stream Deck Mobile is for you providing that you don't mind
the 15 key per page limit. If you are broke and
spending money right now isn't an option and you're
already using Streamlabs OBS and you just want
something simple to control that piece of software
whilst keeping up with chat and some of your alerts
then maybe Streamlabs Deck is going to be enough for you. So what do you think? Have any of these apps
tempted you into trying them? Were you using any already or are there any that I
have missed in this video? I'd love to hear your thoughts. So leave them down in the comments below so that I can learn
back from you guys too. Thanks so much for watching. If you enjoyed this kind
of comparison video, where we put the apps head to head then please do give that thumbs up. That will let me know that you like this kind of video, then maybe in the future we can do more comparisons
of different microphones and different lights and things like that. So I'll catch you in the next one. Peace. (upbeat music) - I thought it was like nursery kid music. I don't even know what it is. - I'm just imagining like
the panic of the person. I'll stop it now, the panic of the person
like managing the livestream just like quickly
finding Twitch soundtrack or something to look like in
the first track then they see. - what's on my desktop? Oh my kids nursing music, use it quick. (laughing)
