Restream takes one stream from you, re-sends it from its servers, and bills you every month for the privilege. SplitCam encodes once on your machine and opens a connection to each platform itself — 84+ destinations, nothing routed through anyone else, nothing to subscribe to.
A cloud multistreaming service is a relay. You send it one stream, it holds a copy on its servers, and it forwards that copy to each platform you connected. The convenience is real, and so is the arrangement underneath: your broadcast passes through infrastructure you do not control, and the bill arrives whether you streamed four times that month or none.
Every frame travels to the relay first and to your audience second. That is one more network hop and one more service that has to be up while you are live.
A subscription charges for the calendar, not for the hours you actually broadcast. Stream twice in a month and you still pay for the twenty-six days you did not.
Quality, destination count and features are whatever tier you are on. Changing any of them is a pricing decision rather than a settings change.
The expensive part of streaming is encoding video, and your machine is already doing it. Once the frame is encoded, sending it to four platforms instead of one is just four network connections. SplitCam opens them itself — hardware encoding through NVENC, QuickSync or AMF on Windows and VideoToolbox on Mac, then a direct connection to each platform's ingest server.
Destinations that share the same resolution and bitrate share one encode. Give a destination its own settings and it gets its own encode — which is why the per-destination control below is a real feature and not a toggle.
Want 1080p60 at 6 Mbps to Twitch and 720p30 at 2.5 Mbps to Facebook? Set them separately, instead of accepting one relay setting for everything. Bitrate, resolution and framerate are independent per destination.
If a platform is up and your connection is up, your stream is up. There is no third service that can have an outage on your behalf.
Twitch, YouTube, Facebook, Kick, TikTok, X and the rest are already in the list with sensible defaults.
Each destination has its own connection out of your machine, so a platform going down leaves the others streaming. With a relay there is one upload feeding everything — which is tidier when it works, and a single point of failure when it does not.
This is the honest limit of sending directly, and it is worth knowing before you switch. A relay needs one upload from you. Sending directly needs the sum of every destination's bitrate leaving your house at once — four platforms at recommended settings is roughly 19–20 Mbps of upload — 6 to Twitch, 4.5 to YouTube, 3 to Facebook and 2.5 to a fourth, plus about 20% headroom. If your connection cannot hold that, a cloud relay is not a convenience, it is the thing that makes multistreaming possible at all. SplitCam ships an Upload Speed Test so you can check before you commit, and you can always run fewer destinations at lower bitrates — but if your upload is the constraint, Restream solves a problem SplitCam cannot. The same goes for streaming from a laptop on hotel or mobile internet, where the relay absorbs the instability instead of your audience seeing it.
Sending directly needs the sum of every destination's bitrate leaving at once. A relay needs one upload. That is the whole trade, and it is arithmetic rather than opinion — here it is with the bitrates each platform recommends.
| Destination | Recommended 1080p | Running total |
|---|---|---|
| Twitch | 6 Mbps | 6 Mbps |
| YouTube | 4.5 Mbps | 10.5 Mbps |
| 3 Mbps | 13.5 Mbps | |
| A fourth platform | 2.5 Mbps | 16 Mbps |
| Plus ~20% headroom | — | 19–20 Mbps of upload |
Three platforms come to 13.5 Mbps, or about 17 with headroom. Four come to 19–20. If your upload cannot hold the number in the last row, a cloud relay is not a convenience — it is the thing that makes multistreaming possible at all, and that is a reason to pay for one. SplitCam has a built-in Upload Speed Test so you can check against your real connection rather than the number on your bill.
Honest table. The last two rows are the ones that should decide it for you.
| Feature | SplitCam | Restream |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free, no watermark | Free tier plus paid plans — check current pricing |
| How the stream travels | Direct from your machine to each platform | Relayed from their cloud |
| Destinations | 84+ pre-configured | Multi-platform, plan-dependent |
| Scene compositing on your machine | Layers, sources, AI background, effects | Studio is browser-based |
| Virtual camera for Zoom / Teams / Meet | Built in, 60+ apps | Not its purpose |
| Works with no internet to a relay | Local recording keeps working | The service is the product |
| Upload bandwidth needed | Sum of all destination bitrates | One upload, fanned out for you |
| Streaming from an unstable connection | Your connection is the stream | Relay absorbs the instability |
The same list on every comparison here, because you should be able to rule us out quickly rather than discover this after the download.
There is no browser link to send someone. You can put a guest's Zoom, Meet or Discord window into a scene with window capture, which works, but it is a workaround rather than a feature.
You switch to a scene, you do not cue it first and cut to it. There is no wall of source previews either. If you direct from a proper switcher workflow, this will feel wrong immediately.
Recording captures the composed scene, not one file per camera for editing later. Nothing in SplitCam pans, tilts or zooms a camera for you.
You can take NDI as a source. SplitCam is not an NDI sender for another machine to pick up.
Documented on Windows: the Whiteboard, Application Audio, the Replay source and the solid Color source. Scenes, layers, the virtual camera, multistreaming and recording run on both.
SplitCam Remote is on the App Store; the Android version is in the works and not released. Phone-as-a-camera is separate from that and is not iOS only.
Yes, for the multistreaming part. SplitCam is free with no watermark and no subscription, and it multistreams to 84+ platforms. The difference is architectural, not a feature tier: SplitCam sends each stream from your computer instead of relaying it from a cloud service.
Yes, and this is the main thing to check. A relay takes one upload from you; sending directly needs the sum of all destination bitrates leaving at once — about 19–20 Mbps for four platforms at recommended settings. SplitCam has a built-in Upload Speed Test, so you can find out in a minute rather than discover it mid-stream.
Yes. Each destination takes the same stream key the platform gives you. Nothing about your channels or their settings changes — only where the connection originates.
You build them in SplitCam itself: layered sources on one canvas, AI background removal, effects, browser sources for overlays. If you are coming from OBS as well, SplitCam imports OBS scene collections in one click.
Yes, locally on your own machine, and that keeps working regardless of what any online service is doing at the time.
No account to create, no time limit and no watermark. SplitCam has been free since 2003 and the current version is v10.9.2.
Free download, Windows 10/11 and macOS 13+. Check your upload with the built-in speed test, paste your keys, and the relay stops being part of your setup.
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