Top 5 Widgets for Improving Your Stream

If you're a streamer, you know that keeping your viewers engaged and entertained is key to building a successful channel. Streamlabs Desktop offers a variety of free widgets that can help you take your streams from basic to sophisticated. In today’s blog post, we'll explore the top five Streamlabs Desktop widgets that can help improve your streams and keep your viewers coming back for more.

Widgets are essentially small, on-screen elements that display important information, encourage interaction from your viewers, and add some visual flair to your stream. Not to be confused with overlays, which are mainly for aesthetics, widgets usually serve a specific purpose. Streamlabs Desktop offers many different widgets ranging from fun things like games and End Credits to must-have essentials, which we’ll be covering today.

The Alert Box Widget is perhaps the most popular Streamlabs Desktop widget, and for good reason. It allows you to display alerts on-screen when someone follows, subscribes, donates, raids, or cheers on your channel. You can customize the design of your alerts and even add special sounds to make them more attention-grabbing. With the Alert Box Widget, your viewers will feel appreciated and recognized for their support.

Goal Widgets are an absolute game changer for getting your viewers to take action. Streamlabs Desktop offers several different goal widgets, including Donation Goal and Follower Goal, as well as platform-specific widgets like Subscriber Goal and Bit Goal for Twitch, Super Chat Goal for YouTube, and Supporter Goal for Facebook.

Streamlabs goal widgets display a progress bar on your screen and let you track goal progress in real-time. Goal widgets are powerful motivators for inspiring people to donate, sub, follow, and more. Oftentimes, viewers get caught up in watching your stream and may forget that they haven’t followed or subbed. Goal widgets keep your objectives at the forefront of your (and your viewer’s) mind. Set your intentions at the start of every stream by placing a goal widget.

The Chat Box Widget allows you to display your chat on-screen during your stream. You might think it’s redundant to have a chat box, since viewers at home can easily see the chat in a separate window. Here’s the thing: viewers love seeing their names on the big screen. With the Chat Box Widget, not only can you keep the conversation flowing, you’ll make your viewers feel like they're a part of the stream.

You can customize the design of your chat box including colors, font, size, etc. If you have multistreaming enabled with Streamlabs Ultra, you can turn on platform icons, which will show you where people are chatting from (Twitch, YouTube, Facebook, etc.). You can also set up chat commands via Cloudbot to respond to frequently asked questions or prompts. Cloudbot can also remind you to take water breaks, stretch, and run ads.

The Event List Widget displays a scrolling list of recent events on your stream, such as new followers, subscribers, and donations. This widget is a great way to showcase your viewers' support and encourage more interaction. You can customize the design of your event list and even set up filters to only display certain types of events. With the Event List Widget, you can make your viewers feel like their contributions are making a difference.

The Stream Labels Widget is similar to the Event List Widget in that it displays information about followers, subscribers, donations, etc. However, the Stream Labels Widget allows you to pin specific events, such as your top donor or top gifted sub contributor (whereas the Event List will cycle through the stream’s recent activity). There are a ton of different viewer shoutouts you can pin, and you can even differentiate from top donor of the stream, of the month, or of all time. The Stream Labels Widget is the perfect way to highlight specific events that are important and unique to you.

All of the widgets we mentioned today are free to use. If you want to customize your stream with widgets that match your premium overlays for a cohesive and professional look, you can sign up for a Streamlabs Ultra subscription. For $19 USD per month, you can access all of the premium widgets and overlays in the Streamlabs library. Streamlabs Ultra comes with a ton of other benefits like multistreaming, premium access to our creator suite of apps, and the maximum number of guests on Streamlabs Collab Cam.

Streamlabs Desktop offers a variety of widgets that can help improve your stream and keep your viewers engaged. The Alert Box, Donation Goal, Chat Box, Event List, and Stream Labels Widgets are all powerful tools that can make your stream more interactive and entertaining. Experiment with different widgets and designs to find what works best for your channel. With a little creativity, you can easily take your stream to the next level with Streamlabs Desktop widgets.