OBS vs. ShadowPlay for Gaming: Which Is Better [2023]

In spite of its popularity, it seems that ShadowPlay still hasn’t found its place in the NVIDIA product line-up because, strictly speaking, it is a part of another product – GeForce Experience, which is an application for NVIDIA graphics cards that enables you to optimize your PC for gaming, get the latest drivers and, yes, also stream and record games. But the site navigation gets quite confusing because all community and support features – FAQ, forums, guides, news – are also gathered under the common GeForce Experience label, so it may be hard to find information relevant to ShadowPlay. Actually, when going through the general GeForce Experience dashboard with all the tabs related to the application, it is challenging to even find ShadowPlay, because its name appears nowhere on the page (Tip: you can still find it by clicking the “Share” tab).

OBS, not being a sub-product but a self-contained project and positioning itself as such, has no such problems. What is more, the fact that OBS is completely open-source is an incredibly community-encouraging factor. It has an API that allows users to create their own unique plugins, and OBS is very attentive to the opinions of its users: their Feature Request functionality works really well and ensures the program develops constantly in the direction set by the same people that actively use it. This experience has led to the creation of more than 20 plugins, including for countdown and TeamSpeak implementation, server ping measuring, and more. With such a community, even the seeming complexity of the program is no longer a big problem.