Restream vs StreamYard: pricing, channel limits and real cost compared

Both companies price on how many places one broadcast can reach at once, so the honest way to compare them is to pick a destination count and read off what each charges. Restream's channel ladder runs 2 on Free, 3 on Standard, 5 on Professional and 8 on Business. StreamYard's runs 3 on Core and 8 on Advanced, with no multistreaming on the free plan at all.

Line those up and Restream wins twice and then loses badly. At three destinations Restream's Standard is $19 a month against StreamYard's Core at $44.99, so StreamYard costs 137 percent more for the same reach. At five, Restream's Professional is $49 against StreamYard's Advanced at $88.99, and Restream is still $39.99 a month cheaper while throwing in two destinations you have not asked for.

At eight it inverts completely. Restream's eighth channel only exists on Business at $239 a month. StreamYard's eighth destination is on Advanced at $88.99. That is $150.01 a month, or $1,800.12 a year, in StreamYard's favour for identical reach. On annual billing the gap is $199.17 against $68.99, which is $130.18 a month.

So the rule is simple and nobody states it: up to five destinations, Restream is the cheaper product by a wide margin. At six or more, StreamYard is, by a wider one.

The crossover above has a condition attached, and it is the single most expensive thing to miss on either site. StreamYard's pricing page carries a line under the plan cards reading that Core and Advanced plans are for individual use only, pointing at its Plan Usage Policy. The free plan card says the same thing in three words: for individuals only.

That is not marketing copy about who the plan suits. It is an eligibility rule, and it means the $88.99 Advanced plan that wins the eight-destination comparison is not a plan a company can legitimately sit on. StreamYard directs organisations to a separate Business tier that carries no published price at all. The comparison that StreamYard wins is one a business is not allowed to enter.

Restream has no equivalent restriction on Standard or Professional, and its Business plan is published rather than quoted: $239 a month, $2,390 a year, 8 channels, a website player, 1,000 concurrent viewers, two included team seats, co-producer mode, team workspaces and stream disconnect protection. Extra seats beyond those two are published as well, at $25 per seat per month.

For a solo creator, then, the eight-destination comparison is real and StreamYard wins it outright. For a company, StreamYard has no number and Restream has three. If you have to forecast a line item before you can sign anything, that difference matters more than the price gap.

Restream's pricing page puts a Save 20% badge next to the annual toggle. StreamYard's puts 22% Off. We flipped both toggles and divided.

Restream bills Standard at $190 a year against $19 a month, which is $228 if you paid monthly. The saving is $38, or 16.67 percent. Professional bills at $470 against $588, a saving of $118, or 20.07 percent. Business bills at $2,390 against $2,868, a saving of $478, or 16.67 percent again.

There is a tidy reason those two match. Standard's $190 is exactly ten times its $19 monthly price, and Business's $2,390 is exactly ten times $239: pay for ten months, get twelve, which is 16.67 percent by construction. Professional is the odd one out at $470, which is $20 less than the ten-month rule would give. It is the only Restream plan where the advertised 20 percent is real, and it is the middle of the ladder rather than the top.

StreamYard's badge behaves the way this category usually does. Core saves exactly $108.00 a year, which is 20.00 percent against a 22 percent claim. Advanced saves $240.00, which is 22.47 percent and slightly beats the badge. Between the two vendors that is four published plans, one accurate badge each, and in both cases the entry plan is the one shortchanged. Divide the annual price by the monthly price yourself before you commit twelve months to either.

Both products record what you broadcast, and both describe the allowance in a unit the other does not use, which makes the feature tables look comparable when they are not.

Restream measures retention in days. Its plan comparison gives recording storage as 15 days on Standard, 15 days on Professional and 30 days on Business, with a custom figure on Enterprise. Everything you record is kept, and then it is not. Recording length is capped separately, at 6 hours per stream on Standard and 10 hours on Professional and Business.

StreamYard measures a permanent library in hours held: 5 hours on Free, 50 on Core, 50 on Advanced and 700 or more on Business. Nothing expires. When the library is full, StreamYard stops saving new recordings until you delete something or buy space, and the storage add-ons run $4.99, $8.99 and $17.99 a month for 100, 200 and 400 hours. Those add-ons replace your allowance rather than adding to it, so 100 hours bought on Core gives you 100, not 150.

The practical test is what you do with a recording. If you download it the same week and cut it elsewhere, Restream's 15 days costs you nothing and its price advantage stands untouched. If the recording is the deliverable and you expect to go back to something from March, Restream on Standard has already deleted it and StreamYard has not. That is a product difference dressed up as a number, and it is worth more than the $25.99 a month between the entry plans.

One more asymmetry hides in the same area. Restream's browser studio is capped at 720p on Free and Standard; 1080p starts on Professional at $49. StreamYard's Core includes Full HD at $44.99. So if what you want is a 1080p browser studio and nothing else, StreamYard's entry plan genuinely undercuts Restream's, because Restream's comparable rung is Professional rather than Standard.

Restream's plan cards carry two add-ons that are easy to read as included features, and a third charge that only appears in the comparison table further down.

Clips turns streams into short vertical cuts and is billed on top of the plan: $19 a month for 50 clips on Standard, $29 for 100 on Professional and $59 for 250 on Business. That one does get cheaper with volume, at 38.0 cents, 29.0 cents and 23.6 cents per clip, which is a genuine bulk discount and worth noting because most tools in this category charge a flat unit rate.

Webinars does not. The add-on is $99 a month for 100 attendees on both Standard and Professional, so the same capacity costs the same regardless of which plan it is bolted to, and $299 for 500 attendees on Business. Per attendee that is 99.0 cents at the small size and 59.8 cents at the large one.

The charge most likely to surprise a finance team is workspaces. Restream lists them at $49 per workspace per month on Professional and $239 per workspace per month on Business. That second figure is the entire price of the Business plan again. An agency that wants a separate workspace per client is not buying an add-on, it is buying another subscription each time, and the pricing page presents it as a row in a feature table.

Add it up for a realistic small team: Business at $239, three extra seats at $25 each, and clips for 250 at $59 puts you at $373 a month before a second workspace. The published entry price for that same company was $19.

AdsGen does not multistream and will never be the answer to this search if what you need is to broadcast a show live. Restream and StreamYard both beat us outright on live production, guests on screen, chat relay across platforms, overlays, encoder integrations and everything else that happens in real time. If you run a weekly show, buy one of them and stop reading here.

The reason this page exists on our site is that a fair number of people arrive at a multistreaming comparison because they want more video out of a product, not because they want to go live. Live streaming produces one long asset on a schedule and needs a host, guests and a slot in the calendar. Paid social testing needs several short vertical files that differ from each other, this week, with no one on camera.

AdsGen takes a product URL and returns finished UGC-style video ads in 9:16 with burned-in captions, with several distinct hooks and presenters per pass. There is no session to record, nobody to book, and the output is sized for the placement rather than cropped down from a landscape broadcast afterwards. Plans start at $82 a month.

If you need both, the honest answer is that they are separate purchases. Neither Restream nor StreamYard generates an ad, and we do not broadcast a webinar.