StreamYard vs Riverside: pricing, storage limits and real cost

Read the two feature lists quickly and you will come away thinking both are unlimited, because both say so. StreamYard's Core plan lists unlimited streaming and recording, and unlimited local recordings. Riverside's recording is unlimited too. Neither company charges you for the act of capturing video, which is genuinely unusual in this category.

The meter is one step later, and they put it in opposite places. StreamYard charges you to KEEP the recording: storage is measured in hours, and its help centre gives the allowances as 5 hours on Free, 50 on Core, 50 on Advanced and 700 or more on Business. Riverside charges you to TAKE the recording: your monthly allowance is download hours for separate participant tracks, and the recording sitting in the cloud costs nothing.

That is not a distinction without a difference, because it decides who each one punishes. StreamYard punishes the person with a long back catalogue. Riverside punishes the person who exports every session. A weekly show that gets recorded, clipped and deleted will never touch StreamYard's ceiling. The same show, exported in full multitrack every week for an editor, eats Riverside's allowance every month.

So the honest way to pick between them on cost is not to compare the two entry prices. It is to ask whether your problem is a library or a workflow.

Line the two ladders up on annual billing. Riverside runs $24, $34 and $79 a month. StreamYard runs $35.99 and $68.99. There is no rung on StreamYard's ladder that undercuts Riverside's entry plan.

The cleanest way to say it: StreamYard's cheapest paid plan costs more per month than Riverside's second most expensive self-serve plan. Core at $35.99 is above Grow at $34. To spend less than $35.99 a month on StreamYard you have to be on the free tier, which burns a logo into your stream and caps you at 2 hours of local recording a month.

On monthly billing the gap opens further, because StreamYard's monthly price is punchier: $44.99 against Riverside's $29, which is 55% more for the entry rung. Over a year of monthly billing that is $539.88 against $348.

None of that makes StreamYard bad value. It does more live: multistreaming to 3 destinations on Core and 8 on Advanced, branded overlays, on-screen guests, a greenroom on the business tiers. If you are running a live show to several platforms at once, Riverside is not really competing for the job. But if you are choosing between them on price alone, there is no version of this where StreamYard wins.

StreamYard's pricing page carries a 22% Off badge over the yearly billing toggle. We divided rather than trusted it, which is a habit worth keeping on every vendor in this category.

Core goes from $44.99 monthly to $35.99 yearly. That is 20.00% exactly, not 22%. Advanced goes from $88.99 to $68.99, which is 22.47% and rounds to the badge. So the number on the banner is the one from the expensive plan, and the cheaper plan gets two percentage points less than advertised.

This is now the fifth vendor in this category where the annual discount is weakest or absent on the entry tier. It is worth about $10.79 a year on Core, so it is not the reason to choose or reject anything. It is a tell. A company that rounds its own discount in its own favour on the plan most people buy is a company whose other published numbers deserve checking too.

Riverside is not cleaner here, it is just differently untidy: its three paid tiers discount at 17.2%, 12.8% and 20.2%, worst in the middle, because Pro and Grow save the identical $60 a year and only the base price moved. Neither company gives you a discount you can infer from a badge.

This is the finding that surprised us most, and it is only visible if you read the help centre rather than the pricing page.

StreamYard's storage article lists the default allowance per plan: Free 5 hours, Core 50 hours, Advanced 50 hours, Teams 50 hours, Business 700 or more. Core and Advanced are identical. Advanced costs $68.99 a month against Core's $35.99, which is 92% more, and the storage line does not move.

What Advanced actually buys is 4K local recordings instead of 1080p, 8 multistream destinations instead of 3, an extra camera, 15 backstage participants, 4 hours of pre-recorded streams instead of 2, on-air webinars for 100 viewers, custom fonts and transcript downloads. Those are real features and some teams need them. Storage is simply not one of them.

So if you are on Core and running out of room, upgrading to Advanced is the wrong purchase. The storage add-on is the right one, and it is much cheaper: 100 hours for $4.99 a month, 200 for $8.99, 400 for $17.99. Watch the wording though, because the help centre is explicit that the add-on REPLACES your allowance rather than adding to it. Buy the 100-hour option on Core and you have 100 hours, not 150. And the annual discount on the add-on collapses as you climb: the 100-hour tier saves 10.02% a year, while the 200 and 400-hour tiers both save 5.56%.

What happens when you do run out is worth knowing in advance. Your stream still goes out and is still recorded by the social platform at the other end, but StreamYard stops recording it and studio recording is disabled until you free up space.

This is the part that matters most if you are buying for a company, and it is the reason we would not recommend either product to a team on the strength of its pricing page.

StreamYard's Plan Usage Policy, updated on 1 September 2026, states that the Free, Core and Advanced plans are intended solely for personal use or for individuals using StreamYard as part of their work, such as freelancers and their collaborators. Business-tier plans are for professional, commercial and collaborative use. The pricing page carries the same restriction in smaller type: Core and Advanced plans are for individual use only.

That is not a dormant clause. StreamYard's own help centre documents that beginning in December 2025, qualifying accounts are transitioned to the Business Plan at their next renewal date, with email reminders 30 and 15 days beforehand, and that transitioned accounts renew at their new Business Plan price. Where do you find that price? The article says users can check it in the Billing section of their account. In other words, you learn what a business pays after StreamYard has decided you are one.

The policy goes further and publishes a threshold most vendors leave vague: a large organization is defined as a company with annual revenues of $50 million or more, and those companies are not eligible for the Business Plan at all and must take Enterprise.

Riverside arrives at the same place by a different road. Every self-serve plan carries a single seat, and the second editor is sold as an add-on with no published price. So both vendors publish a full, precise, confident price ladder that stops applying the moment a second person needs access. If you are evaluating either one for a team, treat the pricing page as marketing and get a quote before you plan a budget around it.

Take StreamYard if the output is a live broadcast. Multistreaming to several platforms at once, branded overlays, on-screen guest management, comment display, a greenroom for speakers: this is a mature live production tool and it is easier to run solo than anything Riverside offers. A weekly show with guests going out to YouTube, LinkedIn and Facebook simultaneously is squarely its job.

Take Riverside if the output is a file. It records each participant locally at up to 4K rather than capturing the compressed call, which is the whole reason it exists, and it is cheaper at every comparable rung. If the recording quality of a remote interview decides whether the project is usable, this is not a close call.

Both beat AdsGen at their own jobs, comprehensively. We do not record anything, we have no guests, no greenroom, no multistreaming, and if what you need is a live show or a podcast we are not a substitute for either of them and will not pretend to be.

Where AdsGen fits is a job neither of them starts: making paid social creative when you have no footage. StreamYard's AI clips and Riverside's AI credits both begin with a recording you already made, and both are repurposing tools. AdsGen begins with a product URL, writes the angle and hook, casts creator-style presenters and returns native 9:16 ads with captions burned in. If the thing you need on Monday is six different hooks to test on Meta, no amount of studio quality helps, because the footage does not exist yet.