Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

OBS Studio VS Ardour

Compare OBS Studio VS Ardour and see what are their differences

OBS Studio logo OBS Studio

Free and open source software for video recording and live streaming for Mac, Windows and Linux.

Ardour logo Ardour

Record, edit, and mix on Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows.
  • OBS Studio Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-06-12
  • Ardour Landing page
    Landing page //
    2022-12-13

OBS Studio videos

Open Broadcaster Software Review

Ardour videos

What is Ardour?

More videos:

  • Review - Ardour Review ENDED
  • Tutorial - Ardour Tutorial - Digital Audio Workstation for Linux

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to OBS Studio and Ardour)
Screen Recording
100 100%
0% 0
Audio
0 0%
100% 100
Video Recording
100 100%
0% 0
Audio & Music
0 0%
100% 100

User comments

Share your experience with using OBS Studio and Ardour. For example, how are they different and which one is better?
Log in or Post with

Reviews

These are some of the external sources and on-site user reviews we've used to compare OBS Studio and Ardour

OBS Studio Reviews

10 Proven Screen Recorders for Mac [Updated in 2023]
OBS is a free and open source screen recording software for Mac, which allows users to record video and live streaming media. In fact, this is also one of the Mac screen video recorders that can't be missed. It supports real-time source and device capture, scene synthesis, encoding, recording and broadcasting.
5 Best free game recording software for PC
OBS Studio is an open source, free screen recording tool that is ideal for game recording and live streaming. OBS Studio rarely suffers from lag issues when recording HD game videos, but due to the relatively large software, it may have a little impact on computer performance. Operationally, OBS Studio has very rich features suitable for game recording, such as capturing...
Top 15 Free Alternatives to OBS | Online Free Screen Recorder for PC
OBS is one of the most popular tools for game streaming and recording. Although it provides very rich features for those who want professional quality, OBS is not very easy to use for ordinary users, especially for beginners. Fortunately, there are plenty of OBS alternatives that work much simpler. In this article we will show you the 15 best alternatives to OBS Studio.
Top 10 OBS Alternatives
But OBS is not very easy to use, especially for beginners. So, if you find yourself trying to figure out how out how OBS works it may be time to consider using an alternative. The following are some of the best OBS alternatives to choose from.
Best Streaming Software for 2021 (Twitch & Youtube)
Streamlabs was initially a live streaming tool that streamers used with other live streaming software. Streamlabs OBS now combines the Streamlabs tool with OBS Studio, giving a more advanced streaming program with a cleaner interface than the open-source tool. It also offers better user support. Like OBS Studio, Streamlabs OBS is free.

Ardour Reviews

  1. Great for the poor man. Still needs A LOT of improvements, specially on midi editing.

    Copy Yes, you can start a project from scratch and end up with a great sounding track using Ardour. Specially if you use mostly audio. For those like me who use both audio and midi editing, it may easily drive you to a real nightmare. The DAW doesn't behave as you would expect. The "share regions" will get you good as you edit one region and it "magically" ruins the original one. Oh, just use copy instead of share, like they say right? Nope. It still bugs you to the bone. So you have to go manually "unlinking" every single region. Some regions may be a single note, for example, and you can miss that. Oh, so I will consolidate all regions before unlinking! Nope, there is not such thing here. Another example: You want to keep only a certain midi note on your midi track, the C3 that is you Drum Kick. You cannot do it, unless if you go deleting every single other note, one by one! Terrible isn't it? No, you cannot copy a single note through the entire track. Sometimes I managed to select a note through the track and delete it. So I took note how I did it and... Next time it's a negative! With so many different selections of tools, smart, playhead, etc, it appears the DAW confuses itself and do not respond appropriately. So... my advice to you is not to fall for what I did, which is believing Ardour can do everything it says it does, cause it doesn't. Keep simple with audio recording and editing. Do your midi stuff elsewhere and run from the nightmare I got myself into. Nevertheless, it is great cost/benefit DAW. Worthy a try. Yes, you can start a project from scratch and end up with a great sounding track using Ardour. Specially if you use mostly audio. For those like me who use both audio and MIDI editing, it may easily drive you into a real nightmare. The DAW doesn't behave as you would expect. The "share regions" will get you good as you edit one region and it "magically" ruins the original one. Oh, just use copy instead of share, like they say right? Nope. It still bugs you to the bone. So you have to go manually "unlinking" every single region. Some regions may be a single note, for example, and you can miss that. Oh, so I will consolidate all regions before unlinking! Nope, there is not such thing here. Another example: You want to keep only a certain midi note on your midi track, the C3 that is you Drum Kick. You cannot do it, unless if you go deleting every single other note, one by one! Terrible isn't it? No, you cannot copy a single note through the entire track. Sometimes I managed to select a note through the track and delete it. So I took note how I did it and... Next time it's a negative! With so many different selections of tools, smart, playhead, etc, it appears the DAW confuses itself and do not respond appropriately. So... my advice to you is not to fall for what I did, which is believing Ardour can do everything it says it does, cause it doesn't. Keep simple with audio recording and editing. Do your midi stuff elsewhere and run from the nightmare I got myself into. Nevertheless, it is great cost/benefit DAW. Worthy a try.


Top 18 Free Music Making Software for Beginners [2023]
Ardour is an open-source DAW designed to help music-makers make pro-level music by offering robust tools for recording, editing, and mixing songs on Windows, macOS, or Linux PCs.
5 PRO TOOLS ALTERNATIVES FOR RECORDING AND MIXING AUDIO
Ardour is a free and open-source DAW with capabilities similar to Pro Tools. It was designed for audio professionals, but it can be used by any musician or producer who wants to create professional-quality recordings. Ardour has a traditional track recorder layout with timecode and multi-track editing. It also includes a powerful mixer, effects processors, and recording tools.
10 Best Audacity Alternatives for Audio Recording and Editing
It offers a feature to see your recording wave while letting you adjust and monitor the input gains for clear and clean recordings. Ardour presents a huge editing platform with editing tools like trim, cut, swing and transpose, etc. so that you can easily mix your tracks with the tools like a fader, mute and automate, etc.
Top 10 LMMS Alternatives and Similar Software
Ardour is a very capable alternative for LMMS. Ardour is a bit complicated to use. That’s why it’s recommended only for those who have prior professional experience of editing and mixing music. If you’re an audio engineer, you’ll love Ardour for recording a piece of music and then editing and mixing it. It comes with some recently added features-
Best LMMS Alternatives 2017
This LMMS alternative is a hard disk recorder as well as digital audio workplace application. It turns on GNU/Linux and Mac OS X. Ardour’s purpose is to provide digital audio workplace software suitable for proficient use. Ardour source code is freely accessible but pre-built binaries are profitable free-libre software.

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, OBS Studio should be more popular than Ardour. It has been mentiond 1062 times since March 2021. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

OBS Studio mentions (1062)

  • How do people create those sleek looking demos for startups?
    For product videos I used OBS a lot: https://obsproject.com/ I haven't used Journey, but it seems promising for product Tours: https://www.william-troup.com/journey-js/. - Source: Hacker News / 13 days ago
  • Ask HN: Has anyone achieved Douglas Engelbart's Vision?
    Any specific area? unix,telnet, uucp/news groups/email, linux, sequel/postgres, AI (chatgpt), video/hardware emulation with or/without VM layer. Software defined radio, open broadcaster software[0], etc. [0] obs : https://obsproject.com/. - Source: Hacker News / 4 months ago
  • Recording internal audio + guitar at the same time
    You might want to look into OBS Studio for that. Its free. And a lot easier to setup for that than ableton, cos its for that. Https://obsproject.com/ Then you can import the recordings into Ableton if you want to edit/produce? Source: 5 months ago
  • Apologies for the low quality video but I thought this escape was pretty cool lol
    Ther is a thing called obs you can get it here and it's easy to use https://obsproject.com/. Source: 5 months ago
  • Simple Question and FAQ Thread
    How to record gameplay on PC using OBS or Nvidia Shadow Play. Source: 5 months ago
View more

Ardour mentions (110)

  • Ask HN: Is There a Blender for Music?
    Effects you can hear. [0] https://ardour.org/ [1[ https://cybershow.uk/. - Source: Hacker News / 2 months ago
  • What Is the Future of the DAW?
    I'm the lead author of Ardour [0], and I'd very much like to hear more about your frustrations, since over the next 1-2 years, paying attention to non-European musical culture is one of the things I hope to focus on during development. You can reach me via the email address in my profile, or maybe use our forums at discourse.ardour.org. Thanks. [0] https://ardour.org/ <= a cross-platform open source DAW that has... - Source: Hacker News / 8 months ago
  • Red Blob Games: Interactive visual explanations of math and algorithms
    One extra detail, something I've learned from 20 years of working on dragging all kinds of objects around the GUI of Ardour [0]: handle ALL button press and release events as drag events where there is no movement. [0] https://ardour.org/. - Source: Hacker News / 8 months ago
  • Absolute beginner seeking advice
    I am aware of the 'Real Tone Cable' however I am curious if this is what I should be buying if I also intend on recording my playing in a software such as 'Ardour'. Source: 10 months ago
  • How to map multiple samples with linux-sampler?
    I just loaded an instance of samplv https://samplv1.sourceforge.io/ into the Digital Audio Workstation (DAW), Ardour https://ardour.org/ . Source: 11 months ago
View more

What are some alternatives?

When comparing OBS Studio and Ardour, you can also consider the following products

Camtasia - Camtasia 2018 makes it easy to record your screen and create polished, professional-looking videos.

Audacity - Audacity is a free and open-source audio production software suite that includes a surprising array of editing tools and recording systems.

ShareX - ShareX is a free and open source program that lets you capture or record any area of your screen...

Reaper - Reaper is a focused digital audio workstation (DAW) developed by Cockos. In the creation of the software, the digital audio technology company intended to make audio editing accessible to the masses.

Snagit - Screen Capture Software for Windows and Mac

LMMS - Make music with a free, cross-platform tool