Restream vs Castr: Which is a better fit?

Trevor T.: My name is Trevor. I am the founder of Common Leaders. And I would rate Restream a four. I had experienced video chat with Zoom and Google Meet and a little bit with Vimeo, and although not really big problems with them, they were limited functionality. And I felt like Restream gave me a higher quality of output in terms of its graphics and its functionality in meeting the needs of something more than just a Zoom meeting. I wanted it to look a little bit more professional, a little more like a media outlet. The other piece of why I chose Restream really came down to its ability to go live. It has recording features like every other video chat software that's out there. The big difference with Restream, at least what I felt was different, was its ability to live stream to various venues, YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, really any outlet under the sun could receive what I was putting out in a live stream, and Restream made that very easy and very seamless to do. For me, onboarding with Restream was pretty straightforward. I did work a little bit with the professionals behind the scene, but most of what I did was recording and practicing on my own, getting used to the features, which are very different than other typical recording softwares. And then, it took a little bit of time to understand how to live stream out to different places. But it was just a lot of experimentation, which I felt like worked because I was live-streaming, and I needed to know what those functionalities were beyond just a technical manual. That being said, it's a very straightforward software. It's not very complicated. It's a lot of clicks and pops and scrolls, but it's all pretty straightforward. My advice for new people using Restream would, first and foremost, be explore all of its features early on so you know how far you can stretch it. You can add lots of different camera options, lots of different mics, lots of different integrations to make the visual element of what you're doing really the best. And if you're video streaming, that's really what you should want is a really active screen, but one that makes sense. So, it's going to take some experimenting, strongly advise doing that. And the other piece of it is do a really strong equipment check. That's something I experienced. Although internet can play a role in its quality, the bigger issues that I had and that you might face are really with the hardware, your computer being able to keep up with it because it can get to be pretty dense at times. So ensuring that your hardware can keep up with it, and maybe upgrading your hardware because it is an intense program. It's going to come out looking like the nightly news if you want it to, which is pretty beautiful, but your computer is going to need to keep up with that. So, do some experimenting, maybe get some advice from Restream or from a professional that you know in IT so that your hardware can keep up with the quality that you're going to see.

Joshua: My name is Joshua. I am the Tech Director at a church called Grace Community Fellowship in Georgia. I rate Castr five stars. We use Castr every week to broadcast our Sunday morning services. We bring everything in through OBS and push it out to Castr, which then pushes it out to all the social media platforms and YouTube. At our church, we have very limited internet bandwidth, so one of the best things about Castr is that we only have to push out one stream, and Castr does the work to push the streams out to every other platform. We've actually been able to grow our audience because we can stream to our main platform, which is YouTube, but then we can hit some of the other social media platforms like Facebook is another big one for us. Those are the big... main reason we love using it. There is really nothing that we have found that we dislike about Castr. Their pricing is fantastic. Their services are great. Everything else that we have run into has just been top-notch with them. We have nothing to complain about.