With the exception of moderators, Twitch bots are the life-blood of a well-organized chat experience. They also help to minimize the disruptions that can happen throughout a broadcast. In this guide you’ll learn all about the best Twitch bots and will be able to figure out which bot will be the best fit for your Twitch stream.
What is a Twitch Bot?
Twitch bots are little robots that reside in your chat and support your stream by providing automatic responses and reactions to the commands you have set. As your stream grows bigger, the need for a bot to help manage your chat will increase, especially if you don’t have a sizable team of mods behind you.
Types of Twitch Bot
Bots are created to cater for a variety of purposes, but there are some types you’ll see more often than others.
Moderation Bots
Moderation bots are the bread and butter of any streaming setup. When you don’t have real moderators available to purge misbehaving viewers in your chat, this type of bot can save you time moderating yourself and keep the stream uninterrupted. AutoMod and others can also keep a list of banned words.
On the other hand, they can also store some of your important links, which can be accessed by a simple chat command.
A few of the typical functions you can expect from a good moderation bot are:
- Custom !command settings
- Auto time-out (for offensive words or unauthorized URLs)
- Raffle / Giveaway system
- Song Request system
View Bots
View bots are unrelated to this article but I wanted to quickly touch on them. These don’t appear in chat like your typical Moobot.
You can spot if your channel has view bots residing in chat by checking out the viewer list and seeing if a bunch of really spammy names appear in the list.
Some streamers rely on view bots to obtain natural viewers by appearing higher in their current game category, you may even be targeted with a view bot as to encourage you to become a paying customer and to use this type of bot more frequently, but you absolutely shouldn’t as it’s against Twitch guidelines and is heavily frowned upon within the streaming community.
If you think you are being view botted, Twitch themselves have written an article on how to deal with it, which you can read here
.
Fun Bots
Fun bots do exactly what it says on the tin. They don’t offer anything in terms of moderation or utility, they’re typically used for light-hearted purposes, like Stay Hydrated Bot.
How do you get bots on Twitch?
Unlike extensions, most bots can be downloaded via their respective developers website, however some Twitch bots are cloud based which don’t require a download. In my list below, I’ll leave links directly to where you can get them.
The Best Twitch Bots
1. Nightbot
Nightbot is one of the most popular bots among streamers on Twitch. It’s popularity stems from the sheer amount of features the bot includes, such as:
- Discord Integration
- Custom Commands
- Giveaways
- AutoDJ / Song Requests
- Spam Protection
- Timers
- Chat Logs
- Now Playing (songs)
The bot is made by the NightDev, the developers behind the BetterTTV browser extension. They have an active community behind them and provide regular updates to the bot.
Nightbot is primarily used for its moderation features, meaning you won’t have to spend time doing things manually whilst you’re mid-stream. What’s better is that Nightbot is one of the best Twitch bots as it’s packed with features yet doesn’t cost any money – it’s completely free!
Get Nightbot: https://nightbot.tv/
2. SmokeyBot
Whilst Nightbot will perform amply for most streamers, if you have a more active chat, the bot can slow down quite significantly. That’s where SmokeyBot comes in.
SmokeyBot was designed with a fast chat experience in mind, but its features are drastically limited in comparison to other bots. It offers a few simple features but performs them exceptionally well:
- Update your stream title, game and description via chat command.
- Create clips from a broadcast or video with chat commands.
- Subscriber list, count and lookup
- Anti-spam with regular expressions
- Spotify implementation
It’s unlikely that you will have heard of this bot before as it caters to a very specific niche.
This bot will work out best for you if you use it in combination with another chat bot (even the creator of the bot Smokey himself uses it in combination with Streamelements), but you’ll only need it in the first place if you’re a well-established streamer.
Get SmokeyBot: https://bot.smokey.gg/login.php
3. StreamElements
StreamElements is one of the best platforms for streamers to build their stream, they cater to pretty much everything there is to do with channel and overlay setup. Within this package, you’ll get access to the chat bot.
Features of the StreamElements Twitch bot include:
- Spam Protection (regular expressions, banned phrases with groups)
- Loyalty System (contests, leaderboards and media requesting)
- Engagement Tools (chat games, alerts and custom commands)
- Cloud-based (meaning there’s no download required)
If you plan on using StreamElements for other areas of your stream, it just makes sense for you to use their chat bot too. You’ll be able to equip your moderators with plenty of different tools to
Get StreamElements: https://streamelements.com/
4. Stay Hydrated Bot
This innocent little bot serves only to remind you to drink some water!
It’s important to stay hydrated throughout your stream to keep healthy and help prevent your throat from getting sore from all the talking. It’s also going to remind your viewers to stay hydrated which allows you to promote a positive, healthy habit.
You don’t have to download Stay Hydrated Bot, you simply head over to the bots Twitch channel and use the command !hydrate yournamehere.
You can then configure the bot to remind you at set intervals between 1 – 5 hours.
When you’re done with the bot, simply type !stophydration to remove it.
Get Stay Hydrated Bot: https://www.twitch.tv/stay_hydrated_bot
5. PhantomBot
PhantomBot stands out significantly to other bots as it’s one of the few Twitch chat bots which is open source. It’s the best Twitch bot for advanced users as there’s a huge community behind PhantomBot, developing new and unique features of their own, taking advantage of the code being open source.
Speaking of features, there really are too many features to mention right here, so if you want to read the full list of features, click here. Otherwise, here’s the stand-out features:
- Twitch Stream Control (meaning mods can make changes for you)
- Advanced Chat Moderation
- Tuned For High Performance (won’t self-destruct when chat gets busy)
- Song Requests
- Chat Games
PhantomBot has three different downloads to choose from. Nightly, Stable & Source. I’d recommend avoiding the nightly version because it’s very prone to bugs and other ad-hoc vulnerabilities that haven’t yet been discovered. The same goes for source, unless you’re code savvy and plan on contributing to the project, the download you’ll want to stick with is Stable.
Get PhantomBot: https://phantombot.tv/
6. Moobot
Moobot is one of the oldest Twitch bots and despite its twelve year lifespan, it’s still not showing signs of its age.
Over the years, the developers have spent time improving the bot with new features as well as game integrations with popular titles such as Apex Legends, League of Legends and Teamfight Tactics.
Moobot is really simple to configure, it comes with a user-friendly dashboard to make all of your changes and enable the desired features.
Moobot pretty much contains all of the features the other Twitch bots do, but that’s because the others will have had to take some inspiration from Moobot somewhere down the line. With this bot, you’ll get:
- Advanced Chat Polls
- Scheduled Chat Posts (for your social media, sponsors, etc)
- In-chat Twitch Alerts
- Song Requests
- Anti Spam Protection
You don’t have to download this bot, all you have to do is connect it with your Twitch account and you’re good to go!
Get Moobot: https://moo.bot/
7. Streamlabs
Streamlabs is another jack-of-all-trades bot. Personally, I think Streamlabs offer the best overall Twitch bot as it contains all the features you’ll ever need, it’s not complicated and it’s completely free.
If you opt for the Streamlabs bot, you’ll get all the usual features such as:
- Custom Commands & Quotes
- Song Requests
- In-chat Notifications
- Auto Host
- Loyalty / Points System
While some would argue that Phantombot is best, it’s for very advanced users who need a bot that can do everything in combination with a feature that has been custom-coded for them. As this represents only a small segment of the live streaming community, simple bots offered by the likes of Streamlabs or StreamElements will provide you with more than you’ll ever need or use.
Get Streamlabs Chat bot: https://streamlabs.com/chatbot
