Setting Up Your Streamlabs Alerts

Adding an Alert Box to your live allows you to have on-screen alerts to highlight your new followers, tips, subscribers, and much more. Creating unique alerts is a fundamental aspect of any live stream. They represent you and your brand and can be completely customized to match your personality or aesthetic. When you add a personal touch to your alerts, it will help you stand out from the crowd, keep viewers coming back, and encourage others to participate in your live stream.

On-screen alerts are often your viewer’s first impression, so we recommend spending a little time on making them unforgettable. Today, we will show you how to create custom alerts using Streamlabs for Twitch, YouTube, Facebook, Trovo, Tipping, Merch, and more. We will also cover how to use Streamlabs alerts with OBS and other streaming software

Summary:

• Using Premade Alerts
• Switching Between Widget Themes
• Creating Custom Alerts
• General Alert Settings
• Global Editing
• How to Add Alert Variations
• Testing Alerts
• Adding an Alert Box Widget in Streamlabs Desktop
• Adding Streamlabs Alerts in OBS
• Adding Streamlabs Alerts to Other Streaming Software

Pre-Made Alerts and Widget Themes

Streamlabs offers thousands of polished ready-to-use alert themes. You can find both free and premium options created by some amazing designers, such as FragileGFX, Paper Crowns, and StreamSpell. You can visit our Alert Box themes page to browse our vast library. Our premium animated themes are included with Streamlabs Ultra.

Changing and Customizing Alert Widget Themes

Depending on the type of content you’re streaming or the season, you may want to switch between different Widget themes. Your Widget theme applies to your Alert Box and Widgets. Keep reading for a quick setup guide or check out our full guide on Widget themes and how to use them.

To switch between themes, click the dropdown next to Theme (in the top right corner of the Alert Box page) and select one of your recently used themes. To choose from all of your Widget themes, click on “View All Themes” to go to the Manage Widget themes page. 

You can also click “Add a Theme” to create a new theme. You can create a new theme from scratch or by browsing pre-made themes in our library. 

Creating Custom Alert Widget Themes

If you don’t want to use a pre-made theme, you can manually customize your Alerts by navigating to the Alert Box from your Streamlabs Dashboard. When you create a new theme from scratch, you can either use your currently active theme settings to get started, or you can start with Streamlabs default settings using the toggle.

General Alert Settings

From here, you can edit your General Settings, which will affect every alert type, and then customize specific alert types. As mentioned, General Settings apply to every alert type. You can edit the alert delay, mod approvals, profanity filters, add custom bad words, etc.

Global Editing

Think of Global Editing as a tool for updating all of your alerts and variations at once.This does not act as a global setting, but rather a way to quickly update the settings on all of your alerts at once in a fraction of the time. You can still change your alert settings individually at any time. Below are some of the changes you can update in the Global Editing window.

General: Not to be confused with the General settings discussed in the previous section. Here, you can select the layout of image and text, alert duration, and text delay. 

Font Settings: Make your text stand out by choosing the font style, size, weight, color, and highlight color.

Animations: Choose how your alerts and text appear on the screen when triggered. 

Text to Speech: Control the settings for text-to-speech (TTS) alerts on your live stream.

How to Customize Specific Alert Types

All of your linked platforms will show in the left navigation panel of the main Alert Box section of your Streamlabs Dashboard. When you click on a platform, the menu for that platform will expand and you can then select which alert type you would like to customize. 

On this page, you can customize the layout of the alert, image, or gif that’s played, as well as the sound, font, animation, duration, text-to-speech, and more, depending on the alert type.

How to Add Alert Variations

Alert Variations allow you to play customized alerts for specific types of events. For example, you can play a different alert for a $10 tip vs. $5 or $1. You can also create variations based on subscription length, level of subscription, cheer amounts, gift subscriptions, and much more.

To set up Alert Variations, simply click the + Add Variation button under the alert type for which you wish to add a variation. Then, set the desired conditions for the variation to be triggered and customize your settings for the variation.

You can manage your variations for each alert type by clicking the “Manage Variations” button. 

Here, you can easily view all of your variations, enable/disable and delete variations, or jump to different variations to edit them. 

Check out our in-depth guide for setting up alert variations if you need more help. 

Previewing and Testing Alerts

If you’d like to double-check that your customized alerts are to your liking, you can test them before going live—there are two ways to do it. 

Previewing

First, you can preview unsaved changes as you go in the preview window of any alert you’re currently updating, as well as in the preview window of General Settings using the dropdown to select the Alert type you would like to preview. 

Previews only go to the preview window, and do not show up in your launched browser source or in your streaming software. This is a great option for checking your settings before you’re ready to save, or updating your alerts while you are live. You can also mute the preview if you’d like to preview your visual settings without the repeated alert sound. Real events will not show up in the preview window.

Testing

Testing is best used for seeing how your alerts look iin your streaming software. Using the test button will also send a test to the preview window on the Alert Box page. Only saved changes will show when the test button is clicked. Testing can be done from multiple places.

In the Alert Box page at the top right test dropdown:

You can also test your alerts by clicking the Test Widgets in Streamlabs Desktop (at the very bottom) and then selecting the alert type you’d like to test. 

In the Streamlabs OBS Plugin you can test your alerts from the bottom left or top right test menus.

Adding Your Alert Box in Streamlabs Desktop 

The first thing you want to do is add an Alert Box widget to your live stream in Streamlabs Desktop. Widgets are elements you can add in Streamlabs Desktop to help you interact and engage with your community. There are tons of widgets you can add to your live stream, but an alert box is one of the top widgets we recommend adding. 

Step 1: To add an Alert Box, press the plus (+) sign in the Sources section of Streamlabs Desktop.

Step 2: Now, select Alert Box from the pop-up menu.

Viewers will now see the default alert appear on the screen when you get a new subscriber, bit donation, follow, host, etc. You can test it out by clicking Test Widgets at the bottom of your screen (near the Go Live button).

How to Add Streamlabs Alerts to OBS

Have you heard? The Streamlabs Plugin for OBS Studio has officially launched, allowing you to enjoy the combined power of Streamlabs' overlays, alerts, widgets, and more right from your OBS interface. This means that all you have to do is install the Streamlabs for OBS plugin to have your Streamlabs alert box (theme and settings) show in OBS.

Select Streamlabs from the top navigation bar in OBS. This will take you to a screen where you can control your Streamlabs settings.

Select Widgets from the left navigation bar and find the Alert Box Widget. Under the Alert Box Widget, click the + Add button. An Alert Box widget will now appear in your selected scene. If you’d like to add an alert box to an additional scene, select that scene in OBS and repeat the above steps.

To learn more about setting up the Streamlabs Plugin for OBS plugin, check out our handy guide.

How to Add Streamlabs Alerts to Other Streaming Software

If you wish to use Streamlabs Alerts with other streaming software, we’re happy to report that you can do so in just a few clicks.

First, you have to grab the link to your Alert Box widget from your Streamlabs Dashboard. If you wish to create different alert box widgets (that have different alerts selected within), click filter events and select the alerts you wish to include in the widget.

When you copy the link to the widget, only what is selected will appear in the alert box.

Once you grab the link for the widget, paste it as a browser source in your preferred streaming software. You can use the test function from your Streamlabs Dashboard to determine if it’s been added correctly. 

As you can see, there are a lot of customizations you can do with your Alert Box and settings.  If you have any questions or comments, please let us know. Remember to follow us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube. Download Streamlabs Desktop