There are plenty of real alternatives. I'm partial to vMix for live-streaming; I ran Demuxed 2020 and 2021 through my vMix deck from the comfort of my office and through 2020-21 ran about sixty high-production fighting game tournaments off of the same. I like vMix because its audio mixing is excellent and WebRTC-integrated chat comes out of the box, plus data-driven lower thirds and good remoting solutions and MIDI controls for script/function control.
Other folks quite like VT-X and TriCaster setups. Or Wirecast, or XSplit (itself notably big in some circles). The only "reskinned OBS" I know of is StreamLabs OBS, which, yeah, isn't great, but there are quite a few alternatives.
On the audio front, I'm not sure calling it "the category leader in audio manipulation" holds much water, given that OBS's audio facilities are notably its weakest point. (Not entirely their fault. The licensing around ASIO is weird.) Voicemeeter plus your DAW of choice come to mind. Or, for live mixing directly in your video mixer--well, vMix and NewTek both are pretty good choices there, too.
This is not to take anything away from the OBS project or team; it's quite good at what it does, and if your needs are in their crosshairs or you're willing to expend as much effort as necessary to build what doesn't exist around it you can put on a great show using OBS. (And in particular I think their game-capture logic is best-of-breed; when running events I still use OBS as an ffmpeg frontend on my satellite systems because I don't have to think about game capture.) But the idea that there are no "real alternatives" isn't correct, particularly when you have more moving pieces involved and you don't want to--or, for less programmery types, aren't able to--spend your days writing duct-tape code around your video mixer.
As far as I can tell none of the products you mention are free or run on Linux. That does of course not mean that they are not real alternatives if you aren't using Linux, but if we scope OBS to include "free, open and cross-platform", there really aren't a lot of alternatives.
> As far as I can tell none of the products you mention are free or run on Linux.
Linux is a distant outlier in the overall streaming space.
If you’re narrowing scope down to “free and works on Linux” then OBS is your go-to, of course. But Linux streamers are a tiny subset of the streaming target audience and anyone doing this professionally should at least consider some of the paid alternatives.
I thought we were just comparing, but if we scope it in such a way that leaves out Linux, then you can add a ton of other software to the comparison yes. Same goes for macOS, or any cross-platform package.
ManyCam, mentioned by the top-level poster, isn't free and doesn't work on Linux either, so I'm not sure where that scoping comes into play. Past that, not focusing on Linux would be because, for both amateur and professional live video, I can think of relatively few people not using Windows. The overwhelming remainder are using Macs, where there are some options like Wirecast, even if they're not my favorites. (I too use OBS on a Mac or Linux, though it doesn't come up very often. As for me, with WSL2, I don't run a Linux desktop anymore.)
As far as "free" goes--OBS is great where it fits. It's exceptional where it fits. And if that's what you need, you absolutely should use it. When it doesn't fit, you start getting into build-versus-buy territory, and once you pop the cork on buying you can buy a lot for relatively little.
It may be that it’s more of the defacto to the casual audiences. I’ve heard of and have used OBS many times for streaming and screen recording. Never heard of the other solutions you listed and never felt the need to search for alternatives as OBS and it’s reskins satisfied my needs and as a casual person to the streaming community the only program I had heard of to use was OBS.
That's a totally reasonable point of view! OBS is a great recommendation at the entry level and while the work it takes to build a show around it does scale upward pretty quickly, it's eminently doable. GDQ is a good example of running a complex, high-production streamed show through OBS. They operate a pretty heavy software stack and they get away with a lot by pushing it into HTML5. That's not my preferred way to go about it, but you can absolutely go that route.
Why I responded at all was the maximalist dismissal of a pretty large industry of smart people doing interesting things in the video mixing space.
Black Magic also makes hardware for this that starts in the few hundred dollars prosumer range and goes as high as you can imagine on the broadcast side.
vMix is amazing software for events, it really opened my eyes to how much more there could be in OBS. Prior to using it I thought OBS did about everything one could expect to ask of a software mixer.
vMix managed to crash during nearly every event produced with it that I watched in 2021. Not the most solid software in the world, as nice as it is to use.
Y'know, I've heard of this, but never seen it, and I run on a pretty shoestring rig. Only time I've ever had my mixer crash was during Demuxed 2020...because I'd installed a fan backwards, not noticed, and the machine bluescreened after a few hours due to overheating and what I think (wasn't really in the mental space to record an error code) was a driver fault.
Other folks quite like VT-X and TriCaster setups. Or Wirecast, or XSplit (itself notably big in some circles). The only "reskinned OBS" I know of is StreamLabs OBS, which, yeah, isn't great, but there are quite a few alternatives.
On the audio front, I'm not sure calling it "the category leader in audio manipulation" holds much water, given that OBS's audio facilities are notably its weakest point. (Not entirely their fault. The licensing around ASIO is weird.) Voicemeeter plus your DAW of choice come to mind. Or, for live mixing directly in your video mixer--well, vMix and NewTek both are pretty good choices there, too.
This is not to take anything away from the OBS project or team; it's quite good at what it does, and if your needs are in their crosshairs or you're willing to expend as much effort as necessary to build what doesn't exist around it you can put on a great show using OBS. (And in particular I think their game-capture logic is best-of-breed; when running events I still use OBS as an ffmpeg frontend on my satellite systems because I don't have to think about game capture.) But the idea that there are no "real alternatives" isn't correct, particularly when you have more moving pieces involved and you don't want to--or, for less programmery types, aren't able to--spend your days writing duct-tape code around your video mixer.