Best ad-blockers for Twitch in 2024

Personalized experience

Total Adblock successfully eliminates all ads, pop-ups, notifications, and trackers on Twitch, helping you create the most enjoyable and uninterrupted streaming environment. However, this service also allows you to personalize your ad-blocking experience by allowing you to whitelist websites on which you want/don't mind seeing ads.

A tailored service like this helps you manage your own online preference and support your favorite websites by enabling their ads.

Beginner-friendly

Total Adblock is extremely easy to install and use, even if you are a complete newbie. All you need to do is to visit its official website, choose between a free or premium plan, and subscribe. I always recommend the premium plan as it gives you unlimited ad-blocking service and includes free anti-virus protection (which is quite rare).

On its website, you'll also find a support page with free video tutorials and a contact email address. I personally tried contacting Total Adblock support and was impressed with how fast they replied and their overall helpfulness.

More than just an ad-blocker

As mentioned above, Total Adblock is not just an advertisement blocking solution. If you opt for Premium, you also get anti-malware, anti-spyware, and its proprietary anti-virus called TotalAV – super layered protection that all of us need.

Besides, you get to block those persistent YouTube ads and enjoy the smoothest streaming experience on the most popular video streaming platform. All in all, Total Adblock is a great all-round ad-blocker for Twitch, YouTube, and numerous other streaming websites. You can try it for free, or get Premium at a discounted price, and with a 30-day money-back guarantee.

Surfshark’s CleanWeb is an ad-blocker and pop-up blocker, as well as a way of being notified if the site you’re visiting has ever suffered from data breaches or incidences of malware. The service is available as part of every Surfshark VPN subscription – either via the VPN app or as a browser extension.

Opening the CleanWeb 2.0 browser extension takes you immediately to the newly minted dashboard. Like other Surfshark GUIs, it’s clean and intuitive.

If you discover a site that refuses to work with CleanWeb, you can add it to a bypass list by clicking the plus symbol in the top right corner of the screen. Options include bypassing CleanWeb, bypassing the VPN, or bypassing both.

CleanWeb is divided into four main features: the ad-blocker, pop-up blocker, data breach alert, and malware alert.

The ad-blocker removes all adverts from pages you start the process of opening – including the video ads favored by streaming platforms.

The pop-up blocker stops cookie requests from appearing every time you visit a site. The feature acts in the background to reject any that are possible to reject. Of those that can’t be rejected, the blocker only accepts those that are strictly necessary in order to use the site.

The third feature – the data breach alert – lets you know if a site you’re visiting has ever been breached. If so, it provides details of the number of exposed accounts and the date the breach happened.

The malware detector lets you know whether any website you’re visiting has ever been corrupted by malware or a virus.

You can select which of these features you want enabled or disabled in the CleanWeb settings tab. Note that those using CleanWeb via an installed Surfshark app only have the option to either enable or disable CleanWeb in its entirety. In either case, you don’t need to be connected to the Surfshark VPN for CleanWeb to function.

The CleanWeb 2.0 browser extension is currently only available on Chrome, Firefox, and Edge browsers. As part of the Surfshark app, CleanWeb is available on iOS, macOS, Android, Windows, Linux, and Amazon FireTV.

AdLock is an impressive stand-alone ad-blocking product, with a range of reporting and analytics options for the curious as well as all the usual features you would expect from any ad-blocker. While it is not a free product, and there are plenty of trustworthy free options out there, I feel AdLock is worth the price of admission.

Feature-rich

Most free ad-blocking extensions and apps have minimalist UIs, offering only the barest levels of information or customization to their users. AdLock, on the other hand, is a full-featured desktop app with a slick, clean interface offering lots of useful advice and statistics – such as the number of ads and trackers blocked and how much of your internet bandwidth was saved by these adverts not being downloaded to your machine. With so many users around the world still on metered connections, the ability to save even a few hundred megabytes from a download limit is nothing to be sneezed at.

Ad-blocking

AdLock is an impressive offering, blocking adverts in your browser, as well as those in other apps, as it runs as a stand-alone application instead of just an extension. While perhaps not quite as undetectable as it claims, it's still impressive how effective it is at blocking adverts on even the most restrictive of sites, including those with the full page pop-ups asking you to turn off your ad blocker before accessing the site. And if you do encounter issues, you can reach out through the AdLock client to flag up sites that aren't working correctly, and AdLock will amend its filter list.

Android friendly

Google is not a fan of ad-blockers, and so while you can download specific web browsers with ad-blocking built in, you can't get your hands on a system-level ad-blocker anywhere on the Google Play store. AdLock, however, offers the Android .apk file for you to download and install yourself, no jail-breaking or rooting required, and no need to go to any suspect or dodgy websites.

AdGuard is another stand-alone ad-blocker, similar to AdLock, available for multiple devices. As it's more than just a browser extension, it will work with not only the Twitch desktop app, but other apps that normally try to serve you adverts. This saves bandwidth and system resources that would otherwise go to waste downloading and displaying ads.

Multiple filters

AdGuard works by scanning your browser/app and identifying the ad-related components that are loaded on the pages you visit – scripts, images, CSS, and so on. It will then search its database for filters that match these elements and block adverts, trackers, pop-ups, and more. AdGuard also filters code from websites before they load, stopping ads in their tracks before they download. What's more, because AdGuard blocks CSS, Javascript, and more, it's a great option for banishing ads on Twitch and other streaming services.

Stealth mode

AdGuard banishes ads and trackers and has plenty of other features to keep your browsing sessions secure. For example, the service can prevent your search queries from being tracked on Google, Bing, and the like. It's also possible to strip tracking parameters from webpages, automatically delete third-party cookies, block WebRTC, location APIs, and more. Some caution is warranted when using these features, however, seeing as a lot of websites these days won't work properly if you block too many things from working.

Multiple device protection

As well as the browser extensions, you can get AdGuard for Windows PCs, macOS, iOS, Android, and more. They've even got plans for their own private DNS servers and a product called "AdGuard Home" which is a router-level ad blocker. On top of an impressive suite of tools and customization options, you can even try it out for free for 14 days to decide if it's the right product for you.

uBlock Origin (uBO) is a highly regarded free and open-source cross-platform ad blocker that has effective anti-tracking capabilities. uBlock Origin is a fork of uBlock, so make sure you download the right one. While they might share a similar name, the two services are quite different when it comes to their abilities, and uBlock Origin is the one I'd recommend if blocking adverts on Twitch is your priority.

Blocklists

uBlock Origin has been around for quite a while now, and its list of features continues to grow. At heart, though, it's an effective ad blocking solution for Twitch, YouTube, and more. It works by blocking domains known to belong to advertising or malware sources, using filter/block lists created by its enthusiastic community of fans and developers. You can even import custom blocklists or create ones yourself if there are some sites you'd like to support by allowing advertisements to be displayed.

Resource light

uBlock Origin is a lightweight ad-blocker with a small memory footprint and low impact on your system resources, making it a great choice for low-powered systems where streaming HD content from sites like Twitch might already be an issue. You can even compare it to another popular ad-blocker, AdBlock Plus, here. The only thing to keep in mind is that the more filters you try to use, the more system resources uBlock Origin will need to run, so if memory/CPU are low, try to pick only what's most important.

Advanced features

The default settings for uBlock Origin will be more than enough for most people, but perhaps there's some specific thing on a website you don't like, some element on Twitch that's annoying you and you would rather not see it. uBlock Origin's element zapper and dynamic filtering allow you to target and remove specific elements from websites. And as uBlock Origin is entirely free and Open-source, all these advanced features come at no extra charge!