Kick Chat Commands: Native & Custom Commands Explained

Kick is the youngest of the big three live platforms, and its command story reflects that. The moderation side is mature — Kick shipped a full set of slash commands early and mods coming from Twitch will recognise most of them within a minute. The custom command side is where things get interesting, because the bot ecosystem that streamers spent a decade building on Twitch mostly doesn't reach Kick at all.

That gap is the single most important thing to understand before you plan a Kick command list. Nightbot does not support Kick. The StreamElements bot does not support Kick. Moobot does not support Kick. If you arrived from Twitch expecting to point your existing bot at a new channel, that's the wall you hit — and it's why this page spends more time on the ecosystem than the Twitch equivalent needs to.

Where Kick's Naming Differs From Twitch

The commands do similar jobs but the words aren't identical, which trips up mods who work across both platforms. Kick uses /followonly where Twitch uses /followers, and /subonly where Twitch uses /subscribers. Typing the Twitch spelling on Kick generally does nothing at all rather than throwing a helpful error, so a mod can believe they've locked chat down when they haven't. If you run a mod team across both platforms, put the mapping in your mod document.

Kick also has a role Twitch doesn't: OG. It sits alongside VIP as a badge for long-standing community members, granted with /og, and it matters for commands because most bots let you gate a command by user level. On Twitch your levels are everyone / subscriber / VIP / moderator / broadcaster; on Kick there's an extra rung, and it's a natural home for commands you want trusted regulars to have without handing out a mod badge.

One more difference worth knowing: Kick kept hosting. /host still works on Kick years after Twitch deleted the feature, so you can put another channel's stream on your offline page and send your audience there without the hard cut of a raid. Kick has also iterated on its chat tooling considerably faster than the older platforms, so if a command doesn't fire, check the current in-dashboard list before assuming it's broken.

The Bot Situation on Kick

Custom commands need something reading chat, and on Kick your options are genuinely narrower than on Twitch. The reason is historical: Kick launched without a documented public API, so third-party developers who wanted to build a Kick bot had to work against undocumented endpoints that could change without notice. Several tried; most of the established Twitch bots decided the maintenance cost wasn't worth it and stayed away. An official API arrived much later than Twitch's, and bot support has been catching up ever since rather than being there from day one.

What that leaves you with is three practical routes. First, Kick's own first-party tooling — the creator dashboard has been growing a basic custom command editor, which is fine for a handful of static text responses and nothing more. Second, the Kick-native bots that grew up filling the vacuum, which vary a lot in reliability and in how much of a command system they offer. Third, a cross-platform bot that treats Kick as a first-class platform rather than an afterthought.

StreamUps custom chat commands are the third kind: the same command list runs on Kick, Twitch and YouTube Live from one dashboard, with nothing installed locally. That matters more on Kick than anywhere else, because Kick streamers are overwhelmingly likely to be streaming somewhere else at the same time — see the Kick integration for how the connection works.

Whichever route you take, mod the bot account. Kick applies link and spam filtering to ordinary accounts exactly as Twitch does, so an unmodded bot posting your Discord invite will eventually have that message removed by your own moderation settings.

Kick Chat Quirks Worth Planning Around

Kick chat moves differently from Twitch chat. The platform's growth has been concentrated in a smaller number of very large channels, which means a mid-sized Kick chat is often quieter than a Twitch chat with the same viewer count, while a big one is faster than almost anything on Twitch. For commands that means the cooldown you tuned on Twitch is probably wrong here — quieter rooms can afford shorter cooldowns on fun commands, and the giant rooms need aggressive ones or the command replies bury the conversation.

Emotes are the second adjustment. Kick has its own emote set and its own subscriber emote system, and Twitch-specific emote names in your command responses will render as plain text for Kick viewers. If you multistream, write command responses in words rather than emote codes and they'll read correctly everywhere. The same applies to platform-specific slang in responses: “thanks for the Prime sub” means nothing to a Kick viewer.

Third, Kick's subscription economics change which commands earn their place. The platform's headline 95/5 revenue split makes subscriber-facing commands more worth building out here — a !subcount command pulling toward a milestone lands differently when your audience knows almost all of it reaches you. Pair it with !socials so viewers who found you on Kick can follow you everywhere else.

Finally, remember that a Kick viewer's chat history is not the same as a Twitch viewer's. Anyone relying on !followage or !watchtime to reward loyalty should expect those numbers to start from whenever your bot began tracking on Kick, not from the day the viewer first showed up.