The three networks
7TV is the newest of the three (launched 2021) and is now the most-used third-party emote network on Twitch by message volume on large channels. It supports animated WebP, 1x/2x/3x/4x scales, and a personal-emote feature where individual users can equip emotes regardless of channel.
BTTV (BetterTTV) is the oldest, dating to 2014. It supports both static and animated GIF emotes, and was the de-facto standard for years before 7TV displaced it. Still widely used and still active.
FFZ (FrankerFaceZ) sits between the two in age and adoption. FFZ specializes in static high-quality emotes and a strong moderator-mod-tool integration. Less common as a sole source but still common as a supplement.
Coverage by channel size
On a top-50 channel, expect to see all three networks active simultaneously, with 7TV emotes accounting for the majority of non-native messages. On smaller channels, BTTV or FFZ may still dominate, especially in older communities that predate 7TV.
A reasonable load order is: native Twitch global, native subscriber emotes, 7TV global, 7TV channel, BTTV global, BTTV channel, FFZ global, FFZ channel. Most chat-rendering tools that take editing seriously load all of these.
Animation considerations
7TV and BTTV both ship animated emotes. Rendering them as static frames in a chat overlay strips a lot of the comedic timing. pepeDance and ratJam are not the same without the loop. Tools that render animated emotes preserve the visual joke; tools that flatten them do not.
The cost of animated rendering is roughly 2–4x the frame work versus static, depending on emote duration and density. This is a meaningful render-time cost only for very long clips; for a 30-second highlight, the difference is seconds.
Which to load if you can only pick one
For most channels with significant chat activity in 2026, 7TV gives the highest coverage per second of integration work. If you are bootstrapping a tool and need to ship something usable in a week, start with 7TV plus native, then add BTTV, then FFZ.
For a finished editing tool intended for professional editors, all three plus native is the only correct choice. Missing emotes look amateur in a chat overlay regardless of which network they are from.