5Stack

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Features ​

5Stack is a comprehensive Counter-Strike management system, servers, matchmaking, tournaments, leagues, stats, and everything you do with a match after it ends. This is the full picture of what the platform offers.

Pages linked below go deeper on the bigger features.

Play ​

  • Play & Matchmaking: one Play page with a mode picker and Find Match for Competitive, Wingman, Duel, and Rush, with regions you star and cap by ping, LAN or online, party queueing, your schedule, and every other way into a game.
  • Draft Lobbies: host a pick-up game in one click or with every setting: auto-split, captains draft, host-assigned, or pre-made teams, with a pick clock, the whole pick order on screen, benches, and a substitute waitlist.
  • Matches: one-page match creation, server selection (on-demand, dedicated, or third-party), map/region veto on one board with veto scouting (each map's edge, both sides' records, the other side's usual bans and picks), enforced check-in with auto-cancel, full match rules (knife, overtime, pauses, best-of, coaches, and more), turn reminders on any page, and a guided admin dock for organizers.
  • Scrim Finder: advertise when your team plays, set who you'll play, and negotiate scrims without a Discord thread.
  • Player Cameras: require a webcam from every player, watch the feeds from the panel, auto-pause when one drops, and put the spectated player's camera on the broadcast.
  • Utility Library: a lineup library for every map, built from throws recorded in game and grenades mined from your own demos, with filmed preview clips and stills, the smoke the game itself simulated, team executes timed to land together, and Discover to find new smoke throws onto any spot and prove them on a real server.
  • Practice Servers: one-click CS2 practice servers driven from an in-game menu and HUD, with scored drills, mastery, executes, and a ranked plan of what to learn next.
  • Custom Map Pools: one pool per format (1v1, 2v2, 3v3 Rush, 5v5), including workshop maps.

Compete ​

  • Tournaments & Brackets: open, invite-only, or rank-gated tournaments with check-in and a free-agent pool drafted into balanced teams; multi-stage Single/Double Elimination, Round Robin, or Swiss brackets; owners entering several teams; negotiated match times, a stats leaderboard, an explained or organizer-picked MVP, a podium even with awards off, and a live, embeddable bracket.
  • Leagues: seasonal divisions on the tournament engine, weekly match play, captain-negotiated scheduling, playoffs, and promotion/relegation.
  • Events: wrap a LAN or a cup weekend into one page that follows the event before, during, and after, with a medal table, leaderboard, match list, highlights, and a media gallery with a lightbox.
  • Competitive Seasons: periodic Elo resets with season-scoped stats and leaderboards, season awards (Champion to MVP), and season pace, compare, and dividers on player profiles.

Match review & media ​

  • Match Analysis: scoreboard lenses, a start-of-round economy chart and buy-type breakdown, clutches, head-to-head, detected roles, heatmaps and movement paths, plus team veto tendencies, a veto simulator, and live veto scouting on the veto board.
  • Match Replay (2D & 3D): replay any map on a stage drawn in your browser, top-down or in 3D, with CS2's real smokes, every bullet, fog of war, an auto-director camera, shareable moments, and clip export.
  • In-Browser Demo Playback: the real demo rendered on a GPU and streamed to your browser, with player POV switching, X-ray, a kill-marked timeline, and your broadcast HUD.
  • Highlights: automatic best-round reels for every player, top plays on the Watch page, a theater-mode clip player, and an in-app clip builder.
  • Live Streaming: a Watch page with a match ticker and live stage, low-latency WebRTC streams, the Stream Deck, broadcast HUDs from your own library, players' Twitch POVs, and a floating player.
  • Demos: automatic upload, fast parsing, storage, retention, download, and reparsing.

Stats ​

  • Stats & Leaderboards: HLTV-style ratings, KAST/ADR, opening duels, clutches, roles, and Elo on tabbed player profiles; expand any match into the full lobby; compare against another player or your own past season; global leaderboards plus FACEIT and Premier boards for your community.
  • Performance Rating: Aim, Positioning, and Utility scored out of 100 against every other player, or against one season's pool, with focus areas and coaching notes.
  • External Matches: import your Valve and FACEIT matches, paste a single share code, or upload a demo to get full stats, replay, and highlights.

Community ​

  • Friends, Teams & the Hub: the floating hub dock (Inbox, Party, Voice, Friends, Chat, Matches), Steam friend sync with live presence, teams, parties, blocking, and linked Discord and Twitch accounts (live on profiles, in search, and as match POVs).
  • Chat: match, permanent team, lobby, draft, tournament, and organizer rooms plus direct messages, with @mentions, per-room mute and notify levels, scroll-back history, reactions, 10-minute edits, image and video attachments, GIPHY GIFs, message requests, in-game all/team chat relay, and a post-match chat log.
  • Voice Chat: party and team voice on 5Stack's own relay, with a Voice app on the dock, per-player volume, a mic check, and voice-activity transmission.
  • Steam Presence: see what friends are playing, in 5Stack and outside it.
  • Moderation & Sanctions: bans, mutes, gags, silences, and warnings that follow a player everywhere, chat moderation, automatic VAC bans, escalating sanctions for abandons and tournament no-shows, and actions only on players below your own role.
  • News: first-party announcements written and published from inside the panel, with comments, +1s, and reply notifications.
  • Discord Integration: create matches from a Discord voice channel, run the map veto, and get per-team voice channels with the 5Stack bot.

Servers & infrastructure ​

  • Flexible Server Management: on-demand servers, dedicated servers on your own nodes, or external machines, all from one panel.
  • Community Servers: public servers with live sanction enforcement, private access lists, map rotation from Steam Workshop collections, per-server plugins, and per-server stats and leaderboards.
  • Move servers between nodes: a dedicated server's files travel with it, with progress and automatic rollback.
  • Automatic CS2 updates: servers stay on the latest CS2 build (and 5Stack plugin) automatically, with optional version pinning when you need stability, and failed updates are flagged with their logs.
  • Regional Servers: multi-region and LAN-capable, with built-in Steam Relay to hide your real server IPs.
  • Server Insights: live CPU / memory / disk, logs, crash reports, CPU pinning, low-latency kernel status, and offline alerts that don't cry wolf.
  • GPU Nodes: power highlights, demo playback, live streaming, and utility lineup previews.

Platform ​

  • Notifications: one Inbox and one settings page for every kind of notification, with per-kind bell switches, per-group push, quiet hours, per-room chat mutes, @mention pushes, urgent match-found rings, and a flashing browser tab.
  • Installable app (PWA): add 5Stack to your home screen or desktop for an app-like experience, with offline-aware caching and an unread badge on the app icon.
  • Built for phones: the hub slides in over the page, matchmaking settings open as swipe-to-close sheets, and Back returns lists to where you left them.
  • Push notifications: per-category, per-device alerts that reach players when the app isn't open, with no third-party push service to sign up for.
  • 17 languages: the interface and the in-game plugin are fully localized, with automatic detection of your browser language.
  • Embeds & popouts: drop a live, auto-cycling tournament bracket onto a stream or site, and pop replays and broadcasts out into their own windows for a second monitor.
  • Search: fast player and entity search from anywhere in the app.
  • API & personal keys: generate personal API keys for programmatic access to your data.
  • 5Stack Plugins: embed your own web applications as native panel pages, sharing the panel's session and design system. (For CS2 server-side plugins, see Game Plugins.)

For administrators ​

5Stack gives admins deep control over how the platform behaves:

  • Administration Overview: roles and access control.
  • Roles & Players: manage roles, the player directory, and sanctions.
  • Matchmaking & Ranks: match types, Elo ranks, lineups, map pools, and per–game-type configs.
  • Branding & Theming: name, logo, login page, and the color theme.
  • Servers & Regions: server types, automatic CS2 updates and version pinning, match server controls, community servers, moving servers between nodes, tuning, and regions.
  • Game Modes: bundle game plugins, cvars, and a Valve game mode into unranked modes for matches, draft lobbies, and community servers.
  • Integrations: Discord, Twitch, external match imports, analytics, and chat.
  • System & Monitoring: metrics, logs, database performance, backups, and the render queue.

Several features are optional and can be switched on or off instance-wide from Settings → Application: matchmaking, leagues, seasons, events, news, the Scrim Finder, voice chat, plugins, and linked accounts.

Rendering features need a GPU

Highlights, in-browser demo playback, live streaming, and utility lineup previews are all rendered on a GPU node. See GPU Nodes. The replay stage and Discover run without one.