How we test

Five criteria, forty identical briefs, three runs each, and the prices read off the vendor's own page.

By Casey LindstromUpdated 21 September 2026Prices checked 21 September 2026

Every tool on this site is scored on the same five criteria, weighted the same way, against the same set of briefs. The weights are below and they do not change between reviews. If a score moves, it is because a vendor changed something.

The rubric

Output quality / 30How the finished track holds up on a second and third listen: arrangement, mix, artefacts, how often a usable take arrives.

Vocals and language / 20Whether the tool sings at all, how the voice sits in the mix, and which singing languages the vendor actually documents.

Rights and licensing / 20What you are allowed to do with the result, whether the licence survives a cancelled subscription, and what the vendor has signed with rightsholders.

Value / 15What the entry price buys, and what commercial use really costs once you read the tier table.

Export and workflow / 15Track length, stems, file formats, editing of a finished piece, and whether the interface fits one song or a hundred.

The briefs

Forty jobs, identical for every tool, chosen to look like what people actually need rather than what demos show: three birthday songs with names in the lyrics, a wedding first dance, a leaving-party song with an in-joke, two podcast beds, a sixty-second product-video score with a mood change at thirty-eight seconds, four looping background tracks, a lullaby, and twenty-six more across genres from country to drum and bass.

Each brief is run three times per tool. We keep the best of the three, which is generous to every tool equally, and we record how many of the three were usable at all. That second number is what the output score mostly reflects, because a tool that lands one in three is a different product from one that lands three in three even when their best takes are identical.

Prices and rights

Every price on this site is read off the vendor's own pricing page on the date shown at the top of each article, currently 21 September 2026. We do not repeat prices from press coverage. Where a vendor advertises one price and puts commercial rights on a higher tier, we say so in the review and it costs them value points.

What we pay for and what we earn

We buy the subscriptions we test. No vendor on this site has been given a free account, an embargoed preview or any opportunity to see a review before it was published, and no vendor pays for placement or for a score.

Some links on this site are commercial and are marked as such where they appear. They sit on the guide pages, never inside a score, and the rubric above is the only thing that determines the ranking. The current order is Udio (83), ElevenLabs Music (82), Suno (79), Soundraw (68), Beatoven.ai (59), Boomy (55), Mubert (50).

Corrections

If a price here is wrong or a vendor has changed its terms, tell us and it gets fixed with the date of the change noted on the page. Write to the address on the about page.

Casey Lindstrom Casey Lindstrom has written about music software since 2014, first for a regional print weekly and since 2019 on the web. They run every tool on this site through the same brief before writing a word about it, and they pay for the subscriptions out of pocket.