BandLab vs Soundtrap vs SoundCraft: Which Free DAW?

BandLab vs Soundtrap is really a question about which wall you'd rather hit, because the browser DAWs all charge for different things. BandLab is free with unlimited projects but caps free projects at 16 tracks and sells a membership. Soundtrap's free plan stops at 5 projects and its subscriptions ladder up from about $10 a month. SoundCraft, ours (bias declared), gives every feature away and charges for storage. Same category, three completely different bets on what you'll run out of, and the right pick depends on which shortage would annoy you least.

BandLab: the social one

BandLab's free tier is genuinely generous: unlimited projects, a 16-track editor, hundreds of instruments and a huge loop library, plus the biggest music-making community on the internet, all funded by a membership ($14.95 a month or discounted yearly) that adds 32 tracks, AI tools and direct distribution to Spotify and friends. The trades: your work lives in BandLab's cloud and social ecosystem, the mixing tools stay simpler than a desktop DAW's, and the feature list moves with the membership strategy. As a place to start making music with people around you, it's honestly excellent.

Soundtrap: the classroom one

Soundtrap (independent again after its founders bought it back from Spotify in 2023) is the polished, education-friendly option: clean interface, strong collaboration, a well-liked podcast mode, and school deployments everywhere. The free plan is a demo at 5 projects with limited loops, and the real product starts around $9.99 a month, rising through tiers toward $17.99. If someone else pays (a school, say), it's lovely. Paying yourself, you're buying a subscription for capabilities the other two give away.

SoundCraft: the free-features one

SoundCraft's bet is that features should be free and storage should cost money. Every account gets the whole editor: 12 tracks, recording, piano roll, 15 effects with full automation, playable instruments (sampled grand, synth, drum pads, harp, guitar, DJ decks), a 141-sample drum library that's also downloadable free, and the one feature neither competitor has an answer to: the Bridge, which hosts your real VST3 plugins inside the browser DAW. The wall is storage: 100 MB free, 2 GB for $1.99, and up from there.

The pricing philosophies, side by side

The honest weaknesses

Ours first: SoundCraft caps at 12 tracks (fewest of the three), its community is the youngest by a mile, and there's no built-in distribution; you export files and release them yourself. BandLab's free 16 tracks disappear fast once you double-track anything, and a cloud-social platform owns your workflow in ways worth thinking about before you build a catalog there. Soundtrap's five free projects make it a trial rather than a home, and its best features bill monthly forever. None of these are dealbreakers; they're just the actual shapes of the deals.

Which free DAW should you pick?

Want a scene and collaborators today: BandLab, no argument. In a classroom someone else pays for: Soundtrap. Making finished tracks with real plugins and a $0-until-you-need-space bill: that's the one we built, and the full tour plus the wider free-DAW field will tell you if it fits. The account is free, the editor doesn't hold features hostage, and your first 100 MB of songs are on us. Start here and hit whichever wall bothers you least.