The best Suno alternatives in 2026

Quick answer

• Free with downloads: Google Flow Music (formerly Producer.ai and Riffusion).
• Cheapest paid plan with commercial use: MiniMax Audio, $5 a month.
• Clearest license for releases and client work: ElevenLabs Music, $22 a month for streaming release.
• Free and open source: ACE-Step 1.5 (MIT, runs on small GPUs), or YuE2 if you want to edit the melody and chords.
• Skip for now: Udio. Downloads are disabled and its terms forbid posting what you make.

Comparison

Prices are monthly billing in US dollars as shown on each vendor’s pricing page on November 10, 2026. Several offer lower yearly prices.

How we tested

We wrote a short original song (two verses, two choruses) and sent the same lyrics and the same style prompt to every model we could run through an API on November 10, 2026, using Replicate. Each clip below is 30 seconds of the result, unedited apart from a short fade at the end. For reference, the Suno clip is from an indie pop song we made earlier with Suno v6, not from these lyrics. To check the lyrics we ran each full song through Whisper speech recognition and compared it with what we wrote; Whisper mishears some sung words, so we only report clear differences.

Style prompt: indie pop, warm female vocals, acoustic guitar, light drums, nostalgic and hopeful, 100 bpm

[Verse]
Coffee's cold on the windowsill
Radio hums but the street is still
I wrote your name on the steamy glass
Watched it fade as the hours passed

[Chorus]
So turn it up, let the city sing
Every light is a little thing
We were young in a paper town
Hold on tight, don't let it fall down

[Verse]
Bus stop shelter and a borrowed coat
Half a song in a folded note
You said "someday" like a promise made
Now it's here and I'm not afraid

[Chorus] (repeat)

ElevenLabs Music: the clearest license

ElevenLabs makes songs from 3 seconds to 5 minutes, with or without vocals, in English, Spanish, German, Japanese and other languages, and lets you regenerate one section without redoing the whole song. In our test it took 10 seconds and sang the lyrics nearly word for word; it turned “every light” into “every lie” and changed the last line of the second verse.

The free plan gives 11 minutes of music a month but no downloads. Starter ($6 a month, $1 the first month) allows downloads and commercial use, but not release on streaming services; that starts at Creator ($22 a month). Its music terms exclude film, TV, broadcast and large commercial games. Pricing

Pick it if you release songs or make music for clients and want the usage rules spelled out.

MiniMax Audio: the cheapest paid plan

MiniMax Audio offers Music 2.6 and the newer Music 3.0 (August 2026, up to 5 minutes a song). We tested 2.6: it wrote a 1:53 song, sang every line in order with only small slips, and was among the closest matches to our lyrics, at $0.15 a song on Replicate.

The free plan gives 10k credits a month, about 33 songs; whether songs made on it can be used commercially is not clear in the FAQ. Starter is $5 a month for about 330 songs, with commercial use for songs made on it. Music 3.0 also has open weights; its license allows commercial use if your product credits “MiniMax-Music3”. MiniMax Audio

Pick it if you want lots of songs with vocals for the lowest monthly price.

Google Flow Music: the best free plan

Flow Music is Google’s song app, built on what was Producer.ai (and before that Riffusion). It runs Lyria 3.5, has a chat-style “Producer” you can ask for changes, covers that keep the melody in a new style, and music videos. The free plan gives daily credits and, unlike most rivals, includes MP3, WAV and stem downloads. Paid plans start at $6 a month for about 600 songs, and Google says paid plans include rights to use your songs commercially; it does not say so for the free plan. You must be 18 and in a supported country. Pricing

We could not call Flow Music from an API, so the clip is Lyria 3 Pro, the previous model, on Replicate. It wrote a 2:32 song in 39 seconds with a long instrumental intro (the clip starts at 0:30). The second verse and chorus came out as written; the first verse was hard to make out, and it rewrote the final chorus. You can also make songs with Lyria in the Gemini app, up to 3 minutes.

Pick it if you want to make and download songs without paying.

ACE-Step 1.5: free and open source

ACE-Step 1.5 is MIT-licensed, runs in under 4 GB of VRAM, makes songs from 10 seconds to 10 minutes in more than 50 languages, and does covers, section repaint, stem separation and LoRA training on your own songs. Our 90-second song took 6 seconds of GPU time on Replicate (about $0.01) and matched the lyrics almost exactly; the vocal sounds less polished than the paid apps. GitHub

Pick it if you are comfortable running a model yourself and want no limits or fees.

YuE2: open source with editable melody

YuE2 (September 2026) plans the melody and chords as symbols you can edit before it renders the song, and can do zero-shot covers. It sings in English and Chinese. Individual creators and musicians may use and monetize what they make for free; companies need to contact the authors for a license. It needs Linux and a 24 GB NVIDIA GPU, and edits regenerate the whole recording. GitHub

We could not include a clip: the free Hugging Face demo refused a full song because it needs more GPU time than free accounts get, so you need Hugging Face PRO or your own GPU.

Pick it if you want control over the melody and chords, not just the prompt.

Udio: not recommended right now

Udio still makes good songs and has Voices, Styles and a session editor, but downloads of audio, video and stems are disabled, and its terms forbid downloading outputs or posting them to YouTube, TikTok or Spotify. There is no official date for downloads to return. Unless you only want to listen inside Udio, pick one of the tools above. Terms

When Suno is still the right choice

Suno v6 writes songs up to 8 minutes and Pro is $8 a month with 20 downloads and commercial use for songs made while subscribed. If you mainly need a few polished English songs a month and are happy to pay, it is still hard to beat. Songs from its free plan stay non-commercial even if you subscribe later. Pricing

About this page

This page is written by Tapemoon. We make music videos from songs, and our own song maker runs on Suno, so we have not listed ourselves as an alternative. No company on this page paid to be included, and we use no affiliate links.

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