Suno

There is one thing to consider: whether you need the song itself or the file.

Who it is for. For people who need a song, not a career: to congratulate a colleague, score a video, hear how lyrics sound. The free plan gives ten songs a day, and you can listen and share a link without limits.

Who else. For authors who write their own lyrics and want to hear a demo quickly, then refine the track in their own software. Paid plans provide separate stems, while Premier unlocks Studio with MIDI and plugins.

Who it is not for. For people planning to sell songs or upload them to streaming services: since Sep 3, 2026, commercial rights come only with downloading, which is almost unavailable on the free plan.

Good fit: section 3 takes you from your first song to your own voice. Choose between it and Udio, then see section 7.

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New generation. Since September 9, new songs are created on v6. In the Suno v6 card you can hear lyric edits, compare models, and check current limits.

Four levels: a song from a description, refining a finished track, your own voice, and a studio for those who need stems.

Song from a description. In simple mode, write what the song is about and its style, and get two versions of a track. In advanced mode, set the style separately, add your own lyrics with verse and chorus markup, choose vocal gender, and use two signature controls: how strange it is and how strictly it follows the style. The vendor counts fifty free credits a day as ten songs, and each press of Create returns two.

Refinement. Like the chorus but not the verse: replace just that section, extend the song, make a cover in another style, or remaster an old track. Paid plans extract separate stems, vocals, and instruments from a song, while Premier splits it into nearly a hundred instruments.

Your voice and your style. Since March 2026, you can record your own voice and give it to the model, and it will sing a new song in it. The terms prohibit other people's voices; the vendor compares the recording with a random phrase. After uploading six of your own tracks, Pro and Premier train a personal version of the model on your sound.

Studio. Suno Studio runs in a desktop browser and only on Premier: tracks, MIDI, a synthesizer, effects, and a beta chat that assembles a session from a request in words. Exporting tracks from it does not count as downloads, making it a way around the limit without buying more.

What the vendor itself shows. The App Store listing shows: a simple-mode screen with a prompt about texting an ex, advanced mode with weirdness and style-influence controls, voice recording with an eight-minute limit, and remixing someone else's track. The Studio 2.0 landing-page video shows a 137 BPM session with eight tracks and open plugins. We have not run Suno for a specific task ourselves; the numbers come from the vendor's help center and other people's tests.

You can start without a card or app, but you will need to sign in right away.

Step 1. Open suno.com and sign in with Google, Apple or email; other social logins are there too. Without signing in no songs get created, and a phone number isn't required.

Step 2. Click Create, write what the song is about and what style it should be in, then wait for two versions: the vendor promises it will take under a minute. Paste your own lyrics in advanced mode with verse and chorus labels in square brackets, and set the style in English.

Step 3. Extend it, replace a section, or make a cover directly from the player. You cannot download a file on the free plan: old accounts retained up to seven trial downloads forever, new ones receive them only occasionally, so you listen to the song on the site and share a link.

Apps. For iPhone it's in the App Store, iOS 18 required. For Android it's in Google Play. The app is weaker than the site: no Studio, and files come out only in mp3.

Where to distribute. A song downloaded on a paid plan may be taken to Spotify, Apple Music and other platforms through any distributor without crediting Suno. We found no separate rules about AI music on the platforms.

Steps verified Sep 5, 2026 against the live site and the help.suno.com docs

The audience is huge, but nobody has measured quality, and that needs to be kept in mind whenever you see “best.”

Audience. More than 100 million people have made at least one song, 2 million pay for a subscription, and annual revenue reached $300 million: co-founder Mikey Shulman gave this summary in late February 2026, with no independent audit of the figures. The company's valuation doubled in seven months, from $2.45 billion in November 2025 to $5.4 billion in June 2026.

Quality. There are no leaderboards or benchmarks for music generators, blog comparisons of Suno and Udio contradict one another, and a Habr review (May 8, 2026) “did not see much difference” between v5 and v5.5. The only verifiable measurement here: how many songs you can take from the site.

Stores. The App Store gives it 4.9 across 340 thousand ratings in the US, Google Play 4.8 across 2.3 million reviews and more than 10 million installs (Sep 5, 2026).

Generated songs are already in the charts. Suno's place among voice and music tools in our catalog is shown under the card title, and the whole tool ranking sits on a shared page.

There are two currencies here: credits for generation and downloads, which became a separate limit on 03.09.2026.

Free. 50 credits a day, which the vendor counts as ten songs; v6-mini model; shared queue. You can listen and share links as much as you want, but can barely take files away: accounts older than Sep 3, 2026 retained up to seven trial downloads forever, new ones receive them only occasionally, and those downloads do not include commercial rights.

Pro. $10 a month or $96 a year; the storefront shows the annual price by default as $8 a month. It includes 2,500 credits, v6 and v6-wild models, tracks, your own voice, and 20 downloads a month. Credits expire, and if they run out early, you get the same 50 a day until the end of the cycle.

Premier. $30 a month or $288 a year, 10,000 credits and 60 downloads, plus Suno Studio, whose exports do not count toward the limit. Buying extra credits costs twice as much as subscription credits, 500 for $4, and works only with an active subscription.

How many songs in practice. The storefront promises “up to 500 songs” on Pro, but a finished track rarely comes out on the first try. Four attempts and splitting into tracks use about 90 credits, so Pro is enough for roughly 27 finished songs a month by practitioners’ estimates and our calculation. You can take twenty of them from the site.

Four questions: whose song it is, what you can do with it, who is suing Suno, and what happened to the data.

Who owns the song. On paid plans, Suno transfers all its rights to the track to you; on the free plan, it retains them and permits personal use only. Subscribing later does not grant rights retroactively to old free songs. A remix of someone else's track belongs to both parties and cannot be sold.

Commercial use depends on downloading. Under terms effective Mar 9, 2026, you can sell, license, or post for money only a song downloaded within your plan's quota. Rights to downloads are perpetual and remain after you cancel your subscription. The terms explicitly prohibit screen recording and stream ripping.

Copyright is not guaranteed. The vendor's help says outright that a song made entirely by a neural network isn't covered by copyright in the US, and a prompt doesn't count as authorship. Your own lyrics stay yours.

Court cases. Warner Music settled and licensed Suno in November 2025, BMG signed a deal on Dec 8, 2026, while two other majors continue litigating in Massachusetts, where on 08.18.2026 a judge allowed a claim over downloading music from YouTube for training.

Loss in Germany. On 07.31.2026, the Munich court, in a suit by GEMA, found both training on other people's songs and producing similar ones to be infringement. The decision is not final, and Suno promises to appeal it. For you, this means one thing: the vendor promises to replace its current models with licensed ones, while finished songs will remain in the library.

Data. Suno was hacked in November 2025, but this came to light only on 07.20.2026: names, addresses, phone numbers, purchase histories, and partial card numbers of 55 million users leaked, and the company did not disclose it itself. Under its terms, the vendor may use your uploaded audio and voice recordings indefinitely, including for model training, with data stored in the US. Audio watermarks were announced on Jun 8, 2026 as an intention; the vendor has not described how they work.

The fork is not in the sound, but in whether they give you the file.

If you need a voiceover for a video instead of a song, check out Murf voiceover: the card covers generation limits and file rights.

If the song is already recorded and you need a backing track for rehearsal, try the Moises splitter: it separates vocals and instruments from finished audio.

If you need a musical draft to refine note by note, compare music in AIVA. There you can download MIDI and keep working in your own editor.

For an instrumental background where you rework individual parts, compare the Stable Audio studio. It lets you rewrite a single track and export the mix to WAV.

Different policies. After settling worldwide with Universal on 10.29.2025, Udio disabled audio and stem downloads entirely: tracks live inside the site until its licensed service launches. Suno kept downloads, but caps them at 20 or 60 per month and limits them to paid plans.

Similar pricing. Both start with a free plan and charge $10 for the mid-tier plan and $30 for the top plan; Udio includes 2,400 and 6,000 credits versus Suno's 2,500 and 10,000 (Udio plans according to reviews, snapshot 08.19.2026). Both are moving toward a «licensed model» through worldwide settlements with labels, but it has no version number or date yet.

Who else is nearby. ElevenLabs makes music as an add-on to speech synthesis, Mureka promises unlimited downloads. Reviews praise Udio's mastering and Suno's vocals, and their conclusions are opposite.

In three years, Suno went from a Discord bot to a $5.4 billion company that labels are suing and licensing at the same time.