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Buying guide
The best free AI music generators
All six free tiers, side by side, with the restriction each one does not put in the headline.
Casey Lindstrom
Every tool in this comparison has a free tier, and not one of them lets you use the result commercially. That is the single fact worth carrying away from this page. What the free tiers differ on is how much you can hear before you decide, and that difference is large.
| Free tier | The catch | |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | SoundrawUnlimited generation and previews | Every download is watermarked |
| 2 | Suno50 credits a day | No download of the finished file |
| 3 | ElevenLabs Music10,000 credits a month, about 11 minutes | No commercial rights |
| 4 | Mubert25 tracks a month, 5 downloads | MP3 only, attribution required |
| 5 | Boomy25 saved songs in total | No MP3 download |
| 6 | Udio10 credits a day, 100 a month | Private use only |
The best free tier: Soundraw
Soundraw lets you generate and preview without any limit at all, and only watermarks the download. That is the most honest free tier in the field: you can build the exact track your video needs, hear it in context, and only pay when you want the clean file. It produces no vocals, so it is background music only. Full review.
The most generous, with a sting: Suno
Fifty credits a day is more free generation than anyone else offers, and you cannot download any of it. You can listen, judge and share a link, which is enough to decide whether ten dollars is worth spending. It is not enough to get a song out of the building. Full review.
Free does not mean royalty-free
These two phrases get treated as synonyms in search results and they are opposites in practice. Free tier means you pay nothing and may use the output privately. Royalty-free means you may use it commercially without paying per play. In this field, commercial use always sits behind a paid tier, and with Mubert it sits behind the second paid tier at 32.49 USD rather than the first at 14 USD.
If you put a free-tier track behind a monetised video, the exposure is yours, not the vendor's. The rights guide goes through what each vendor actually grants.
What an hour on each free tier actually gets you
I gave every free tier one hour and the same three briefs, which is roughly what somebody deciding between them would spend. Soundraw let me finish the job: I built the exact ninety-second bed my test video needed, heard it against the picture, and the only thing standing between me and using it was the watermark. Suno let me generate more than I could listen to and take none of it away. ElevenLabs gave me about eleven minutes of downloadable music, which is genuinely enough to judge the tool and not enough to use it.
Mubert and Boomy both ran out before the hour did, Mubert on downloads and Boomy on saved songs. Udio at ten credits a day is the thinnest free tier here by a distance, which is a strange choice for the tool I rate highest overall.
How I would run a free trial
Do not test tools on the brief you wish you had. Test them on the one you actually have, in the language you actually need, with the real name in the real line. A free tier that sounds wonderful on a generic lo-fi prompt tells you nothing about how it will handle your mother called Grazyna.
Run the same brief three times before you judge a tool. All of these vary enormously between generations, and a single bad first take says more about luck than about the product. Three runs is also exactly what I do for the scores on this site, which is described on how I test.
Questions people ask
What is the best free AI music generator?
Soundraw, because generation and preview are unlimited and only the download carries a watermark. For vocals, Suno's fifty credits a day go furthest, but nothing can be downloaded.
Can I use free AI music on YouTube?
Not safely. Every free tier here is private use only. Monetised video counts as commercial use with every vendor on this page.
Which free tier gives the most music?
Soundraw in volume, Suno in generations, ElevenLabs in downloadable minutes at roughly eleven a month.
Casey Lindstrom
Writes and tests everything on this site
I have written about music software since 2014, first for a regional print weekly and since 2019 on the web. I pay for every subscription on this site out of my own pocket, run each tool through the same brief before I write a word about it, and keep the raw exports so I can go back and check myself.