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Updated July 12, 2026
AI music generation models turn a text prompt into a full song, with vocals, instruments, and structure. The real choice isn’t which app to open; it’s matching quality, price, how you run it, and whether you can sell it. We compared the nine that matter.

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Best Music Generation Models

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Suno V5.5

Suno
Complete radio-ready songs
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Suno is the model to beat for finished, full-length songs, and V5.5 is the most polished vocal generator you can use today.
Score 100Price License ProprietaryCommercial rights Paid-plan commercial use
  • Nothing else here matches its hit rate on complete songs: coherent structure, clean mixing, and expressive vocals from a single prompt, across most mainstream genres.
  • If you want to type an idea and get back something that sounds finished, this is the most reliable pick.
  • There’s no public API, so it’s app-only, fine for one-off songs, but if you need to generate at scale, Mureka or Lyria 3 are the API picks.
  • It leans pop, with niche genres drifting mainstream, and a Warner licensing deal is actively reshaping the model.
  • App — Available in Suno.

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Mureka V8

Mureka
Quality songs you can automate
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Mureka gets closest to Suno’s quality while adding what Suno lacks: a first-party API and a paid commercial-use path for scaled generation.
Score 88Price License ProprietaryCommercial rights Paid-plan commercial use
  • The vocals and overall polish land within striking distance of Suno, and you get things Suno won’t give you: an official API and commercial rights for paid output.
  • It’s the strongest choice when you need quality and programmatic access together.
  • It’s a notch below Suno on the hardest, most expressive songs, so for pure one-shot quality Suno still wins.
  • Mureka now markets V9 as well; V8 is the benchmarked version, and API naming can move faster than consumer labels, so confirm the exact model selected.

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Lyria 3 Pro

Google
Music built into apps
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Lyria 3 Pro is Google’s developer-first music model: stronger on instrumentals than vocals, watermarked on every track, and built for embedding generation into apps.
Score 68Price License ProprietaryCommercial rights API/enterprise terms
  • It’s a reliable, well-documented API for adding music to a product, with clean instrumental output, vocals supported, and stereo WAV on the Pro tier.
  • Timestamped structure control gives more predictable results than most one-prompt tools, which matters when generation has to run unattended.
  • Lyria 3 Pro is still in preview, generation is single-turn with no iterative editing, and every track carries a SynthID watermark that flags it as AI-generated.
  • If you need unmarked audio, that’s a dealbreaker. On pure vocal songs, Suno and Mureka clearly outclass it.

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MiniMax Music 2.6

MiniMax
Affordable API song generation
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MiniMax Music 2.6 is the sensible value pick for generating full songs through an API, with solid vocal output that punches above its weight.
Score 62Price License ProprietaryCommercial rights API/enterprise terms
  • You get full, vocal-driven songs from a clean API, with multilingual output and auto-generated lyrics when you don’t bring your own.
  • Quality sits comfortably in the middle tier, making it a strong high-volume workhorse when you need lots of decent songs rather than a handful of perfect ones.
  • It’s not the best on vocals or instrumentals, so for a hero track you’ll want Suno or Mureka.
  • MiniMax’s API terms say customers retain ownership rights in generated content, while the consumer app permits personal, noncommercial use, so keep the route distinction clear.

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Eleven Music v2

ElevenLabs
Paid commercial-use route
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Eleven Music v2 is the rights-conscious pick: it is trained on licensed music and offers a clear paid-plan route for commercial output.
Score 56Price License ProprietaryCommercial rights Paid-plan commercial use
  • Its edge is provenance. ElevenLabs trained it on licensed music through deals with rights holders and permits commercial use under eligible paid plans.
  • Vocals are polished and multilingual, making it a strong option when rights clarity matters alongside song quality.
  • It’s priced at a real premium, and on song quality it trails Suno, Mureka, and Lyria 3 on instrumentals.
  • Commercial permissions depend on the plan and use case, so check model-specific terms; licensed training data is not a blanket guarantee.

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Udio v1.5 Allegro

Udio
Fast in-app drafts
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Once a top-two name, Udio is now an app-only route with downloads disabled during its current transition, which sharply limits its usefulness for real work.
Score 15Price License ProprietaryCommercial rights Unclear / verify
  • Allegro is Udio’s fast, low-cost model, and Udio’s vocals earned it a real following. At its best it produces expressive, characterful singing.
  • If you just want to sketch ideas and listen inside the app, it’s quick and cheap.
  • The dealbreaker is export access: you can’t currently download audio, stems, or MP3s, so creations stay on-platform. That restriction does not resolve commercial rights or ownership, which remain unclear.
  • For production work, use Suno or Mureka.

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ACE-Step 1.5 XL

ACE-Step project
Editable open-weight songs
View on GitHub
ACE-Step 1.5 XL is the most practical open-weight song model: MIT-licensed with real editing tools, if you have the GPU to run it.
Score Not scoredPrice License Open weightCommercial rights Broad commercial use
  • This is the open-weight pick with the best tooling: an MIT license that explicitly clears output for commercial use, editing modes like repaint and cover, LoRA fine-tuning, and 50-plus languages with sung lyrics.
  • You control the pipeline instead of paying a provider per song, but you bear the compute cost.
  • You need a high-end GPU, roughly 12GB of VRAM minimum and 20GB-plus for full quality, so it’s not run-anywhere. It still trails Suno on polish, and sustained vocals can sound metallic.
  • Choose it for control and editability, not cloud-model convenience.

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Stable Audio 3.0 Small

Stability AI
Local music generation
View on Hugging Face
Stable Audio 3.0 Small is the open pick for generating complete music locally on a typical machine, with lyric-conditioned singing still unverified.
Score Not scoredPrice License Open weightCommercial rights Broad commercial use
  • At 0.6B parameters, it is designed for on-device full music composition and supports outputs up to two minutes.
  • ComfyUI support and public weights make it the most practical local option here for readers without a high-end GPU.
  • Full sung lyrics are not clearly documented, so choose ACE-Step or a proprietary model when vocals are essential.
  • Commercial use is governed by Stability’s Community License, including its revenue threshold, and Medium and Large are separate variants with different access routes.
  • Run locally — You can run it locally with ComfyUI after downloading weights from Hugging Face.

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LeVo 2

Tencent / SongGeneration project
Best open-weight vocals
View on Hugging Face
LeVo 2 is our open-weight vocals pick, but a restrictive Tencent license and steep hardware needs keep it in research territory.
Score Not scoredPrice License Open weightCommercial rights Noncommercial only
  • If you want convincing open-weight vocals, this is the strongest candidate here. Tencent’s dual-track approach separates vocals from accompaniment and supports full songs, instrumentals, and a cappella.
  • The result is a useful research model when vocal quality matters more than commercial rights.
  • The license is the catch: it restricts the code and weights to noncommercial use. The exact v2-large route also needs roughly 22-28GB of VRAM depending on setup.
  • For anything you’ll sell, ACE-Step’s commercial-use grant is the safer open pick.
  • Run locally — If you have a high-end machine, follow the setup guidance and download the weights from the official SongGeneration model card.

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How to Choose

When choosing between these models, consider:
  • Access: Decide first whether you’ll use the model in an app, call it through an API, or run it locally, because that single choice drives your cost, privacy, latency, and setup work. Suno and Udio are app-only; Mureka, Lyria, MiniMax, and Eleven add APIs; ACE-Step, Stable Audio, and LeVo 2 are the local routes.
  • Quality: We use a 0-100 blend of the Artificial Analysis Music Vocals and Instrumental Elo leaderboards, which rank models by blind human preference votes. It’s a useful signal for which one sounds better. The open-weight models aren’t in the arena, so they remain unscored and should be compared on practical factors instead.
  • Price: We normalize everything to cost per generated minute of audio, since vendors bill in very different units: subscriptions, credits, per-song, and per-track. Treat these as directional; your real cost depends on how much you regenerate to get a keeper.
  • Commercial rights and vocals: If you plan to publish or sell, rights matter as much as quality. They range from paid-plan or API terms to broad open-model grants and LeVo 2’s noncommercial restriction. Udio’s export lock is an access limitation, while its commercial rights remain unclear. Stable Audio can generate music locally, but full sung lyrics are not clearly documented.

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Other Models We Considered

Suno V5 (Suno) — The prior Suno flagship, still good, but V5.5 supersedes it.Suno V4.5 (Suno) — An older Suno generation; skip it now that V5.5 exists.Lyria 2 (Google) — Google’s earlier instrumental-only API model, with no sung vocals.Eleven Music v1 (ElevenLabs) — The first ElevenLabs music model, now behind Music v2.FUZZ-2.0 (Producer.ai) — A benchmarked historical challenger with no current verified model route.Sonauto V2.1 (Sonauto) — A cheap benchmarked option, but the product and model have moved on.MusicGen (Meta) — The recognizable open instrumental baseline, now old, instrumental-only, and outclassed.HeartMuLa (HeartMuLa project) — An Apache-2.0 multilingual local model, promising but still rough for finished songs.DiffRhythm 2 (Xiaomi / ASLP) — An Apache-2.0 full-song open model with a demo, worth watching as it matures.YuE (YuE project) — A permissively licensed full-song local model, but slow and demanding to run.

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Frequently Asked Questions

Suno V5.5. It tops both the vocals and instrumental leaderboards and is the most reliable at turning a single prompt into a finished, full-length song. Mureka V8 is the closest alternative and adds an API that Suno doesn’t have.
For most people making complete songs, Suno V5.5. It’s app-based, needs no setup, and produces the most polished results. If you need to generate songs programmatically, Mureka V8 or MiniMax Music 2.6 are better fits, while Eleven Music v2 offers a clear paid-plan commercial-use route.
It depends on your hardware and goal. ACE-Step 1.5 XL is the best all-round open song model with the friendliest license, but it needs a high-end GPU. Stable Audio 3.0 Small generates music on a typical machine, but full sung lyrics are not clearly documented. LeVo 2 has strong open vocals but a noncommercial license.
Sometimes, and it depends entirely on the model and route. Suno, Mureka, and Eleven provide commercial-use paths on eligible paid plans, while MiniMax’s API and consumer app use different terms. ACE-Step explicitly permits commercial output. Udio’s rights remain unclear and exports are disabled; LeVo 2 is noncommercial only. Always read the applicable terms before you publish or sell.
The current comparison heavily favors Suno. Udio’s downloads are disabled during its transition, while Suno remains the stronger benchmarked model with a usable export workflow. Unless Udio restores a download-enabled product, Suno is the clear pick, with Mureka as the main alternative.
Reasonably well. The score comes from blind human preference votes on the Artificial Analysis arena, so it tracks what people actually think sounds better rather than a synthetic metric. But it can’t capture genre fit, editing workflow, or licensing, so use it as a starting point and then test on your own prompts.
Suno V5.5 for finished vocal tracks, with Mureka V8 close behind and adding an API. Among open-weight models, LeVo 2 has the strongest vocal case, though its license is noncommercial. Do not choose Stable Audio specifically for vocals until Stability documents reliable lyric-conditioned singing.