Software Alternatives & Reviews

Dorico VS LilyPond

Compare Dorico VS LilyPond and see what are their differences

Dorico logo Dorico

Dorico redefines the gold standard in scoring software.

LilyPond logo LilyPond

GNU LilyPond is a computer program for music engraving.
  • Dorico Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-04-26
  • LilyPond Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-09-29

Dorico videos

Music Software & Interface Design: Steinberg's Dorico

More videos:

  • Review - Dorico Review (My First Impressions Switching from Sibelius)
  • Review - Why Is Dorico 3 Special?

LilyPond videos

LilyPond Tutorial 1 - Introduction to LilyPond (Your First Score)

More videos:

  • Review - Lilypond Carry-On Review

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Dorico and LilyPond)
Music Tools
32 32%
68% 68
Music
44 44%
56% 56
Audio & Music
32 32%
68% 68
Musician Tools
100 100%
0% 0

User comments

Share your experience with using Dorico and LilyPond. For example, how are they different and which one is better?
Log in or Post with

Reviews

These are some of the external sources and on-site user reviews we've used to compare Dorico and LilyPond

Dorico Reviews

The 10 Best Music Writing Software Programs (2022)
Its professional design and easy-to-use interface are impressive. Furthermore, Dorico Pro 2 provides a smart layout and instrumental adjustments while you write and compose with a vast playback library of almost 1500 sounds.

LilyPond Reviews

We have no reviews of LilyPond yet.
Be the first one to post

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, LilyPond seems to be a lot more popular than Dorico. While we know about 43 links to LilyPond, we've tracked only 2 mentions of Dorico. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

Dorico mentions (2)

  • Worth buying nuraphones?
    Absolutely love mine. Excellent sound quality unmatched by any other headphones that I've used below, at, and even slightly above their price range -- and by "unmatched," I mean it isn't even close. The Nuras are phenomenal, period. I use mine regularly, for both listening enjoyment and orchestral music composition with Dorico and Spitfire Symphony Orchestra. Source: almost 3 years ago
  • Music Software and Bad Interface Design: Avid’s Sibelius
    Well, the founders of Sibelius started another music notation software called Dorico[1]. Is Dorico's UI more consistent? Does it address many of the issues of this video's criticism? Or put another way, does being a green-field software project allow the freedom to create a sane UI? Or did it have to deliberately copy may of Sibelius' faults so migrating users can quickly get up to speed with Dorico? (Analogous... - Source: Hacker News / about 3 years ago

LilyPond mentions (43)

  • MIDI Editor
    Why use this when you could just use Lilypond, which is free, open source, and has a legacy in TeX: https://lilypond.org. - Source: Hacker News / 5 months ago
  • Show HN: TuneType – a font that has (guitar) chords embedded as ligatures
    > since its width was set to 0 Is this totally necessary? It might be. I don't know much about font programming. If the values have to be hard-coded. If you can get me a contact info, I could send you the master list of chords.. Maybe you could use that. > I think a more “advanced” use case like the one you described can be addressed by something like https://lilypond.org Lilypond is a music engraving system. That... - Source: Hacker News / 5 months ago
  • Show HN: TuneType – a font that has (guitar) chords embedded as ligatures
    So I need to pack the font itself with both the A and the Am6 ligatures… I think a more “advanced” use case like the one you described can be addressed by something like https://lilypond.org. - Source: Hacker News / 5 months ago
  • Make measure width smaller?
    At lilypond.org I found some tips, but they all were for the complete score. I don't want my score to be compressed or have smaller notes as I'm rewriting the music because the original notes are to small for me. Source: 6 months ago
  • Caught by MuseScore's Dark Patterns
    As far as open-source software is concerned, you can use Lilypond [1]. Fully text-based transcription. You can edit, insert, splice, overwrite, etc. To your heart's content in your favorite text editor and get a high-quality engraving as output. [1] https://lilypond.org/. - Source: Hacker News / 8 months ago
View more

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Dorico and LilyPond, you can also consider the following products

MuseScore.org - Create, play back and print beautiful sheet music with free and easy to use music notation software MuseScore. For Windows, Mac and Linux.

Sibelius - Sibelius is a virtual score creation tool which allows composers to easily create new piano scores, developed by Avid.

Guitar Pro 7 - Create, play and share your tabs

Finale - Finale, the world standard for music notation software, lets you compose, arrange, notate, and print engraver-quality sheet music.

MuseScore - Our goal is to let musicians from all over the world create and share their works, as well as to make learning music exciting, easy and available for all.

Denemo - GNU Denemo is a music notation editor that lets you rapidly enter notation for typesetting via the...