Software Alternatives & Reviews

Finale VS LilyPond

Compare Finale VS LilyPond and see what are their differences

Finale logo Finale

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

LilyPond logo LilyPond

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

Finale

Categories
  • Music
  • Music Tools
  • Musician Tools
  • Audio & Music
Website finalemusic.com
Pricing URL Official Finale Pricing
Details $

LilyPond

Categories
  • Music
  • Music Tools
  • Musician Tools
  • Audio & Music
Website lilypond.org
Pricing URL-
Details $

Finale videos

Finale 26: Review & What's New

More videos:

  • Review - Insecure Season Finale Review | The Joe Budden Podcast
  • Review - Quick Vid: Bojack Horseman Series Finale (Review)
  • Review - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ot7AbNBD_tQ

LilyPond videos

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

More videos:

  • Review - Lilypond Carry-On Review

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Finale and LilyPond)
Music Tools
48 48%
52% 52
Audio & Music
52 52%
48% 48
Music
55 55%
45% 45
Audio
45 45%
55% 55

User comments

Share your experience with using Finale and LilyPond. For example, how are they different and which one is better?
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Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, LilyPond seems to be a lot more popular than Finale. While we know about 43 links to LilyPond, we've tracked only 3 mentions of Finale. 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.

Finale mentions (3)

  • About free (not pirate) software to start composing
    When you're ready to upgrade, Finale full version has fully sampled sound for hundreds of instruments. Retail $299. finalemusic.com. Source: 4 months ago
  • ‘Jean Sibelius’ Review: An Early Finale
    Since Sibelius and Finale are two industry-leading (and very much competing) music notation software systems, this headline made me do a quadruple-take! https://www.avid.com/sibelius https://finalemusic.com For those interested in (extremely entertaining) breakdowns of the Sibelius software and other offerings in this space from a UI/UX design perspective, I highly recommend Tantacrul's videos, which propelled him... - Source: Hacker News / over 2 years ago
  • An odd request: what is the music/ theme song that is used during Blue Jays Central on SportsNet?
    I too would want the sheet music so I can transcribe it on music notation software like Finale. Source: over 2 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 / 4 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 / 4 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 / 4 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: 5 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
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What are some alternatives?

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

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

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.

Guitar Pro 7 - Create, play and share your tabs

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...

OpenMPT - OpenMPT is a popular tracker software for Windows.