Software Alternatives & Reviews

Sibelius VS LilyPond

Compare Sibelius VS LilyPond and see what are their differences

Sibelius logo Sibelius

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

LilyPond logo LilyPond

GNU LilyPond is a computer program for music engraving.
  • Sibelius Landing page
    Landing page //
    2022-12-27
  • LilyPond Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-09-29

Sibelius videos

Music Software & Bad Interface Design: Avid’s Sibelius

More videos:

  • Review - Overview (Sibelius 2019 Explained)
  • Review - Sibelius 7 Review

LilyPond videos

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

More videos:

  • Review - Lilypond Carry-On Review

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Sibelius and LilyPond)
Music Tools
60 60%
40% 40
Audio & Music
63 63%
37% 37
Music
67 67%
33% 33
Audio
100 100%
0% 0

User comments

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Reviews

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

Sibelius Reviews

7 Best Music Composition Software To Write Music [Free & Paid]: 2022
Sibelius is a popular software to compose music for professionals and beginners. The software has 3 different versions and Sibelius is free to use with some limitations. Check out the comparison of all 3 versions here
The 10 Best Music Writing Software Programs (2022)
Known for its easy-to-use and wide range of templates that Sibelius first offers can kick start your imagination when you are stuck in a creative rut.
Best music notation software 2022
The program has great collaboration tools, too. When you finish a score or reach a good stopping point for collaboration, you can hit the share button on the toolbar to send your work to the Sibelius cloud. Avid’s MediaCentral Platform then processes it and sends you a URL that can be opened on any computer with any web browser. If you’re collaborating with another Sibelius...

LilyPond Reviews

We have no reviews of LilyPond yet.
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Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, LilyPond seems to be more popular. It has been mentiond 43 times since March 2021. 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.

Sibelius mentions (0)

We have not tracked any mentions of Sibelius yet. Tracking of Sibelius recommendations started around Mar 2021.

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
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What are some alternatives?

When comparing Sibelius 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.

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...

OpenMPT - OpenMPT is a popular tracker software for Windows.