GarageBand is free, already on your Mac or iPhone, and enough to finish a track. FL Studio costs from $99, runs on Windows and Mac, and gives you a pattern workflow and a note editor GarageBand has no answer to. By the end of this page you will know what each one costs, what “free” leaves out, where GarageBand stops, and which DAW to move to when it does.

Prices are from Image-Line’s store on 21 September 2026. Image-Line’s current version is FL Studio 2026.

The short answer

If you own a Mac or an iPhone and have not finished a track yet, use GarageBand. Buy FL Studio when you know what GarageBand will not do for you, or when you are on Windows, where GarageBand does not exist.

What you pay. GarageBand is free on every Mac, iPhone and iPad. FL Studio is $99, $179, $269 or $449 once, with every future version included.
Where it runs. GarageBand runs on macOS Monterey or later and on iOS 16 or later, and nowhere else. FL Studio runs on Windows 10 and 11 and on macOS 10.15.7 or newer, Intel or Apple silicon, on one licence.
How you write. GarageBand records onto a linear timeline, with a Beat Sequencer on the phone for drums. FL Studio builds short patterns in a Channel Rack and places them in a Playlist.
The note editor. FL Studio’s piano roll has tools GarageBand’s editor does not have.

FL Studio is a product with four editions and 25 years of updates behind it. GarageBand is the free app on the computer you already own. On features FL Studio wins, and that was never the question. The question is whether you need to spend anything yet.

What each one costs, and what “free” actually means here

GarageBand costs nothing, has no editions, and does not stop working. FL Studio’s four editions are $99, $179, $269 and $449, and the $99 one cannot record audio.

GarageBand. Free, with no upsell inside it. Apple’s Mac page says it runs on “macOS Monterey or later” and can “Create and mix up to 255 audio tracks”. The iPhone version needs “iOS 16 required” and works “with up to an astounding 32 tracks”. Both come with the same sound library, Drummer, and Alchemy, which Apple describes as “one of the world’s most advanced synthesizers”. Third-party plug-ins work on both: Audio Units on the Mac, and on the phone “Audio Unit Extensions let you use your favorite compatible third‑party instrument and effect plug‑ins”.

FL Studio. Image-Line’s store lists Fruity at $99, Producer at $179, Signature Bundle at $269 and All Plugins at $449. Every edition includes every future version: “When you buy any Edition of FL Studio you’re getting all future updates to your Edition for free, for as long as we keep making FL Studio.” You can move up an edition later for the difference: “Upgrades are pro-rated - you pay only the difference between editions.”

Fruity, the $99 edition, cannot record audio. Image-Line’s edition comparison says Fruity “is aimed at users who need the Piano roll and Pattern Clips in the Playlist for sequencing, but don’t need more than 8 Audio Clips or audio recording.” If you sing, play guitar, or want to drop a vocal sample onto the timeline, the edition you are comparing against GarageBand is Producer, at $179. GarageBand records audio for free.

The trial. FL Studio’s trial is “fully functional and never expires”, exports “WAV, MP3, and more” at full quality, and has one restriction: “In trial mode FL Studio won’t reopen project files (.flp).” You can finish a track in it. You cannot come back to one tomorrow. That is enough to find out whether the pattern workflow suits you before you spend $179.

Platform: the part that decides it for most people

If you are on Windows, this comparison is over, because GarageBand does not run there. If you are on a Mac or an iPhone, GarageBand is already installed and the only question is when to leave it.

Apple ships GarageBand on macOS, iOS and iPadOS and nothing else. There is no Windows version, no Android version, and no browser version. FL Studio runs on Windows 10 and 11 and on macOS 10.15.7 or newer, and Image-Line’s download page lists both Intel and Apple silicon Macs. One licence covers both operating systems.

The phone changes the comparison more than the Mac does. FL Studio has a phone app, but FL Studio Mobile is a separate $14.99 product with its own project format, not the desktop program on a phone. Image-Line’s manual says that “From FL Studio Mobile 3 onward, you must load projects in the Plugin, they are no longer directly compatible with FL Studio for desktop”: a mobile project opens inside a plugin on the desktop, not as native tracks. GarageBand on the iPhone is the same project format as GarageBand on the Mac. Songs made on the phone open on the Mac, so a beat sketched on the train and finished at a desk is one file. If most of your ideas arrive when you are away from a computer, that is the feature that matters, and FL Studio does not have it.

Making a beat in each

GarageBand on the iPhone gives you a Beat Sequencer grid and records the result onto a timeline. FL Studio gives you a Channel Rack, where every drum and instrument is a row, and a Playlist, where you arrange the patterns you built. Both get a kick, snare and hi-hat playing in under a minute.

GarageBand. On the phone, drums live in the Beat Sequencer: a grid of sixteen steps, one row per drum, tap a square to switch it on. The drum pattern, bass and chords are each recorded as regions on a timeline, and you arrange by duplicating sections and deleting regions from the copies. How to Make Beats on GarageBand walks through the whole thing with step numbers and kit names, so it is not repeated here. On the Mac there is no step grid at all. You get Drummer, a virtual player you steer with an XY pad, and a piano roll for drawing notes by hand.

FL Studio. The Channel Rack holds your instruments, and a pattern is a set of notes for any of them. Image-Line describes the unusual part: “Every pattern has access to all instruments in the rack. In other words, all patterns play from the same set of instruments. Patterns are not limited to a single instrument as they are in most other sequencers.” Patterns go into the Playlist, whose tracks “are not restricted to a single instrument, audio recording, or Clip type”, so a drum pattern, a vocal and an automation clip can share a lane. Image-Line calls the step sequencer “ideal for creating drum loops and simple melodies”, and that is what it is for.

The difference in practice is what happens after the first loop. In GarageBand, the loop is already on the timeline and you arrange by copying it. In FL Studio, the loop is a pattern, and the song is a set of patterns you place, so an eight-bar drum idea and its four-bar variation are two named blocks you can drop anywhere. Producers who build a track from six or seven short patterns tend to find FL Studio’s model faster once they know it.

The note editor

FL Studio’s piano roll has more tools than GarageBand’s, and it is the single biggest thing $179 buys.

Image-Line says its piano roll “has the well deserved reputation as the best Piano roll in the business”, and the tools menu is where the reputation comes from. Arpeggiate is “a powerful arpeggiator based on specialized score presets”. Strum “shifts the timing and velocity of the individual Notes in chords to simulate ‘strumming’”. Chop, Flam, Articulate and Randomize each do one job to a selection of notes. Scale highlighting shows the notes of a chosen scale as lighter rows, and Snap to Scale makes dragged notes land on them. Ghost notes show what other instruments are playing in the same pattern, so you can write a bassline against the chords without switching windows.

GarageBand on the Mac has a Piano Roll Editor, and Apple’s guide covers adding notes, editing notes, quantising note timing, transposing regions and drawing automation in it. That is the full list. There is no strum, no chop, no arpeggiate tool, and no ghost notes for the MIDI you record. On the phone the editor is smaller again. Apple’s iPhone guide covers dragging notes left or right, dragging a handle to change their length, a velocity slider, copy and delete. Most of the shaping happens by re-recording the part.

If your tracks are mostly notes rather than mostly audio, this is where FL Studio earns its price.

What you give up in GarageBand

The stock sounds, the routing, and the depth of editing on the phone. None of them stop you finishing a track. All of them can be heard on it.

The sounds are recognisable. Every GarageBand instrument is a synth with a preset loaded, and the presets are on millions of computers. The most famous example is a drum loop. Rihanna’s “Umbrella” was built on a GarageBand loop called “Vintage Funk Kit 03”; Stereogum’s history of the record describes how Kuk Harrell found it while teaching himself the software, and how The-Dream heard it and asked what the beat was. That loop is still in GarageBand. So is everything else your listeners have heard before. FL Studio ships with its own synths, and more of its sound comes from what you do with the filter and the envelope than from what you pick from a list.

The routing is fixed. GarageBand’s master track has Master Echo and Master Reverb, and Apple’s guide explains the rest of the system in one sentence: “Each audio and software instrument track includes a Master Echo and Master Reverb slider, which you use to control the amount of Master Echo and Master Reverb used on the track.” Those two are the sends. There are no aux buses you create yourself, no sidechain routing between arbitrary tracks, and no way to send a group of drums through one compressor unless you bounce them. FL Studio’s mixer, per Image-Line’s manual, has “500 x Insert Tracks”, “Each Track has 10 effects slots”, and “Insert Mixer Tracks can be routed (sent) to as many other Mixer Tracks as required”, which is what makes sends, buses and sidechain compression possible.

The phone is shallow after the first pass. Thirty-two tracks, per Apple, is enough for a beat and not enough for a busy arrangement. The note editor is covered above. What you get instead is speed: the Beat Sequencer and the scale-locked instruments are faster from nothing to a loop than anything on the desktop, which is why the phone version is the one to sketch in and the Mac version, or Logic, is the one to finish in.

When to move, and where to move to

Move when you have finished several tracks and can name the thing GarageBand would not let you do. If you are on a Mac, the move is to Logic Pro, not to FL Studio, because your projects open there unchanged.

GarageBand projects open directly in Logic Pro. Apple’s guide says there is “no need to import or convert any files”, and the tempo, key signature, track layout, mixing data and effects all carry across. Logic Pro for Mac is $199.99 once, and everything you learned in GarageBand carries over: the timeline, Drummer, the instrument library, and the way regions and sections work are the same program with the limits removed. Logic Pro vs FL Studio covers what that $199.99 buys against FL Studio’s $179, and it is the comparison a Mac user who has outgrown GarageBand is really making.

The move to FL Studio makes sense in three cases. You are on Windows, where Logic does not exist. You have tried the pattern workflow in the free trial and it is how your head works. Or the piano roll tools above are the thing you keep wanting. In each case, buy Producer, not Fruity, unless you are certain you will never record a sound.

Some readers should ignore both. If you have GarageBand and you have not finished a track in it, a new DAW is not what is missing. Every window in FL Studio asks the same questions GarageBand does: what tempo, which notes, which sound, where does the second section start. Answer them once in the free program. The FL Studio vs Ableton Live page is where to go when you have, and are choosing between two things that cost money.

Common questions

Do artists actually use GarageBand?

Yes, and on records you know. Rihanna’s “Umbrella” started as the GarageBand drum loop “Vintage Funk Kit 03”, per Stereogum. Grimes’ Visions was, in the words of a Future Music interview republished by MusicRadar, “recorded entirely using GarageBand and a Juno-G synth”. Steve Lacy told The FADER in April 2017 that his production for Kendrick Lamar’s “PRIDE.” “came from this acoustic session that was recorded on my iPhone”. In each case the artist moved to something bigger afterwards; Grimes described working in Ableton, Logic and Pro Tools by the time of Art Angels. None of them waited to start.

Why don’t professionals use GarageBand?

Because the routing is fixed and the editing is shallow, not because the audio is worse. The two sends are Master Echo and Master Reverb, the phone tops out at 32 tracks, and the note editor stops at move, quantise and transpose. A professional session needs buses, sidechains and detailed editing, and Apple sells those as Logic Pro, which opens the same projects. The recordings above show what GarageBand is for: the idea and the demo, and sometimes the whole hook.

Is there anything better than GarageBand?

For a Mac user who has hit its limits, Logic Pro, because the projects carry across. For a Windows user, there is no GarageBand, and the free options are Cakewalk Sonar, which is free with a BandLab login, and Waveform Free, which Tracktion describes as “completely unlimited”; both are covered in The Best DAW for Beginners. For someone who wants patterns and the deepest note editor on either platform, FL Studio Producer at $179. “Better” depends on what you ran out of.

Do any pros use FL Studio?

Yes. Sound On Sound’s Inside Track on Metro Boomin, from April 2023, reports through his mix engineer that “Metro Boomin makes all his music in FL Studio and more recently Pro Tools”. Martin Garrix, on Image-Line’s own artist page: “I tried to switch to Logic a few times but it’s just not my thing.” Madeon told VICE in 2016: “I’ve spent more time looking at FL Studio’s interface than anything else in the world.”

What carries over

Whichever one you open, the instrument inside it is the same. GarageBand’s Alchemy and FL Studio’s synths are an oscillator, a filter, an envelope and an LFO behind different panels, and the preset you start from is what every other user of that program also started from. Learn what those four controls do by ear and the choice on this page becomes a question about windows and prices. Detune teaches exactly that on an iPhone, a few minutes at a time, and it does not care which DAW you paste the result into.

GarageBand vs FL Studio