For most of 2024 and 2025, Suno vs Udio was a real argument about sound. People had strong opinions about whose vocals were more natural, whose mixes were cleaner, whose model handled odd genres. Pages comparing the two are still everywhere, and most of them argue it the old way.
That argument mostly ended on October 29, 2025, when Udio settled with Universal Music Group and switched off downloads (audio, video and stems) for every user the next day. There was a short window in early November to grab existing songs. Since then you can make songs on Udio, play them and share them on Udio, and not take them anywhere else.
What Udio is now
Udio is still a working product. Its pricing page sells Free, Standard ($10 a month, or $8 billed yearly) and Pro ($30, or $24 billed yearly), with Voices, audio upload, Extend, Remix, Styles from existing songs and editing of music and lyrics. It has since settled with Warner as well and signed deals with Merlin and Kobalt. The plan is a licensed platform where songs live inside Udio, announced for 2026. As of our check date, downloads hadn't come back and the relaunch hadn't been confirmed.
So the honest framing is: Udio is a place to make and share AI songs, not a place to make songs you'll release.
Where Suno wins
You can download and release. Pro gets 20 song downloads a month and Premier 60, and commercial use on a paid plan covers songs downloaded within that allowance. That's a cap, and people are right to be annoyed about it. But it's a cap on something Udio doesn't offer at all right now.
Longer songs and a deeper edit toolkit. v6 generates up to eight minutes, and Replace Section, Extend, Cover, stems and (on Premier) Studio all run on it. Custom models let you fine-tune on your own tracks.
A licensed model. Suno says v6 was trained from scratch on licensed material from Warner, BMG and Believe. Universal and Sony are still suing Suno, so it isn't settled ground. But it's no longer the 2024 situation.
Where Udio still has a case
Styles from existing songs and Blend / Reduce Styles are genuinely useful controls for steering a sound, and Udio users tend to like them.
If you only share in-app, the lockout doesn't touch you. Some people make songs for themselves, for friends, for the fun of it. Udio's free tier gives three full-length songs a day, and that's a fine way to do it.
If the relaunch brings downloads back, Udio's licensing (Universal, Warner, Merlin, Kobalt) would be among the broadest in the field. Watch for it.
Moving from Udio to Suno
The prompting habits mostly carry over, with a few changes that matter in v6:
- Lead with the genre in Suno's own wording, then tempo, then feel. Suno's Styles field weights the start heavily; a long preamble pushes the important parts out.
- Negatives go in Exclude, never in Styles. "No autotune" in Styles tends to add autotune.
- Put a direction in every lyric header:
[Chorus | full voice, hook up front], not[Chorus]. Say the same cue again in the arrangement part of Styles. - Write out every repeat. No
(x2), no[Repeat Chorus]. - End on a cue,
[End | clean ending], so the song stops where you planned.
Our v6 prompt guide goes through each field, and if you have prompts saved from Udio or older Suno versions, the free prompt upgrader cleans them up for v6.
The bottom line
On sound, the two have traded places release by release, and we haven't run a blind test to tell you otherwise. On what you can do with the result, it's not close right now. Suno lets you download and release within a monthly cap. Udio doesn't let you download at all. If that changes, we'll update this page.