Veena vs BandLab

Veena vs BandLab comes out one way: Veena wins. Veena gives you a personal music producer, free in your browser, who builds your whole song as real tracks, while BandLab's free Studio stops at 16 tracks and 15 minutes and keeps AutoMix, Voice Cleaner and Audio-to-MIDI for its Pro plan at $14.99 a month (BandLab's pricing page, September 2026).

Veena is an AI DAW with a personal music producer built in. Describe the song you want and CoProducer builds it with you — beats, chords, melody, arrangement and mix — as real tracks you can edit, mix and export. Free, in your browser.

BandLab's numbers below are its own, quoted from its membership pricing page, its help centre and its Terms of Use as they read on 23 September 2026.

Veena vs BandLab, row by row (September 2026)

What BandLab's free Studio costs you

BandLab sells its Studio as "best-in-class and 100% free" (BandLab's Studio page, September 2026). Read its own pricing table and help centre and the free plan turns out to be metered at every step that matters to a finished song:

• 16 tracks, 15 minutes. "You can create up to 16 tracks with a maximum duration of 15 minutes" (BandLab help centre, September 2026). Paying doubles the tracks to 32; the 15-minute limit "applies to both free and Membership users."
• Most of the AI is on the Pro plan. The pricing table marks Palette, Audio-to-MIDI, Smart Tools, Voice Cleaner, AutoMix, the FX Preset Generator and Voice Changer "No" for Free. Pro is $14.99 a month after a 3-day trial, or $99 for the first year and $149 a year after that.
• Ten effects per track. "You can have a maximum of 10 Effects per track. If you have a Membership, you can have up to 20 Effects!" (help centre, "Adding Effects").
• Stems on a ration. The Splitter gives free users "3 splits/day"; "Studio access" and MIDI conversion are listed for Pro and Max.
• Sounds on a ration. Free accounts claim 20 BandLab Sounds samples a week, and the count resets every Monday.
• Tokens for the newest generator. SongStarter 2.0 runs on Tokens: "All users will automatically receive 15 Tokens every month," and more cost $8.99 for 2,000 (help centre, "Tokens, Credits, and Claims").

On Veena's free plan, CoProducer runs on a daily allowance and you keep up to 5 projects. The studio around it isn't rationed: the timeline, the piano roll, 61 instrument presets, 7 drum kits, a 16-pad sampler, 10 built-in effects, 4-stem separation, your own plug-ins and exports with no cap all come free. Veena Pro, at $20 a month, removes the daily request cap and unlocks the premium models.

SongStarter picks a genre. CoProducer builds the song.

BandLab's own AI starting point is SongStarter. Its help centre gives the whole flow in one line: "Pick a genre and click Generate." You pick from 11 genres, flick between three variations, then "Save as Project or Edit in Studio." What comes out is an idea, in BandLab's own word: SongStarter is its "AI Music Idea Generator" (BandLab's SongStarter page, September 2026). Turning that idea into a song, with sections, an arrangement and a mix, is still your job, and the tools that add chords, bass and drums to a MIDI idea (Smart Tools: Layer, Extend and Recompose) are "available as part of your BandLab Membership."

CoProducer starts where a producer starts: with a sentence about the song. Here is the flow on Veena's free plan, with the trap prompt at the bottom of this page:

1. Open Veena in your browser and sign in with Google. Nothing to install and no graphics card needed, because the AI runs on Veena's servers.
2. Describe the beat. "Make a 140 BPM trap beat in F minor…" CoProducer sets the tempo and key, plans the intro, hooks and verses with their bar lengths, and writes a task list you can watch it tick off.
3. Pick each part. Every new part comes as three options. Audition them and choose. A part that has to lock to another, like an 808 that follows the kick, waits for the one you picked and reads its actual notes.
4. Change anything in plain words. "Half-time hats in the second verse." "Swap the bells for a pluck." "Add a 4-bar breakdown before the last hook." Or open the piano roll and drag the notes yourself. One undo reverses any CoProducer change.
5. Record your vocal and export. Track your verse from the mic, then export the mix or every track, as often as you like.

It works on the first day. In Veena's own data, 3 in 4 new users (75.7%) whose first request asks for a new song get a finished first result on day one; when that first request asks for trap, 83.6% do.

Collaboration: BandLab sends an invite, Veena brings the producer

BandLab lets you invite collaborators from your Library by username or email (BandLab help centre, September 2026). They join a project that still lives inside the Studio's limits, with the same 15-minute ceiling for everyone.

Veena's real-time collaboration has been live since 12 September 2026, on every plan. You create an invite link (email-locked to one Google account, or open to anyone who has it) that works for 30 days. Edits sync instantly, and each collaborator's named cursor sits on the bar and track they are working on.

The producer comes into the room with you. Each person gets a private CoProducer chat, and a shared chat builds for the whole session: one run at a time, the next request waiting in an "Up next" strip, and every option pick marked "Selected by" whoever chose it. If only one of you owns a plug-in, that machine renders the audio and shares it with everyone else. The full walk-through is in real-time collaboration in Veena.

Stems, plug-ins and a 24-bit master, free

Stems. Right-click any audio clip, choose "Separate into Stems", and vocals, drums, bass and other land on new tracks, time-aligned next to the original. On the free plan, the right-click route doesn't touch your daily CoProducer allowance. Try it on a bounce with the free stem splitter.

Your own plug-ins. The Veena Bridge helper app loads your VST3 and AU plug-ins on a Mac and your VST3 plug-ins on Windows. CoProducer sees what you have installed, knows about 20 products by name (Serum, Kontakt, Omnisphere, the FabFilter Pro range, Valhalla and more) and starts from their real presets. BandLab's help centre documents its own effects, 10 to a track, and no VST or AU hosting. Setup is in using your plug-ins with Veena Bridge.

The master. Veena exports WAV at 24-bit/48 kHz, MP3 at 320 kbps, MIDI, and MP4 when the project has video: the full mix, or every track as stems in one zip, on every plan, with no watermark on your exports. BandLab's web mixdown is M4A at 128 or 192 kbps, or 16-bit, 44.1 kHz WAV (help centre, "Supported Import and Export File Formats"). Every format is listed on the export formats page.

Who owns what the AI writes

BandLab draws its line around generated music. Its SongStarter help page says: "While you won't own the rights to the generated track, you can still use it without incurring any fees or royalties to the original creator." Its Terms of Use, current as of 9 September 2026, give you "a non-exclusive, revocable licence to make use of the BandLab-generated Content within the functionalities of the Services."

Veena goes the other way. Its terms say "you own the Output you generate through your use of the Service", and Veena assigns you its rights in that Output, on the free plan as on Pro. Every part CoProducer writes for you is yours to release.

Moving from BandLab to Veena

1. Download your tracks. In BandLab's Studio, open the project menu, choose Project > Download > Tracks, pick WAV and download each one. For a MIDI part, use the track's Export as Audio/MIDI.
2. Drop them into Veena. Drag the files onto the timeline. Veena imports WAV, M4A, MP3 and 10 more audio formats, plus MIDI files (one track per channel), and the first clip you import sets the project tempo.
3. Let CoProducer build on them. "Keep my vocal and the 808, rebuild the drums with half-time hats, and add a pad under the hook." It measures your take's tempo and where the phrases land before it writes a note around them.
4. Bring your collaborators. Send them a Veena invite link and keep producing together.

Weighing other options first? Every rival we measure Veena against is in our alternatives library, the BandLab field is ranked in BandLab alternatives, and the rest of our head-to-heads, including Veena vs Soundtrap and Veena vs GarageBand, are on every Veena comparison.

Veena is the free studio BandLab charges for

BandLab gives you a free Studio with a 16-track, 15-minute ceiling and rents its AI tools back to you at $14.99 a month. Veena gives you the producer for free: CoProducer builds the whole song as real tracks, and stems, your plug-ins, 24-bit WAV and real-time collaboration come with the free plan. It is the free DAW that does the producing with you. Paste the trap prompt below into CoProducer and hear your first beat tonight.