Advantages 

Disadvantages 

• Easy-to-use and attractive interface
• Interactive features: the sheet music scrolls automatically, you can add annotations, change the tempo, and record yourself.
• Accompaniments: the backing tracks and orchestral accompaniments are recorded by professional musicians and offer excellent sound quality.
• Wide range of instruments and musical genres
• Most pieces have arrangements in several levels of difficulty so they are accessible to everyone.
• Teachers/students can share pieces, annotations and recordings.  
• Bands and ensembles feature: Ideal if you play in a group or teach an ensemble. 
• You can download the scores, use them offline, and print them.
• 14-day free trial - you can try before you buy!
• Available on all devices

• Some pieces are only available for one or two instruments.
• Transposition feature only available for certain pieces, not all of them.

Advantages 

Disadvantages 

• Very user-friendly
• Organise your music by setlist, composer, tags, labels and much more
• Great options for professional musicians, such as creating setlists and choosing the order you want (alphabetical, shuffle, ‘fresh’ - it displays pieces you haven’t practised in a while).
• Wide variety of annotation options (symbols, colours, sizes), as well as the ability to copy/paste and highlight
• Excellent score metadata: key of the piece, length, artist, rating, difficulty, etc. 
• PDF options: You can import music you buy from Musicnotes (a sheet music shop) or scan paper PDF music.
• Practice tools such as an on-screen piano, tuner, and metronome
• The sharing feature is great for sharing notes with other musicians.
• It is a one-time purchase of €19.99, and you get free updates for life.

• No free trial
• Exclusively for iOS, not available for Android
• Some organisational limits: if you add an entire book of songs, you have to manually bookmark each song in order to jump directly to it, which can be a tedious task.
• It is a sheet music reader app, so it lacks some features like the option to change the key of a piece.

Advantages 

Disadvantages 

• The app is free.
• Vast music library (around 1.4 million scores!)
• You can compose music and share it with the community for feedback/pointers.
• You can customize the workspace notation element to create a toolbar which works for you.
• Many supported file formats for import and export
• The community: MuseScore is open source so anyone can contribute to it, which means regular updates and music scores added.

• Limited options with the mobile app: for example, you cannot notate a piece via the app.
• In the music library, the majority of scores are written by users so quality can be an issue.
• The playback quality of scores is not great.
• Although it is free, you do need to subscribe if you want access to all the features on offer.

Advantages 

Disadvantages 

• It currently has over 630,000 sheet music titles and 72,000 recordings.
• It’s free (although if you pay a monthly subscription, it removes ads and gives you instant access to scores without having to wait several seconds). 
• It’s a fantastic resource for classical musicians, and you can filter by instrument, composer, time period, and more.
• Many scores are available in various editions, including first editions.

• IMSLP mainly offers PDF scores for download, there is no access to any interactive learning features. 
• Only non-copyrighted music - you won’t find any pop/rock music in the library. 

Advantages 

Disadvantages 

• The interface is easy to use and the app provides great guides on how to use the features. 
• Helpful tools such as automatic scrolling, annotation tools and practice tools (on-screen keyboard, tuner, metronome). 
• You can organise your music into setlists or using tags.
• The app links to IMSLP for sheet music downloads, which is an incredibly vast music library, plus its own Pia store. You can also scan PDF music into the app or via iCloud.

• Only available on iOS 
• The annotation features are limited.
• Some of the design is a little dated, such as the metronome - the app displays a large mechanical metronome in the middle of the page which blocks the music.
• The app is free but there are several features which require in-app purchases, such as access to the recording tool and the on-screen keyboard.

Advantages 

Disadvantages 

• Great app for beginners thanks to the informative lesson plans and tutorials.
• Very well-organised to help you learn. Instead of trawling through the many online resources, Yousician provides music lessons in an easy and digestible package.
• Live feedback! The software evaluates your performance and will provide feedback about your pitch, rhythm, tempo, and other factors. 
• Tailor made for learning - it offers goal trackers, performance statistics and reminders.
• It’s an ideal music app if you don’t have the budget to hire a teacher or if you’d like to try out an instrument before investing in lessons with a teacher.
• Free trial available 

• Limited instrument range: The app is currently available for piano, guitar, bass, ukulele and voice. 
• It’s not really designed for players of an intermediate level and above. Once you get to grips with your instrument, the Yousician lessons can seem a bit boring, repetitive and restrictive. 
• Some people may not like the fact that instead of feedback from a music teacher, the feedback is provided by the app, so it’s less accurate and provides no human interaction.