Music · Head-to-head
Udio vs Lyria 3.5
Udio (freemium, AI Score 7.6/10) vs Lyria 3.5 (freemium, AI Score 8.2/10). Side-by-side pricing, features, pros and cons, and which to pick.
The verdict
Pick Udio if…
- →your primary use case is producers and sound designers who prize mixdown fidelity and precise genre reproduction over export freedom, and who can work inside a platform whose licensing and download terms are still settling.
Pick Lyria 3.5 if…
- →overall capability matters more than price (AI Score 8.2 vs 7.6)
- →your primary use case is creators already working inside google flow who are scoring their own ai-generated video and want vocals and lyrics without paying for a second music subscription.
Side-by-side specs
| Spec | Udio | Lyria 3.5 |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Music | Music |
| Pricing model | freemium | freemium |
| Headline pricing | Free tier + paid plans (terms changed post-settlement — check website for current pricing) | Free tier inside Google Flow Music; bundled into Google AI plans rather than sold separately. Third-party access is credit-priced (Runway lists Lyria 3 Pro at 8 credits/song). |
| Free tier | Yes — a free tier with a capped monthly generation allowance for non-commercial use. Confirm current limits and export rights on udio.com before relying on them. | Yes — Google Flow Music includes free Lyria generation, with limits governed by your Google AI plan tier rather than a separate music quota. |
| AI Score | 7.6/10 | 8.2/10 |
| Best for | Producers and sound designers who prize mixdown fidelity and precise genre reproduction over export freedom, and who can work inside a platform whose licensing and download terms are still settling. | Creators already working inside Google Flow who are scoring their own AI-generated video and want vocals and lyrics without paying for a second music subscription. |
| Editor's pick | — | — |
| Use cases | media content-creation | media content-creation |
| Date added | 2025-07-01 | 2026-07-30 |
Pros and cons
Udio
Music · freemium
Pros
- ✓Audio fidelity is still among the best in the category — 48kHz stereo, clean vocal separation, less remedial mastering needed
- ✓Genre and era reproduction is more specific than rivals, down to production character rather than just tempo and instrumentation
- ✓Audio inpainting lets you fix one section of a finished track instead of rerolling the whole generation
- ✓Settled with Universal rather than continuing to litigate, giving it a named path to a fully licensed catalogue
Cons
- ×Download and export rights were restricted as part of the October 2025 UMG settlement and have been in flux since — the single biggest thing to verify before using output in client work
- ×Product cadence stalled through the litigation while Suno shipped v5, a multitrack Studio workspace and Personas
- ×No public generation API, so it cannot be embedded in an app or batch pipeline the way ElevenLabs Music or Mubert can
- ×Smaller community, fewer tutorials and fewer third-party integrations than Suno
Lyria 3.5
Music · freemium
Pros
- ✓Free to evaluate inside Google Flow Music — no separate music subscription needed to hear what the model does
- ✓SynthID watermarking is applied to every output, giving verifiable provenance for commercial, platform and publisher use
- ✓Sits next to Google's video generation tooling, so scoring generated footage happens without leaving the workflow
- ✓Available through third-party suites like Runway at genuinely low per-song credit rates — cheap enough to iterate on a soundtrack without watching the meter
- ✓Backed by DeepMind's research cadence, with steady Lyria iteration rather than a one-off drop
Cons
- ×Not a product — no library, no sharing, no song-level iteration UI of its own; you get whatever the host surface exposes
- ×Google has published no spec sheet, generation-length figure or independent benchmark for 3.5, so every quality claim over Lyria 3 is still the vendor's word two weeks after launch
- ×Which Lyria you actually get depends on the door: Runway was still selling Lyria 3 tiers in August 2026 while Flow Music shipped 3.5
- ×Suno and Udio remain far ahead on consumer workflow — stems, section-level rerolls, sharing — and on transparent commercial-use licensing, which for Lyria varies by Google surface and plan
Related comparisons
Updated 2026-08-10. Spec data sourced from official product pages and tracked in our public directory at /tools.