Open-Source Suno Alternative (2026, Free)

Q: Is there a free open-source Suno alternative I can run locally?

ACE-Step 1.5 is MIT-licensed with 13,728 GitHub stars (created 2025-09-04, last push 2026-10-11 in the 2026-10-18 check). Hugging Face ACE-Step/Ace-Step1.5 is ungated (907 likes). YuE (multimodal-art-projection/YuE) is Apache-2.0 with 12,091 stars (last push 2026-10-06). "Locally" means the code and weights are downloadable; GPU needs vary. We have not generated a song on a forkalt machine.

Q: Does it match Suno quality?

We have no sourced bake-off against Suno. ACE-Step 1.5's README says quality sits between Suno v4.5 and Suno v5 on the authors' metrics. That is vendor self-reported.

Q: What is the license?

MIT on ace-step/ACE-Step-1.5 (LICENSE file, 2026-10-18). Apache-2.0 on multimodal-art-projection/YuE (GitHub license field, 2026-10-18). Not legal advice.

Q: Why isn't AudioCraft / MusicGen the lead row?

facebookresearch/audiocraft is commonly discussed. This hub leads with ACE-Step 1.5 because it is the most-starred MIT music-generation repo we opened on 2026-10-18 that still receives 2026 commits. AudioCraft is not in this sourced set yet.

Identifying Suno · Mark source

Suno homepage preview image used to identify the commercial music product — Suno official OG. Source · License: Suno product image.

This hub lists open music-generation projects people compare with Suno-class hosted song products. Suno is named only to identify that product class. We copy licenses and GitHub star counts from official repositories. We do not rank musical quality against Suno.

Quick take.

ACE-Step 1.5 — Open MIT music foundation model for local song generation on consumer GPUs.

How we pick

Active GitHub repository we could open (README or API).
License copied from that repository.
Downloadable weights or code for local music generation.
No unsourced "beats Suno" claims; vendor tables stay labeled vendor data.

Comparison

Name	License	Developer	Type / modalities
ACE-Step 1.5	MIT	ACE-Step (ACE Studio / StepFun)	audio, music, text

Listed model: ACE-Step 1.5. Related audio on this site: ElevenLabs alternatives (Drama 3) and Runway alternatives (LTX-2.5).

Sourced snapshot (2026-10-18)

Field	ACE-Step 1.5	YuE
Repository	github.com/ace-step/ACE-Step-1.5	github.com/multimodal-art-projection/YuE
Stars / forks	13,728 / 1,807	12,091 / 1,389
License	MIT	Apache-2.0
Last push	2026-10-11T14:11:22Z	2026-10-06T07:30:39Z
Weights	Hugging Face ACE-Step/Ace-Step1.5 (ungated, 907 likes)	See the YuE README / project page
Job	Local text-to-music / editing	Music generation with symbolic planning (README)
Quality vs Suno	Not independently tested	Not independently tested

YuE does not yet have its own forkalt model page. Figures in that column are GitHub API + the repository description only.

Why a music checkpoint is on a Suno hub

Suno sells hosted song generation. Searchers still type “open source Suno alternative” when they want downloadable music models. The open artifact we could fully source on 2026-10-18 (LICENSE file, ungated card, recent push) is ACE-Step 1.5.

Suno is named only to identify the search. We did not copy Suno pricing into a quality table.

ACE-Step 1.5: MIT local music model

See the model page for hardware quotes, install commands, and the vendor quality disclaimer. Default README path is <4 GB VRAM; XL 4B DiT needs more. Hosted acemusic.ai is not the local checkpoint.

YuE: Apache-2.0 second row

YuE (multimodal-art-projection/YuE) is Apache-2.0, 12,091 stars, last push 2026-10-06. Homepage listed on GitHub: map-yue2.github.io. Description: frontier music generation with symbolic planning, zero-shot covers, and agentic music editing. We have not yet opened a dedicated LICENSE file path beyond GitHub’s Apache-2.0 license field, so YuE stays a hub row, not a model URL.

What we left out

AudioCraft / MusicGen, Stable Audio Open, DiffRhythm, and others are commonly discussed. They are not in this sourced set yet. ACE-Step 1.0 (ace-step/ACE-Step, Apache-2.0, 4,949 stars, last push 2026-02-15) is the previous-generation repo; this hub leads with 1.5.

Listed options

ACE-Step 1.5

Open MIT music foundation model for local song generation on consumer GPUs.

MIT

FAQ

Is there a free open-source Suno alternative I can run locally?

ACE-Step 1.5 is MIT-licensed with 13,728 GitHub stars (created 2025-09-04, last push 2026-10-11 in the 2026-10-18 check). Hugging Face ACE-Step/Ace-Step1.5 is ungated (907 likes). YuE (multimodal-art-projection/YuE) is Apache-2.0 with 12,091 stars (last push 2026-10-06). "Locally" means the code and weights are downloadable; GPU needs vary. We have not generated a song on a forkalt machine.

Does it match Suno quality?