11 free VST plugins that hold up against paid ones

Most "best free plugins" lists mix genuinely great free tools in with crippled demos and long-abandoned freeware that hasn't been updated since VST3 existed. We checked each of these directly against the developer's current site rather than an old roundup, confirmed they're still actually free (not "was free a few years ago"), and noted format support so you're not caught out mid-session.

EQ: TDR Nova

A four-band dynamic EQ with parallel processing and high/low-pass filters, from Tokyo Dawn Labs, one of the most consistently recommended free plugins in mixing communities. It's a genuine substitute for a paid dynamic EQ like FabFilter's Pro-Q line for most uses, not a simplified alternative to one. Windows gets VST2/VST3; Mac adds AU and AAX.

Compression: TDR Kotelnikov and Klanghelm MJUC jr.

TDR Kotelnikov is a wideband bus compressor built for transparent, mastering-grade glue across a full mix, regularly mentioned in the same breath as paid options from Sonnox and Weiss. There's a paid "Gentleman's Edition" add-on with extra workflow features, but the standard free Kotelnikov hasn't been pulled or paywalled; it's still the same free compressor it's always been.

Klanghelm's free compressor is called MJUC jr., not MJUC SE as it's sometimes mislabelled online; the full paid MJUC is a separate €24 plugin. MJUC jr. is a variable-mu tube compressor emulation, less transparent than Kotelnikov and more about vibe and glue, especially on vocal buses. Between the two, it's worth having both rather than picking one: reach for Kotelnikov when you want the compression to disappear, and MJUC jr. when you want it to be felt.

Klanghelm also gives away three more free plugins worth grabbing alongside MJUC jr.: TENS jr., a spring reverb emulation; IVGI, a saturation and distortion tool covered below; and DC1A, a simpler character compressor. All four are VST/VST3/AU/AAX, 64-bit, on both Windows and Mac, so there's no format reason not to install the full set.

Synths: Vital, Surge XT, Spitfire LABS

Vital's free tier runs the exact same synthesis engine as its paid Plus ($25) and Pro ($80) tiers; what you're paying to unlock is extra factory presets and wavetables, not a better-sounding synth. The free tier ships 75 presets, 25 wavetables and 5 text-to-wavetable requests a day; Plus adds 250 presets and 70 wavetables, and Pro adds 400-plus presets, 150 wavetables and unlimited text-to-wavetable generation. That's still enough on the free tier to get genuinely useful sound design done before you'd need more, since the engine underneath doesn't change.

Surge XT is fully free and open source, no tiers, no upsell, with a deep hybrid/subtractive engine and over 2,800 factory patches. It supports VST3, AU, CLAP and LV2, but deliberately has no AAX support: Avid's AAX signing process requires an iLok-bound closed toolchain that doesn't fit an open-source project, per the Surge team's own FAQ. Pro Tools users will need a wrapper to load it.

Spitfire LABS is a rotating, expanding library of free sampled instruments, strings, piano, synths, choir, pulled from Spitfire's premium catalogue, requiring only a free account. Spitfire now also sells LABS+, a $12.99/mo or $99/yr subscription layered on top for extra monthly packs; that's additive, the original free LABS catalogue of 59-plus packs hasn't been paywalled or reduced.

Reverb and delay: Valhalla Supermassive and Freq Echo

Valhalla DSP gives away two of its plugins outright: Supermassive, a huge ambient reverb-delay hybrid with 22 modes that gets recommended alongside paid granular reverbs for sound design and pads, and Freq Echo, a frequency-shifting delay and chorus hybrid good for barberpole phasing and runaway echo textures most paid delays don't offer. Neither requires an account or iLok. Both run on current Windows and Mac.

Saturation and distortion: Airwindows

Airwindows isn't one plugin but a huge, MIT-licensed catalogue, 27 dedicated saturation plugins, 22 distortion, 21 clipping, each built for one specific job rather than one all-in-one Saturn or Decapitator-style unit. Mastering engineers favour it for that surgical, single-purpose approach: ToTape9, for instance, does one thing, analogue tape emulation, rather than bundling tape into a multi-effect chain you have to switch off the parts of. If a whole catalogue is more than you want to dig through, Klanghelm's IVGI (mentioned above) is a single-plugin alternative that goes from subtle warmth to dense distortion with one main control.

Format support is scattered across two eras of the project: the original individual builds are Mac AU/VST2, Windows VST2, and Linux VST2, while a newer "Consolidated" pack bundles the whole catalogue into modern formats, CLAP, AU, VST3 and LV2, distributed via GitHub. If your DAW has dropped VST2 support, or you'd rather not install dozens of separate plugin files, grab the Consolidated pack rather than the individual legacy builds.

Limiting and metering: Limiter No6 and Youlean Loudness Meter

For a currently maintained meter, Youlean Loudness Meter's free tier, described by its own developer as never expiring, covers LU, integrated, true peak, loudness range and dynamic range readouts against film, TV and gaming presets, which is enough for most home-studio loudness checks. A one-time $37 Pro upgrade adds streaming-platform presets (Spotify, YouTube and others), a dynamics graph, PDF/PNG/SVG export and batch analysis, useful mainly if you're delivering to several streaming platforms professionally rather than just checking your own mix.

Building a free starting rack

If you're starting from nothing, a genuinely capable free signal chain looks like: TDR Nova on the mix bus or problem tracks for EQ, TDR Kotelnikov for glue compression and MJUC jr. where you want more character, Vital or Surge XT for synths, Spitfire LABS for anything sample-based, Valhalla Supermassive for space, and Youlean Loudness Meter watching your final level. That's seven plugins covering EQ, two flavours of compression, two synths, a sampled-instrument library and a reverb, for £0. The paid plugins you'd add later tend to refine a workflow you already understand, not unlock something these can't do at all.

The full list