OnSong has been the standard for a decade and it is a deeper product than ours. There are things it does that we do not do at all, and if you need one of them, nothing below will change that.
If you are still reading, the rest of this page is about the two places we think we are genuinely better.
OnSong 2026 is a free download, and unlimited songs require a subscription. As of September 2026, their pricing page lists $29.99 a year for Essentials (2 devices) or $59.99 a year for Premium (4 devices). A band of ten on the Groups plan is $30 a month. We make a competing app, so check it against the source rather than taking our word.
SongCharter is $19.99 once. Not a year — once. It unlocks every device you own through Universal Purchase, and there is no tier above it to be upsold to. Against Essentials that pays for itself in about eight months; against Premium, in four.
This is the actual difference, and it is worth more than the price to most people who switch.
SongCharter turns things that are not charts into charts. Photograph a page from the band book, screenshot a chord site, paste a link to one, drop in a PDF, or sing a hook into your phone at 11pm — and what comes back is one clean chart where every chord is a fact anchored to a word. Which means it transposes. All of it, including the photograph.
OnSong reads text formats into editable charts and, in the 2026 version, ChordFlow finds chords in text-based PDFs. Its Document Scanner with Text Extraction — the feature that turns a photographed page into something editable — is a Premium feature, which is the $59.99/yr tier. In SongCharter that is the base product.
The reason most people put off switching is not the app, it is the afternoon of re-importing. Since 1.3.0, SongCharter takes every ChordPro or text file at once — select the whole folder and a library of hundreds arrives together, each chart keeping the key and capo its file declared. If you have been exporting from OnSong to ChordPro, that is your migration, and it is one gesture.
PDFs and photographed pages come in one at a time, because each one needs reading. That is the honest limit of the bulk path.
A set in SongCharter travels as a link. Your bandmate taps it and the whole set opens in their browser — no account, no app, nothing to install, and nothing of yours stored on our servers, because the set rides in the part of the URL that browsers never send anywhere. For comparison, sharing a library across an OnSong band is what the Groups plan is for.
OnSong is a bigger, deeper, more capable product with a decade of work in it, and if you need projection, tracks, MIDI or a worship ecosystem you should stay. We are better at exactly two things: getting a song in from whatever shape it arrives in, and costing $19.99 once.
If those are the two things standing between you and a set you can actually play, the demo is free and takes a photograph of one page to judge.
The full side-by-side, including SongSheet Pro and SongbookPro, is on the comparison page. Weighing SongbookPro instead? That has its own page. And if a capo is the thing you are actually fighting, the capo chart is free and needs no app.
Judge it on one song. Photograph a page of the band book, or paste a link to the chord page you were already reading — three songs free, no account, and the chart it hands back is yours to keep either way.