These two are compared constantly and are barely competitors. OnSong is a chord-chart app that got deep. BandHelper is a band-management service that happens to hold your songs. We make a third thing, so read accordingly — the facts below are from their own sites in October 2026, and the honest answer is that a lot of bands run both.
| OnSong 2026as of Oct 2026 | BandHelperas of Oct 2026 | |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | A chord-chart and sheet-music app for the stand, with a decade of stage features on top | Band management — repertoire, schedule, contacts, finances, checklists, stage plots, practice log — with the songs inside it |
| How you pay | Free download; Essentials $29.99/yr, Premium $59.99/yr; Groups 10 users $30/month | Subscription, priced by band size and tier. One person: $16 to $32/yr. A 2–5 piece: $40 to $80/yr. 6–20 people on Pro: $120/yr. Free trial; in-app prices may be higher |
| Platforms | iPad, iPhone, Mac | iOS, Android, Mac, and a web app — nobody in the band is left out |
| Accounts | An OnSong account for the subscription and Drive | Required. It is an online service, and the price is per user |
| Charts in | Text, ChordPro, PDF, Word; cloud drives; SongSelect, PraiseCharts, Planning Center; scanning to text on Premium | Lyrics and chords typed or pasted in. Anything else — PDF, JPG, Word — attaches as a document |
| Transpose | Text charts, text-based PDFs via ChordFlow; scanned images, no | Chords you typed in, yes — and each member can keep a personal transpose amount. Attached documents, no |
| Setlists | Books and sets, deep organisation | Set lists inside the repertoire, pushed to every bandmate’s account automatically |
| On stage | Pedals and autoscroll; MIDI, lighting, tracks and projection on Premium | Bluetooth or MIDI switches; MIDI and OSC out; recordings and tempo per song |
| The band | Groups plan, OnSong Connect, team sharing | The whole point: one master copy, personal versions, who is confirmed for Saturday, who got paid |
Prices in US dollars from onsongapp.com/pricing and bandhelper.com, 22 October 2026. If something here is wrong, tell us and we will fix it.
Ask yourself which sentence you said out loud last week. If it was “I need the chart on my stand to be readable and in the right key at 9pm,” you are shopping for a chart app, and OnSong is the deep end of that category. If it was “nobody knows who is confirmed for Saturday and we never agreed on the set,” you are shopping for band management, and no chart app on earth will fix it. BandHelper will.
A shared band database on a subscription, with apps for iOS, Android and Mac and a web version, so the bass player on Android is a full member. The Pro tier holds repertoire, schedule, contacts, finances, checklists, files, stage plots and a practice log. Songs live inside the repertoire: you type or paste lyrics and chords, attach a PDF or image if that is what you have, record tempo and key, and set lists go out to every member automatically. Two ideas in it are genuinely good and rare: one master copy of a song that the band shares plus a personal version each member can mark up, and a per-member transpose amount, so the singer and the guitarist see the same song in their own keys.
It is priced by headcount. One person on the Pro tier is $32 a year; a two-to-five piece is $80 a year for the lot, which is $16 each. Its developer also makes Set List Maker, which is no longer getting new features; their own site now points you to BandHelper instead.
The chord-chart app a lot of worship teams and cover bands standardised on, now a subscription. Essentials is the songbook: unlimited songs, books and sets, autoscroll, pedals, transpose with capo and chord diagrams, imports from Dropbox, Drive and the worship catalogues. Premium turns it into a stage controller: MIDI and lighting scenes, MultiTracks with click and cues, lyrics projection, live video, and a document scanner that extracts text from a photographed page. Apple only: iPad, iPhone, Mac.
This is where the comparison usually goes wrong. OnSong is built around the chart as text — it formats, transposes, draws diagrams, and reads chords out of text-based PDFs. BandHelper treats a typed chart as data it can transpose, and treats everything else you attach as a document it will show you. If your book is scanned pages and PDFs, BandHelper will carry them but will not change their key, and neither will OnSong unless the PDF is text-based or you pay for Premium’s scanner.
Common, and not a failure. A bandleader keeps the schedule, the money and the agreed set in BandHelper, and each player reads from whatever chart app they like — in the thread this page exists to answer, that was forScore. BandHelper’s set list is the source of truth; the stand is personal. The cost is two apps and the double-entry of the set, which is exactly the thing people complain about, so decide with eyes open.
One paragraph. Neither app above will take a photograph of the band book and hand you a chart that transposes. SongCharter does only that — photo, screenshot, link, PDF, or a hook you sang into your phone, out as one clean chart with each chord anchored to a word — plus sets that page themselves and a link that sends the whole set to the band with nothing to install. iPad and iPhone, no accounts, no schedule, no finances, $19.99 once. If the problem is Saturday’s roster, we cannot help and BandHelper can.
The five-way table is on the comparison page. OnSong vs SongbookPro is the other question people arrive with. Leaving OnSong altogether has its own page, reasons not to included.
If a real part of your book only exists as pictures, photograph one page — fifteen songs free, no account, and the chart it hands back transposes.