Two good chord-chart apps, two opposite bets about how you should pay and what you should run them on. We make a third app, so read accordingly — but every fact below comes from the two companies’ own pricing pages, checked in October 2026, and the recommendation at the end is not us.
| OnSong 2026as of Oct 2026 | SongbookProas of Oct 2026 | |
|---|---|---|
| How you pay | Free download; unlimited songs need a subscription. Essentials $29.99/yr (or $3.99/mo), Premium $59.99/yr (or $5.99/mo) | About $7, once, in the app, after a 12-song free trial. Each platform is a separate purchase |
| Devices | 2 on Essentials, 4 on Premium | Your own devices on the platform you bought; sync through your own cloud storage |
| Platforms | iPad, iPhone, Mac. Android and Kindle are listed as “coming soon” | Android, iOS, Windows |
| The band | Groups: 10 users for $30/month, everyone gets Premium, 50 GB shared | Groups: 6 users for $30/year, 12 for $50, 20 for $80; a web dashboard runs the shared library; 21-day trial |
| What goes in | Text, ChordPro, PDF, Word; Dropbox, Drive, Files; PraiseCharts, SongSelect, Planning Center. Scanning a paper page into text is Premium | ChordPro, OnSong-format text, PDF; a free desktop app for library work |
| Transpose | Text charts, with capo and chord diagrams. Text-based PDFs through ChordFlow. Scanned images, no | Text-based songs, with capo. PDFs are viewed and annotated, not transposed |
| On stage | Foot pedals and autoscroll on Essentials; MIDI, lighting scenes, backing tracks, projection on Premium | Bluetooth pedals, metronome, chord diagrams, handwritten notes with a stylus |
| Accounts | An OnSong account for the subscription and OnSong Drive | None for Solo; accounts for Groups |
Prices in US dollars from onsongapp.com/pricing and songbook-pro.com/pricing, 22 October 2026. If something here is wrong, tell us and we will fix it.
If your band is all-Apple and you want the deepest feature set in the category — worship integrations, MIDI, projection, backing tracks, a Mac app — that is OnSong, and the subscription is the price of that depth. If you want the basics done well, paid for once, on whatever tablet each bandmate happens to own, that is SongbookPro. Most people asking this question are the second kind, and they usually know it by the time they have typed the search.
This is the whole argument for most switchers, so here it is in their own numbers. OnSong 2026 is a free download that lets you look at a library; adding unlimited songs is $29.99 a year on Essentials or $59.99 a year on Premium. Over five years that is $150 to $300 for one musician. SongbookPro Solo is about $7, once, per platform, after a free trial that stops at twelve songs. Five years is $7.
Be fair to OnSong here: the yearly fee buys a product that keeps growing, cloud storage, and support, and the free tier does not delete anything when a subscription lapses. But the songs you added stop being fully yours to use until you pay again, and that is the sentence that sends people to this page.
OnSong runs on iPad, iPhone and Mac. Its pricing page lists Android and Kindle as “coming soon”, which it has for a while; treat it as Apple-only today. SongbookPro runs on Android, iOS and Windows, and this is the deciding fact for a lot of bands — the drummer with a Samsung tablet and the singer with an iPad can be on the same app. Each platform is bought separately, so an iPad and a Windows laptop is two purchases of about $7.
Both are text-first. ChordPro files and OnSong-format text come into either one as editable charts that transpose, show a capo, and draw chord diagrams. Both accept PDFs. The difference is what happens to a PDF: OnSong’s ChordFlow reads chords out of a text-based PDF so it can transpose, and on the Premium tier its Document Scanner turns a photographed page into text. SongbookPro treats a PDF as a picture you can annotate with a stylus and page through. If your book is mostly PDFs and you need them to change key, OnSong Premium is the only one of the two that tries. If your book is ChordPro, they are equals.
Neither one will transpose a photograph of the band book or a screenshot of a chord site. That is a different kind of app, and it is the one we make; more on that at the bottom.
Both turn pages from a Bluetooth pedal. OnSong adds autoscroll on Essentials and, on Premium, the things that make it a stage controller rather than a songbook: MIDI automation, lighting scenes, MultiTracks with click and vocal cues, lyrics projection. SongbookPro has a metronome, chord diagrams and handwritten notes. If you fire program changes at a keyboard or run tracks, OnSong; if you read a chart and play, either.
OnSong Groups is $30 a month for ten users, each of whom gets Premium and a share of 50 GB. SongbookPro Groups is $30 a year for six users, with a web dashboard where one person edits the shared library and permissions, and a 21-day trial. For a four-piece that just wants the same charts on every stand, that is a twelve-to-one price difference in SongbookPro’s favour. For a worship team living in SongSelect and Planning Center, the OnSong integrations are the point and SongbookPro has no answer to them.
One paragraph, then we are done. Both apps above assume your charts already exist as text. SongCharter is for when they don’t — a photo of a page in the band book, a screenshot or a pasted link from a chord site, a PDF someone emailed you in 2019, a hook you sang into your phone — and every one of those comes out as one clean chart where each chord is anchored to a word, so all of it transposes. It is iPad and iPhone only, it does no MIDI and no projection, and it is $19.99 once. If your library is already tidy ChordPro, SongbookPro is cheaper and you do not need us.
The five-way table, with SongSheet Pro and BandHelper, is on the comparison page. Already decided to leave? There is a page for leaving OnSong and one for leaving SongbookPro, each with the reasons not to. OnSong vs BandHelper is a different question and has its own page.
If the chart only exists as a picture, photograph it — fifteen songs free, no account, and the chart it hands back transposes.