I’m curious if there’s any reliable data out there on the general distribution of DAWs being used out in the wild.
I saw this post, and while it seems to have a high sample size, the group comes exclusively from Production Expert readers and feels very biased. I only know what I’ve heard through others in the industry, and from what YouTubers use, but I think FLStudio is massively under-represented and ProTools massively over-represented in this survey.
This post shows a very different story, and is perhaps more what I imagine the market share to look like.
I know the DAW user base changes drastically depending on the user profile (beginner vs professional; musician vs mastering engineer) and the differences in the data from the two sources above highlight this.
Part of the reason I’m curious is that there’s been a lot of frustrated posts about AVID and AAX, which is a format used by only one DAW/company in a market of many. So I guess my questions are “is AAX worth supporting?” and “how many percentage sales would you lose by not supporting it?”
My assumption is that if you are aiming at the pro market with something like a mastering suite, then you should support AAX; but if you are making a create synth aimed at musicians then maybe not. However I have no data to back up these assumptions, but I have seen some newer commercial products that skip AAX.
As an aside, I also wonder at what point AVID would be pressured to support other plugin formats (like what happened with Reason not too long ago)
[for clarity, because I know this could be misinterpreted, I’m not saying ProTools is a bad DAW, nor do I care about arguments over “better” or “worse” in terms of DAWs or plugin formats, I’m just curious about the numbers and how they might impact development and marketing decisions]
Updated chart that Michael posted in the last thread. Since then FL Studio has grown, Cubase lost a spot. For the amount people talk about Reaper, it’s way down. If you are aiming at an EDM / Synth crowd, AAX is a waste of time. It’ll probably be ok to drop Intel mac in a year or two.
What’s interesting that I didn’t consider before is that you’d lose more users by dropping VST2 than you would by dropping AAX (for this one plugin anyway).
The top 4 in that list do not surprise me given what I see and hear.
It would be interesting to see this kind of data from other companies with a broader user base (like NI or Waves or something), but I don’t think we’d see anything like that made public in this reality.
While I assume that Linux has a very low percentage of users, the platform has grown a lot in the past few years and not having it at all in this overview feels like it’s either misleading or has a very limited dataset.
Slightly more dated (2025), but gives a slightly different picture.
Makes sense to differentiate between the different target groups. Post-production, music studios and producers.
We are having to do a bit of speculation on incomplete data, but…
It is interesting how big the swing in numbers is for the DAWs in first position - ProTools going from 2% to 37% and FLStudio going from 32% to 1% is pretty wild. Even Reaper going from 1% to 7% is a relatively big jump.
The FLStudio drop does not surprise me. The ProTools swing is a bit more than I’d expect, but I guess our source data is coming from two very different perspectives.
Logic, Cubase, and Live all seem to fairly equally share the runner up position. And MacOS vs Windows seems equal enough. So these platforms are definitely less specialized. I imagine this wouldn’t fluctuate much if we found some other data source.
But I would still love to see the numbers from a big company with broad user demographics. Especially how those numbers fluctuate per product and over time. Getting some numbers on Linux would also be worthwhile.
It doesn’t give us much, but I think it’s worth looking at Softubes Console1 tutorials, which cover these DAWs specifically: Reaper, Logic, Luna, Digital Performer, FL Studio, Ableton Live, and Pro Tools. Later on they added Bitwig, and updated only the Reaper and Ableton Live tutorials. Maybe nothing too crazy to deduce from this, but they didn’t include Cubase. Softube do have a deal with Universal Audio, so the Luna inclusion could be pushed by that. Not sure why they included Digital Performer over Cubase, given the numbers we’ve seen, but they’ll have their reasons.
My side project is SocaLabs.com, I make a bunch of free plugins, the most popular being a Wavetable synth. I don’t track DAWs with those, just platform, I see:
I’m my experience with contracting I worked for a few different companies. As price point goes up, so does macOS Market share. Free plugins skew heavily towards Windows and Reaper, but they drop off with paid plugins.
Everybody in this industry is surprisingly tight lipped. It’s not like other industries where you can buy a report from Gartner that breaks down the market and the amount of sales. What does the most popular tier of plugins actually sell? I figure Serum, Kontact, ProQ, Ozone, etc get well into 6 figure units, but has anybody hit a million units? You’d think somebody would be wiling to brag about how well they are doing.
Since your plugins are foss the Linux numbers might be bigger as they will get included in distro packages which don’t show up in your download metrics.
I’d love to have a bit of a more confident overview of the music software market. Of all the companies I’d assume NI have the most access to the most broad data, but I wonder what kind of information companies like Plugin Boutique have…
