DAW Market Share Statistics

Audio Plugins
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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]

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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.

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2 Likes
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Thanks for the updated stats.

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.

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I wouldn’t do VST2 for a new plugin, this plugin is 20 years old and not all daws do vst2 → vst3 conversion.