If you're hunting for quality assets you can use in your videos without risking a copyright claim, Uppbeat and Soundstripe have probably both landed on your shortlist. From the outside there's not much to separate them – both give you a library of pre-cleared assets, and both promise your channel stays safe.
This article breaks down exactly what you can expect from each platform. You’ll discover which platform offers free downloads, what your license covers once you've paid, and how the two catalogs hold up when you're searching for that perfect track or video asset.
- Uppbeat vs Soundstripe at a glance
- Pricing and plans: What do you get for your money?
- How do the licenses work?
- Library and curation: Is bigger always better?
- What else comes with your subscription?
- What do users say?
Uppbeat vs Soundstripe at a glance
Uppbeat gives you 12,000 music tracks and over 120,000 sound effects, stock video, motion graphics and LUTs, all vetted by humans. Its license covers your own channels and stays valid after you cancel. Soundstripe's catalog is far bigger, but nothing you've downloaded can go into a new project once you stop paying. Here’s how the two platforms stack up.
What does Uppbeat offer?
Uppbeat gives creators a catalog curated to the same standard used in professional film, TV, and advertising work, made entirely by real, credited artists. Every piece of royalty-free music, every sound effect, stock video clip, motion graphic and LUT is human-made, cleared for use before you ever download it, and covered by a license that keeps working long after you cancel.
Nothing reaches the library until a human team has signed it off, which is why a 12,000-track catalog can be quicker to work with than one several times the size. Plans start with a free tier, then step up through Essentials, Creator and Pro, with Business for teams and organizations and a custom option for broadcast, paid streaming, radio and cinema. The free tier is there so you can try the catalog on a real edit before committing to any of them.
What does Soundstripe offer?
Soundstripe is a royalty-free music and sound effects platform aimed at a broad mix of creators, filmmakers, wedding videographers and businesses. The pitch is its scale with over 58,000 original tracks, more than 115,000 sound effects, and a stock video library on the top consumer tier. Every track on the Pro plan and above comes with stems, and there's an AI Search Assistant plus Adobe extensions for Premiere Pro and Express. There's no free plan, although they do offer a 30-day money-back guarantee instead.
All prices shown are in USD. Local pricing varies by territory – check the pricing page for rates in your region.
Pricing and plans: What do you get for your money?
On both platforms, the tier you need depends on what type of content you’re working on, rather than by how much music you want. Uppbeat's license widens at Pro, which brings in client work, and again at Business, which covers organizations. Soundstripe's widens once at Pro, which is also the first tier that covers a monetized channel.
Uppbeat: Unlimited downloads, and a license that grows with you
Essentials, Creator, Pro and Business all give you unlimited downloads of the libraries each one covers, and anything you download is cleared for use the moment you get it. The free tier works differently – three downloads, topped up by one each month – but they're cleared in exactly the same way, so you can cut them into a real video and see how the catalog handles your content before you pick a plan.
Free: 3 downloads from Uppbeat's catalog, copyright-safe and usable immediately with an Uppbeat Credit. 25% access to every library, and coverage for individuals publishing on their own channels.
Price: Free.
Essentials: Unlimited music and sound effects downloads, plus safelisting for one YouTube channel. Covers individuals publishing on their own channels.
Price: $8.99/month (monthly billing).
Creator: Everything in Essentials, plus stock video up to 1080p, motion graphics and LUTs, and safelisting for three channels. Still covers individuals publishing on their own channels.
Price: $12.99/month (monthly billing).
Pro: Everything in Creator, plus stock video up to 4K, WAV downloads, priority support, safelisting for ten channels – and a license that covers freelancers and solo professionals for their own content, client projects and commercial digital use.
Price: $24.99/month (monthly billing).
Business: The same libraries and ten channel safelisting as Pro, with a license written for teams, companies and organizations, rather than individuals.
Price: $34.99/month excluding tax, billed yearly.
Custom: Coverage for broadcast, paid streaming, radio and cinema.
Price: Contact the Uppbeat team through the pricing page.
As well as flexible monthly options, it’s worth noting that annual billing brings Essentials, Creator and Pro down by up to 40%.
All prices shown are in USD. Local pricing varies by territory – check the pricing page for rates in your region.
Soundstripe: A higher entry point, and commercial use costs extra
Soundstripe's tiers add catalog and tools as you climb, but the step that costs most is the one that allows you to go from personal to commercial use.
Personal: Unlimited access to the music and sound effects catalog, with auto-clearance for one YouTube channel. Non-commercial personal projects only.
Price: $19.99/month (monthly billing), or $119/year.
Pro: Everything in Personal, plus stems on every track, the Premiere Pro extension, project workflow tools, and clearance for up to five channels. Covers commercial projects that aren't promoting a brand.
Price: $39.99/month (monthly billing), or $239/year.
Pro Plus: Everything in Pro, plus 100,000+ stock video clips from HD to 8K.
Price: $69.99/month (monthly billing), or $399/year.
Business: Three team seats with role-based permissions, and coverage for a single market.
Price: From $999/year.
Enterprise: Broadcast, advertising, branded content and influencer marketing rights, with $1 million in indemnification and a dedicated account manager.
Price: Custom.
Soundstripe also sells single-use song licenses from around $49 if you only need one track.
Uppbeat and Soundstripe pricing at a glance
The entry points are Essentials at $8.99/month and Personal at $19.99/month, but they don't cover the same thing. Essentials covers an individual publishing on their own channels, while Personal is for non-commercial content only, so a monetized channel means you’ll need Soundstripe Pro at $39.99/month. For client work, the comparison is Uppbeat Pro at $24.99/month against Soundstripe Pro at $39.99/month. Which of those you're actually choosing between depends on whether you monetize and whether you take on client projects.
How do the licenses work?
There’s two questions that decide whether a royalty-free license is worth what you're paying: does it stop copyright claims? And does the license hold once you stop subscribing? Uppbeat and Soundstripe answer both differently.
Uppbeat's licensing
Every Uppbeat download, including those on the free plan, is cleared for use on YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, and other social platforms. Safelisting your channel means copyright claims are handled automatically, with no per-video code to generate and nothing to remember to paste into a description. And, if you’re on a paid plan, every download comes with a perpetual license, so the content you publish while subscribed stays protected even if you cancel later.
Soundstripe's licensing
Soundstripe's coverage is tied to your subscription. Projects you publish while you're an active subscriber stay licensed permanently, so a published video doesn't become a liability if you cancel – but you can't use previously downloaded files in new projects once your subscription lapses. The files sit on your drive, unusable, until you resubscribe.
Unless your channel is registered with Soundstripe, you need to clear each song you use on each separate video, which means generating a single-use code for every single track you download and regenerating it every time you reuse it.
Where each platform draws the commercial line
On Soundstripe, the line sits between Personal and Pro, so anything monetized, client-facing or promotional needs Pro or above. On Uppbeat the license widens twice. Pro opens up client projects and commercial digital use for freelancers and solo professionals, and Business is the tier that covers teams, companies and organizations. If you're buying for a company rather than for yourself, that second step is the one to get right.
Library and curation: Is bigger always better?
Catalog size is the number every platform leads with, and it's the one that tells you least. What matters is how many of those tracks you'd actually use, and how long it takes to find them. Uppbeat only accepts 1% of what artists submit, so the filtering happens before you ever search. Soundstripe accepts far more and leaves that filtering to you and its search tools.
Uppbeat: A library built to a professional standard
Uppbeat's catalog is built by the same team behind Music Vine, a sync library whose music lands in TV shows, films, and ad campaigns. Only 1% of artist submissions make the cut, and every track is manually reviewed before it's added. You're not wading past forty near-identical corporate loops to find something usable – the licensed cinematic music would hold up in a real trailer, and the lo-fi soundtracks sound like you’re in a room with the musicians playing them.
The same bar applies to the stock video, sound effects, motion graphics and LUTs. These are all made by a roster of human artists, who earn a revenue share on every download – free ones included. A smaller catalog sounds like less, but what you're really getting is the professional-quality shortlist someone else has already made.
Soundstripe: Scale, stems and a Warner Chappell add-on
Soundstripe's 58,000 tracks give you far more to dig through, and this depth is clear when you start searching in specific niches like wedding, corporate and trailer music.
Stems are the standout here – having every track split into its component parts on Pro and above lets you mute the vocal for a voiceover section, drop the drums under dialogue, then bring everything back for the reveal.The Warner Chappell Production Music collection - tracks from the production music arm of Warner Music Group – is also available as an add-on for Pro and Pro Plus, which multiplies the catalog again and adds far more vocal tracks.
What you give up is the consistent quality of the music. 58,000 tracks is only an advantage if the search tools get you to the right one – which is where several reviewers say Soundstripe falls down.
What else comes with your subscription?
Price and licensing tell you what you're allowed to do with a library, but a platform’s added features are what decides how long you spend searching for the right asset.
Uppbeat: Fast discovery and real support
Describe your video in plain language to the Playlist Generator and it hands back a playlist of matching human-made tracks, with no endless scrolling required. Smart filters, keyboard shortcuts, Boards, Sync Preview and more than 2,500 hand-built collections round out the toolkit, covering everything from seasonal b-roll to gaming video music.
You get more choice the higher your subscription is. Essentials covers music and sound effects, Creator brings in stock video up to 1080p, motion graphics and LUTs, and Pro takes stock video up to 4K and adds WAV files. Plus, every plan – even the free one – comes with a real human support team, the single most praised part of Uppbeat in its Trustpilot reviews, and Pro adds priority support on top.
Soundstripe: AI search, extensions and project tools
Soundstripe's AI Search Assistant takes a plain-language brief and returns matching tracks, and the reference track search – where you name a well-known song and it surfaces catalog tracks with a similar feel – is clever for the briefs where a client has said "something like this."
The Adobe integrations are strong, and with extensions for Premiere Pro, Adobe Express and Frame.io you can browse and drop tracks without leaving your timeline. Soundstripe Pro adds Projects for organizing work, and its Business tier adds seats and role-based permissions. Where it's thinner is the breadth of asset type. There are no motion graphics or LUTs, so animated overlays and color presets mean another subscription somewhere else.
What do users say?
Uppbeat holds a Trustpilot score of 4.7 from over 2,000 reviews, with 88% of those at five stars. Creators consistently point to the quality of the catalog, how quickly they can find a track, and the responsiveness of the support team.
Soundstripe's Trustpilot rating sits at 3.8 out of 5 across roughly 769 reviews. Plenty of the feedback is positive, with the catalog and the stems both singled out, but the recurring complaints cluster around billing – unexpected charges, automatic renewals, and difficulty canceling – alongside a sense that the selection is narrower than the price suggests.
Both platforms are reviewed by creators doing broadly the same job, so the gap is worth reading – though it says more about support and billing than about the music.
Uppbeat vs Soundstripe: Which platform is right for you?
Uppbeat is the better call for most creators, freelancers and agencies, especially for anyone monetizing their videos. You can test the catalog free before you spend anything, the license grows with your work rather than making you upgrade just to publish, and everything you download stays cleared long after you cancel. Sound effects come in alongside the royalty-free music, with stock video, motion graphics and LUTs from Creator up, and there's a support team that answers on every plan.
Soundstripe makes sense if you need volume and stems, and if the Adobe integrations fit how you already work. Just go in clear-eyed about the tiers – the one most creators actually need is Soundstripe Pro (the more expensive tier), not Personal.
If you're weighing up other options too, our comparisons of Uppbeat and Epidemic Sound and Uppbeat and Artlist cover the same ground for those platforms.
