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ACE Music vs Suno: Which AI Music Generator Is Better in 2026?

ACE Music v1 and the open-source ACE-Step 1.5 compared with Suno v5 and v6 on sound quality, benchmarks, price and openness.

"ACE Music beats Suno" headlines usually mean one of two different models. Here is what each claim actually says.

Two ACE models, two different claims

ACE Music v1 (proprietary, from ACE Studio) ranks #1 on the Artificial Analysis vocal music leaderboard with an Elo of 1160, ahead of Suno v6 at 1144. The margin is inside the roughly ±20-point confidence interval, so it is effectively a tie at the top.

ACE-Step 1.5 (open source, MIT) reports a SongEval score of 8.09 in its paper, above Suno v5. This is a combined score reported by the model's own team, not a single metric and not an independent blind test.

Side-by-side

ACE Music v1ACE-Step 1.5Suno v6
Quality#1 on AA vocal leaderboardAbove Suno v5 on SongEval (self-reported)#2 on AA vocal leaderboard
Open weightsNoYes (MIT)No
Run locallyNoYes, under 4 GB VRAMNo
Custom styles (LoRA)NoYesNo
Public APINoYes, via fal.ai and other hostsUnofficial only
Free tier20 credits/dayFree to self-host; free daily songs on AceMusic.appLimited daily credits

Where each one wins

  • Vocals and melody: In Decrypt's hands-on test, ACE Music v1 had stronger melodies, more natural voices and cleaner endings.
  • Niche genres: Suno still handled some uncommon styles better in the same test.
  • Cost and control: ACE-Step 1.5 wins clearly. It is free to run, can be fine-tuned with a few songs, and supports cover generation, repainting and track extraction.

Our take

If you just want the best-sounding song from a hosted app, ACE Music v1 and Suno v6 are neck and neck, so try both. If you want something free, private or customizable, use ACE-Step 1.5.

You can generate a song with ACE-Step 1.5 right now, no install needed.

Try it yourself

Generate a song with ACE-Step 1.5 for free, right in your browser.

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AceMusic.app is an independent website and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to ACE Studio or its ACE Music product. ACE-Step is an open-source model released under the MIT license.