Comparison of synthesizer plugin formats
Marketing people spread a lot of misinformation on the web. We don't get paid by Steinberg, Apple or AVID and spent over 20 years with developing synthesizer plugins as a full-time job. We got deep knowledge about the different interfaces.
The table with the most important plugin formats should help you to decide which one is the right one for you. It is a summary of facts, not opinions. Some of these facts are only known by developers and concealed by the marketing.
What you should know:
- Unlike what marketing people advertise there is no significant difference in sound quality between the plugin formats in practice. All of them sound excellent.
- All plugin-formats got a very similar feature-set.
- There are also only very small differences in CPU performance.
- However, there are big differences in stability and reliability.
What plugin-format do you recommend?
VST2 is best format for synthesizers. Sadly Steinberg does not longer support it and replaced it with VST3 - a plugin format with a similar name, but that works different in many technical aspects.
While VST3 works well for effects, it is not a plugin-format that is really suitable for complex synthesizers. It does not come with full Midi support. As a result, the developers need to do ugly hacks to make things work as expected, or they are forced to drop features.
The AudioUnit format is technically very similar to VST2, but is not as reliable. You may already have experienced it for yourself, that you needed to reboot your Mac before your DAW detects a recently installed AudioUnit. So if your're on the Mac and your DAW supports several plugin formats you really should concider using VST instead. VST is a cross-platform format. This means that your songs and patches most likely do also work on PC (if you should decide to migrate one day or got a friend that uses a PC).
| green=good red=unsupported/bad yellow=neutral | VST2 | VST3 | AudioUnit | AAX | RTAS | CLAP |
| available for Windows | yes | yes | no | yes | yes | yes |
| available for macOS | yes | yes | yes | yes | yes | yes |
| available for Linux | yes | yes | no | no | no | yes |
| 64 bit Intel support | yes | yes | yes | yes | no | yes |
| 32 bit Intel support | yes | yes | yes | yes | yes | yes |
| M1 ARM support | technically possible | yes | yes | since 2.4.1 | no | yes |
| works well for synthesizers | yes | technical limitations | yes | yes | yes | yes |
| works well for effects | yes | yes | yes | yes | yes | yes |
| full MIDI support | yes | no | yes | yes | yes | yes |
| supported by most DAWs | yes | new ones support it | only Mac | only ProTools | only ProTools | Bitwig, Reaper, ... |
| sound-quality | excellent | excellent | excellent | excellent | excellent | excellent |
| cross-platform compatibility | yes | yes | no | yes | yes | yes |
| CPU usage | very low overhead | complex interface | good | iLok requires CPU | iLok requires CPU | very low overhead |
| stablility (plugins) | excellent | complexity causes issues | wrappers are used | possible iLok driver issues | possible iLok driver issues | it is still new |
| robust and reliable technology | excellent since VST2.4 | strange interface design | unreliable AU detection | requires iLok | requires iLok | yes |
| MIDI 2.0 support | yes | since VST 3.7 | yes | yes | no | yes |
| MPE support | yes | yes | yes | yes | no plugins available | yes |
| developer-friendly | yes | no | no | no | no | yes |
| future proof | deprecated | yes | yes | competing formats | deprecated | it is still new |
| proprietary technology | yes | yes | yes | yes | yes | no |
What will happen in the future?
RTAS: RTAS is a dead format, as it does not come with 64 bit support.
AAX: It is likely that AAX will also vanish soon, since development is complicated and there are better competing plugin formats. Dongles and iLok are not popular among customers either. Furthermore, native Apple M1 support has been missing for too many years.
AudioUnit: The future of AudioUnits is pretty safe - at least as long as Apple doesn't seriouly break things... again. :-(
VST2: Steinberg does not longer license VST2 to new developers to push their own VST3 format. They also dropped VST2 support from Cubase. However competing DAW developers still support it and will most likely continue to do it in the future.
VST3: Steinberg's VST3 SDK is not popular among developers. Native VST3 development is much more difficult, time-consuming and expensive than for the competing formats. To get around this, the majority of developers use wrappers and abstraction-frameworks like JUCE. This means in practice, that VST3-exclusive features are rarely supported.
CLAP: The CLAP is rather popular among developers, since it is simple and has very fair licensing condidtions. Sadly it is raising the market-share very slowly. Only a hand full of DAWs support it.
