Chordify.net is a music education website designed to help people find chord charts for their favorite songs. The directory has more than 36 million chord charts for guitar, piano, ukulele, and mandolin. Musicians of all levels can find chordified songs to practice along with. From beginner tunes to more complex progressions, there’s something for everyone.
On each song page, you’ll find an innovative music player that combines chord diagrams with the audio signal from an embedded YouTube video. A playhead moves along the chord charts and highlights each chord in sync with the music playback. This makes it easier to connect the sounds you’re hearing with your position in the song, so you don’t lose your place.
Their team has built a music information retrieval model that detects the harmonic structure and chord progressions of any music. Once the chords are identified, Chordify generates the chord diagrams automatically. It doesn’t always get them right, so the community is allowed to edit the chords until, eventually, they reach a consensus that the charts are correct.
So what are the best alternatives to Chordify? After all, there’s more than one way to build a chord finder. In this article, we’ve rounded up the most popular options.
Chordify limits free users to 4 song pages per day
Chordify’s biggest limitation is that free plan users can only view four “songs” per day. Their use of the word song is a misnomer because it refers to song pages. A popular song can have a dozen different versions in its directory. So as you’re clicking through and trying to find the most accurate one, you might run out of credits before getting halfway through the list.
The Chordify premium subscription opens up unlimited access. You also get advanced tools like a digital capo feature for guitarists, the option to download MIDI files, a tuner, and more. Paid users can download Chordify on their mobile devices and upload their own songs. These are great perks and if you get value from their app, it never hurts to support a company you like.
Still, four songs per day is a fairly low threshold. Not everyone is ready to pull out their credit card that quickly. So we tested several other options to see how their free plans compared.
Best free plan alternatives to Chordify
We tested several websites like Chordify, where musicians can learn new song chords. The best options we found were Songsterr, Yousician, and Ultimate Guitar. Our own company Hooktheory also offers a free product called TheoryTab that we’ve included in the following roundup.
As you’ll see in the illustration below, each of these services offers a full video that syncs up with the piano and guitar chord diagrams of the song. This was our baseline metric for high-quality products. We left out sites that use plain text with no audio embed, as these require users to bounce between multiple apps and are less convenient overall.
The next metric we checked was the number of song pages available per day. Since Chordify offers only four, we wanted to know what the competitors are doing.
Our own service, TheoryTab, offers unlimited page views per day and visitors are free to explore without signing up or paying. Each page on our platform is a combination of staff-created and user-generated content. It’s set up like a Wiki, where future users can weigh in and make improvements over time. Regardless of who created the page, they are always free and accessible to all.
Ultimate Guitar allows unlimited page views for “unofficial” user-generated pages, but their official pages created by the company are available on the paid tier only. There are still thousands of high-quality tabs from their users, and they have a similar Wiki approach that allows for community edits over time.
Songsterr provides unlimited access to pages, but access is throttled for free plan users. Every ten seconds, they enforce a pause to disrupt playback to nudge people onto the paid plan.
Songsterr: Best for chord fingerpicking tablature
The next metric we looked at was the articulation of guitar chords. Of the four websites, Songsterr offers the best option for fingerpicking tabs. You won’t find it on every chart, but we used the classic example Stairway to Heaven as our baseline for testing. It’s something most beginner guitarists have tried to learn at some point and they had the best chart for it.
By comparison, Chordify and Ultimate Guitar both provide easy chord charts for the song, but their fingerpicking tablature versions are locked behind their paid plan.
TheoryTab’s free service offers a fretboard view with the guitar chords, and in the case of Stairway to Heaven, the individual notes are notated as a MIDI melody instead of tablature. For this reason, we consider Songsterr to be the superior resource for fingerpicking notation.
TheoryTab: Piano and guitar chords + melody
TheoryTab offers many of the same features as Chordify but with the additional perk of melody notation. Both services include a YouTube embed with a playlist of related songs below. So, let’s have a closer look at the differences between song pages on each service to see how they compare. Below is a screenshot of each site for the track Hey Jude by The Beatles.
One of the first obvious visual differences is TheoryTab’s use of color. We found that assigning a different color to each note helped users scan the MIDI notes, piano keys, and guitar frets more easily. Chordify’s black-and-white notation reduces accuracy, but the lack of contrast might be less appealing to some people.
The second big difference is that TheoryTab includes melody notation. This is a big deal for people who want to learn to sing along with the guitar or piano chords. Chordify offers the song lyrics, which are not available on TheoryTab.
TheoryTab vs Chordify: Transpose to different keys
Both services include the option to transpose into a different key. TheoryTab lets you do this for free. You can change the root note and reassign the song to any musical mode, say from Major to Minor or Phrygian. It will automatically translate the chords and the melodies based on their scale degree and Roman numeral notation.
Chordify offers a simple transposition tool, called the capo feature. You can move the root note of the key signature up or down, say from A Minor to G# Minor. The key signature itself cannot be changed from minor to major as it can with TheoryTab. Their transpose feature is locked behind a paywall, so site visitors on the “four songs per day” plan will not have access.
Hooktheory: Music theory insights and tutorials
TheoryTab doesn’t stop at chord charts and MIDI melodies. The site uses advanced chord AI analysis to detect shared chord progressions and create playlists that any site visitor can browse.
For example, if you want to find all the songs in TheoryTab’s database written in the key of G Major and perform a ii-V-I progression, you just open the Trends page and begin your search. You don’t actually have to pick a key signature. If you want to see all songs across all keys that use that same progression, switch to the “relative” view.
Access to education is a top priority at Hooktheory. Our aim is to make learning music theory fun and accessible.
We offer numerous free resources and have published music theory books that explain the chord and melody logic behind hundreds of popular songs. Audiovisual examples are embedded directly into them, with simple steps you can follow to apply the same techniques in your own songwriting.
If you’re looking to go deeper, check out Hookpad, our songwriting sketchpad. Here, you can create beats, songs, and musical ideas with built-in music theory and AI from our TheoryTab database. Drag and drop chords, notate your vocal melodies, add lyrics, and export them as chord charts for your setlist.
Visit TheoryTab today to explore the best free and unlimited alternative to Chordify.
About the Author
Ezra Sandzer-Bell is a musician and copywriter with a passion for merging music theory with technology. Learn more about his musical journey and the philosophy behind his work here.