A Soundly alternative for people who want to own their library

Most people looking for a Soundly alternative are not unhappy with the software. Soundly is genuinely good at what it does. They hit one of two walls: the free tier stopped letting them index their own files, or they did the arithmetic on the subscription and did not like the number.

This post is about the second wall, because the first one is really the same wall wearing a different hat. Both come down to a design decision Soundly made on purpose, and a different one we made on purpose.

What Soundly is actually good at

Worth saying plainly, because the rest of this page argues the other side. Soundly ships 250,000+ sounds in its Pro library. That is a catalog you do not have to build, curate or pay for separately, and for a sound designer starting from nothing it is a serious head start. It runs on Windows as well as macOS, it syncs across machines through its cloud, and it has a real team behind it with enterprise support.

If what you need is access to a lot of sounds you do not own yet, Soundly is a reasonable purchase and you can stop reading here. Nothing below is going to change that.

The wall most video editors hit

The free tier indexes up to 10,000 of your own local files and gives you 10GB of cloud storage. That is a lot until it is not. Anyone who has been cutting for a few years, who has bought a couple of SFX packs, who saves interesting sounds out of their own footage, gets there faster than they expect.

And the thing you hit the cap on is your own files. Not the catalog. The library you assembled, on the drive you paid for, indexed by an app that has decided you have had enough. Pro removes the cap at $14.99 a month, or about $150 a year on the annual plan.

You are not paying to store your sounds. You are paying, monthly, for permission to search them.

The cancel test

Here is the question worth asking about any tool that sits between you and your own files. Cancel it today. What still works on Monday?

With a subscription library app, the honest answer is: your files are still on the drive, and the way you found them is gone. The labels, the collections, the search, the muscle memory of typing three letters and hitting the right whoosh. Sounds you licensed and downloaded from the Pro catalog usually keep their license, which matters and is a real point in Soundly’s favor. But the part that made 40,000 files usable stops.

That is the whole reason Sonault exists as a one-time purchase with files in a normal folder. Not because subscriptions are immoral. Because a tool that organizes your own work should not be able to stop.

Side by side

The three-year number

Soundly Pro on the annual plan is roughly $150 a year, so about $450 across three years, and at the end of it you own nothing. Sonault is $39 once. That is not a clever framing, it is just subtraction, and it is the reason most people arrive on this page.

The catch is that those two numbers are not buying the same thing, and any comparison that pretends otherwise is lying to you. Part of that $450 is a quarter-million licensed sounds. If you use that catalog, you are getting something for the money. If you opened it twice in 2024 and have been cutting with your own packs ever since, you are paying a catalog subscription to search a folder.

What you get instead

Sonault takes the opposite bet on every axis. Sounds are real files in a folder you can open in Finder and back up with Time Machine. Search, labels and favorites live on top of them rather than around them. There is no catalog, no cloud and no account check between you and a whoosh.

The parts that matter day to day:

• Import from a link. Paste a YouTube URL, scrub the waveform, keep the 400 milliseconds you wanted. This is the feature people actually switch for, and it is the one Soundly has no equivalent of. There is a full walkthrough of that workflow, including the rights question.
• Bring what you already have. Drag a whole folder in and it lands in one pass. Your originals stay where they are; nothing is copied into a proprietary store.
• Drag straight to the timeline. Every sound is a real audio file, so Resolve, Premiere, Final Cut, CapCut and Audition all accept it without an export step.
• Pull audio out of your own video files. Drop a clip in, keep the audio, trim it. The video is left untouched.
• Ask instead of clicking. The built-in MCP server lets Claude or Cursor search, label and import for you. Relabeling 400 sounds becomes one sentence.

Moving your library across

If you do switch, the migration is deliberately dumb. Your sounds are already files on your drive, wherever Soundly was indexing them from. Drag that folder onto Sonault and everything lands in one pass, waveforms and all. You are not re-importing years of files one at a time, and you are not exporting a database.

What does not come across is your labeling. Collections and tags live inside Soundly, so you rebuild them. For most people that is an evening of dragging, and it is a reasonable moment to read how to build a labeling system that survives 10,000 files before recreating the one that was not working.

So which one

The numbers above come from Soundly’s own plans page. If they have changed since we last checked, we would rather fix it than be right in the archive: email hello@sonault.com.