The quality of free plugins just keeps getting better. These are the best free plugins for 2026.
We really are spoiled for choice. Not only are paid plugins better than ever, with analog-style instruments sounding more realistic every year, and hardware emulations of classic gear making in-the-box production that much more professional-sounding, we’re also blessed with a plethora of free ones. It’s a veritable VST smorgasbord out there. So much so, in fact, that it can be hard to know what’s worth downloading and what’s not.
Here’s a list, then, of what you need to have in your AU and VST folders. These are the best free plugins for 2026 presented in no specific order. Instruments and effects, they’re all here. And all free.
Vital Audio Vital
Of course, we have to start this list with Vital from Vital Audio, aka Matt Tytel. Although it’s not the new kid on the block anymore, Vital remains a (wait for it) vital wavetable synth to rival the big dogs like Serum and Pigments. And while there are paid variants, the free version is just as good, complete with morphing wavetables, stereo modulation, keytracking LFOs, MPE and all the other good stuff. You just don’t get as many wavetables and presets as in the paid versions.
There’s a reason we listed it as one of the ten best wavetable soft synths you’re not using.
Find out more on the Vital website.
Surge Team OB-Xf
You’re probably familiar with Surge, the freeware super synth maintained by a team of dedicated coders. While it certainly could sit comfortably on a list of the best plugins of 2026, we’ve decided to give its seat instead to OB-Xf, an emulation of the Oberheim OB-X built by the same Surge Team.
If OB-Xf sounds familiar, that’s because it started from the same code as OB-Xd, the classic freeware synth now stewarded by discoDSP. discoDSP has made the (rather unpopular) decision to charge for OB-Xd, so now Surge Team has forked the original code and continued development. It’s currently in beta, so downloader beware, but it sounds great and will tick all those Obie boxes for you.
And if you’re in need of a new freeware sampler, check out the just-announced Shortcircuit-XT from the same people.
Find out more on the Surge Team GitHub.
Valhalla Supermassive
When it comes to algorithmic software reverbs, you can’t beat Valhalla. Sure, there are better — but they’re also more expensive. Valhalla only charges $50 for its effects plugins. But free is even better than cheap, and that’s what Supermassive is.
Supermassive is (as the name suggests) best for huge reverbs. You know, the kind that YouTube synthfluencers drown their demos in to make themselves sound better. Or you can use it to turn any sound into a pad. It’s also got a delay circuit that specializes in huge feedback washes.
And Valhalla keeps updating it. There are now a whopping 22 modes of reverb/delay to play with. Massively essential.
Find out more on the Valhalla website.
TDR Nova
Dynamic EQ isn’t the rare beast that it once was. Nova from Tokyo Dawn Records (that’s TDR to you and me) used to be one of the few available EQs with dynamics built in. Although that’s changed, Nova is still very much worth the download, chiefly because it’s so darned easy to use. Even if you’ve never tried a dynamic EQ, you’ll be ducking frequency bands to the sidechain input in no time at all.
Although the four bands you get in the gratis version will probably be enough to work with, you can level up to the paid Gentlemen’s Edition (€60) for two more nodes and other additional functionality.
Download Nova from the Tokyo Dawn Records site.
Xfer Records OTT
Xfer Records is best known as the developer of the world-beating Serum, which has had such an outsized influence on electronic music it’s not even funny. Serum isn’t the team’s only product, though. Along with paid plugins like the excellent LFO Tool, there’s also OTT, which may rival Serum in terms of appearances on tracks. (It’s so common, even FabFilter has aped it in its recent Pro-C 3.)
A multiband compressor, OTT uses simultaneous downward and upward compression across three bands to generate monstrous results. It’s not called Over The Top for nothing.
Get OTT from the Xfer Records website.
Caelum Audio Flux Mini 2
A good LFO tool is indispensable. While there are plenty available that are capable of all kinds of craziness, if you just need something to handle basic volume ducking duties and the occasional filter wobble and don’t feel like laying out any cash, Flux Mini 2 from Caelum Audio fits the bill perfectly.
Based on the bigger and more powerful Flux Pro, Flux Mini 2 lets you draw in LFO curves to affect filter cutoff (low-, high- or bandpass), filter resonance, and mix, but the one you’ll probably use the most is amplitude for sidechain-style volume modulation. Plus, it can send MIDI CCs to control other plugins.
Find out more at the Caelum Audio site.
Splice Instrument
Spitfire Audio’s LABS was a fantastic, free and ever-growing plugin packed full of unique and very usable Spitfire sampled instruments. And then it went paid (as LABS+). Now, thanks to Splice owning Spitfire, it’s back again in the form of Instrument, a freemium plugin with a free tier that revives LABS and adds new monthly instruments. (If you want more, you can upgrade to one of two paid levels with access to exclusive content and credits to use across Splice.)
How much you want to engage with the Splice ecosystem is up to you, but the free content in Instrument is nothing short of fantastic. This is Spitfire we’re talking about, after all, with sounds that include a piano recorded at Philip Glass’ home, drum performances by session musician Abe Laboriel Jr., and the BBC Symphony Orchestra captured at Maida Vale Studios.
Find out more.
Dawesome Zyklop
Two years ago, we called Zyklop from Dawesome one of the best secret sauce plugins of 2024. It certainly still is that, and it’s also one of the best free plugins for 2026.
Based on the bigger Myth instrument, Zyklop uses resynthesis to transform any sound you throw at it into a complex waveform that you can then use in a traditional-style synthesizer. While you only get a single oscillator, Zyklopdoes offer eight voices and enough synthesis modules and effects to be very useful. It also sounds amazing: wild and like nothing else really.
Download Zyklop here.
Usual Suspects JE-8086
OK, this is a big one. Usual Suspects is a crack team of mad geniuses that figured out how to emulate the Motorola DSP chips found in 1990s synthesizers like the Access Virus series, Waldorf Micro Q and Microwave 2, and Clavia Nord Lead 2X. Recently, they managed to reverse-engineer the Toshiba chip in the Roland JP-8000, perhaps the most famous of the era’s virtual analog synths and the progenitor of the supersaw wave.
If you’re unfamiliar with the Usual Suspect’s work, these are chip emulators, not software recreations of synthesizers. That is, they host the actual ROM from the original instruments. Without this, you won’t hear a sound. And, as this is a legal gray area, we can’t tell you where to get the ROM. But once you do find it, you’ll have the original JP-8000 in your DAW. What a crazy world we live in.
Find out more on the Usual Suspects site.
Ewan Bristow Plugdata Patches
For this last one, we’re going to recommend a developer rather than a single plugin. Because you really need to know about Ewan Bristow.
Ewan Bristow has really blown up in the last year. He makes what he calls “weird audio devices” and they really do live up to that description. There’s a spectral delay, spectral resynthesis sound manipulator, cepstral morphing (we’d be lying if we said we knew what that was), a spectral filter that converts wavetables into filter shapes, and much more. His work is universally unique and excellent-sounding.
The only catch is these are plugdata patches, not discrete plugins, so they need to be run in the (also free) plugdata programming environment. But you can use Ewan’s creations as you would a plugin, you just need to load the plugdata VST first. Sort of like an ensemble inside Reaktor.
Learn more at Ewan Bristow’s Gumroad page.
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