"Sync licensing software" is a phrase that covers at least four different products solving four different problems. Songwriters searching for it usually get shown whichever category the article's affiliate deal points at, then buy the wrong thing. This page separates the categories, says plainly which problem each one solves, and tells you which one you actually need — including the cases where the answer is not Pitchkit.
I write for sync and I built Pitchkit, so treat this as informed and interested rather than neutral. The comparison table is honest about what Pitchkit does not do.
Examples: Disco, Songspace, SourceAudio. These store your masters in the cloud and give you private streaming links to send to music supervisors, A&R and collaborators. You control who hears what, and you can see who listened. Typically $25–99 per month.
This is the category most people mean when they say "sync platform." It is genuinely necessary once you are sending catalog to other people regularly, and nothing else replaces it. What it does not do is decide which of your songs belongs in the link. You still pick those yourself.
Example: Pitchkit. These take a brief and rank your existing catalog against it. The value is in the step between "brief arrives" and "pitch goes out": which of my songs actually fits this. Tools in this category live or die on whether their tagging is automatic — if you have to hand-tag 900 songs before it works, it is a spreadsheet with extra steps.
Examples: Music Vine, Artlist, Musicbed, Songtradr, Taxi, sync agencies with rosters. These supply the opportunity itself — briefs, listings, or direct representation — usually in exchange for a cut, a submission fee, or exclusivity on the tracks you place through them. This is a business relationship, not software you install.
If your actual problem is "I do not get briefs," none of the software categories fix that. This is the one you need.
Examples: Songtrust, Sentric, publisher-side systems. Splits, registrations, cue sheets, collections. Adjacent to sync but a separate job entirely, and increasingly the thing that costs writers real money when it is neglected.
| Your problem | The category that fixes it |
|---|---|
| I do not get briefs at all | Agencies and marketplaces (category 3) |
| I get briefs but pitch late or pitch from memory | Catalog matching (category 2) |
| Supervisors need to hear my catalog | Hosting and delivery (category 1) |
| I placed something and have not been paid | Rights administration (category 4) |
| I cannot remember what I have written | Catalog matching (category 2) |
Point it at your music folder once. It reads BPM, key, energy, brightness and danceability straight from the audio, optionally transcribes lyrics with Whisper, and builds an index. Then you paste a brief — plain English, including lines like "110–125 BPM, Phoebe Bridgers energy, something about leaving home" — and it ranks your whole catalog by fit. Tick the ones you want and it copies those files into a named pitch folder ready to upload.
The realistic setup for a working sync writer is one tool from category 1 for delivery and one from category 2 for matching. They are not competitors. Pitchkit's own output is a folder of files, and where most people send that folder is Disco.
It is an umbrella term for four unrelated product categories: platforms that host and share your catalog with music supervisors, such as Disco and Songspace; tools that match your existing catalog against a brief, which is what Pitchkit does; marketplaces and agencies that supply the briefs or represent your music, such as Songtradr, Musicbed or Taxi; and rights administration systems that handle splits, registrations and royalty collection, such as Songtrust.
Because the phrase covers all four, most roundup articles compare products that do not compete with each other. The useful question is not which sync licensing software is best, it is which of the four problems you currently have.
Probably only the matching category, and only if your catalog has outgrown your memory. Below about a hundred songs most writers can hold their catalog in their head and a folder of well-named files is enough. Somewhere between a few hundred and a thousand songs that stops being true, and the failure mode is specific: you send four songs, the brief closes, and two weeks later you remember the song that would have won it.
Hosting platforms are worth their monthly cost when other people are asking to hear your catalog on their schedule. If nobody has asked yet, that subscription is buying you nothing.
They solve opposite halves of the same workflow. Disco is where your catalog lives so other people can hear it: cloud hosting, private streaming links, access controls, team collaboration, roughly $25 to $99 a month. Pitchkit is where your catalog gets searched so you can decide what to send: local audio analysis, automatic tagging, brief matching, pitch folder creation, $49 once.
Disco does not read a brief and tell you which of your songs fits. Pitchkit does not host anything or generate a link anyone else can open. Writers who do both jobs regularly tend to run both, and Pitchkit's output folder is frequently uploaded straight into Disco.
Pitchkit is macOS only, and that is a real limitation rather than a temporary one. If you are on Windows, the hosting platforms in category one are all web-based and work fine, and a well-maintained spreadsheet plus consistent file naming remains the practical fallback for the matching problem.
We would rather say that plainly than sell a Windows user something that will not run.
Partially, and it helps to know which parts. Concrete constraints translate reliably: tempo ranges, key, duration, instrumental versus vocal, explicit genre and mood language, and lyrical themes if your lyrics are transcribed. Artist references translate reasonably well when the tool converts the reference into musical characteristics rather than string-matching the name.
What software cannot do is read the subtext an experienced writer picks up, such as knowing that a particular supervisor says 'uplifting' and means 'not sad', or that a brand brief has an unstated ceiling on how aggressive the track can be. The realistic goal is not for the tool to pick your pitch. It is for the tool to hand you the fifteen candidates worth considering out of nine hundred songs, in seconds, so your judgment is spent on the choice rather than the search.
For catalog hosting, $25 to $99 a month is the going rate and reflects real storage, bandwidth and access-control costs. For matching tools that run locally there is no ongoing infrastructure to pay for, which is why Pitchkit is a one-time $49 rather than a subscription. Charging monthly for software that runs on your own machine and uses no servers is difficult to justify, so we do not.
Be cautious with anything charging a percentage of placements for what is essentially software, and with submission fees, which are a cost regardless of outcome.
Mac app. Indexes your catalog, matches any brief, builds the pitch folder. Runs entirely on your machine. 14-day money-back guarantee.
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