Best Karaoke Apps in 2026: Which Are Still Maintained, and What They Really Cost

Transparency: This roundup is written by the Bloom Vocal team. We don't build a karaoke app in this category, and this piece makes no comparison to our own product. Update dates, ratings, and pricing below were checked directly against official App Store listings, official pricing pages, and third-party complaint aggregators as of 2026-08-01, and are noted individually where a source couldn't be fully confirmed.

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Two Questions Most "Best Karaoke App" Lists Skip

Search "best karaoke apps" and the first page is dominated by general software directories running the same format: a feature grid, a star rating pulled from one source, a paid link. What that format tends to miss is two things that matter more in practice than any feature comparison.

First: is the app still being maintained? Karaoke catalogs depend on licensing deals that lapse, and apps that stop updating tend to accumulate unresolved bugs and stale song libraries quietly, without ever being pulled from the store. A listing being live is not the same as an app being current.

Second: what will you actually be billed, and how hard is it to stop? The recurring complaint pattern across this category isn't about song selection or scoring accuracy — it's billing mechanics: charges that continue after the app is deleted, cancellation policies that route you back to whichever store you subscribed through, and no refund for the current billing period once you do cancel. A price listed on a marketing page and the price you're actually charged through an app store checkout aren't always the same number.

This roundup is organized around those two questions rather than a straight feature-by-feature grid.

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At a Glance

Verified 2026-08-01. Ratings and update dates from official App Store listings unless noted.

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Group 1: Actively Maintained Karaoke Apps

Smule is the largest and best-known app in this category, holding a 4.5/5 rating from roughly 179,000 App Store ratings and sitting at #90 in the Music category as of 2026-08-01. Its most recent update shipped 2025-07-20 (v14.2.7) — recent enough to count as actively maintained, though not updated in the last few months at the time of this check. Its free tier is narrow: you can sing the second part of an existing duet, but solo recording — the feature most people open a karaoke app for — requires a subscription.

Pricing is where Smule gets complicated. Purchased directly through smule.com, VIP runs about $44.99/year (or roughly €29.99), a figure we cross-checked against Smule's own Zendesk subscription guide and an independent cost breakdown. Subscribing through the iOS App Store's in-app purchase menu shows a different structure entirely: a $7.99 weekly VIP tier and a separate "VIP All Access Pass" with multiple price points ($5.99, $9.99, $12.99). We were not able to re-confirm a current in-app annual price during this check — it has historically run in the $53–99 range through app store channels — so treat any specific in-app annual figure as unconfirmed rather than current. Smule's own subscription marketing page was not directly reachable during this research, the same access pattern we've hit on previous checks; we're flagging that rather than guessing at what it currently shows.

Billing complaints, all sourced and paraphrased rather than quoted directly: users report triggering an annual charge with an accidental tap, and being charged for a trial they didn't realize had started (PissedConsumer). A consistently repeated pattern across cancellation-help sites is that deleting the Smule app does not stop billing — cancellation has to happen through whichever store (Apple, Google, or Smule's own site) the subscription was originally purchased through, and canceling does not refund the current billing period, which is stated as official policy (19pine.ai). One report describes a refund for an accidental annual-tier upgrade taking more than a week to process (dated around April 2025). Separately, several App Store reviews describe frustration that solo singing is effectively blocked without VIP, and that a previous free-credit system was removed. We did not find direct complaints about advertising volume or song-catalog locking specifically, so we're not attributing those to user reports here. Full breakdown in our Smule review, and a direct comparison against a skill-building alternative in Smule vs. Yousician.

StarMaker is, by update recency, the most actively maintained app in this entire roundup — its App Store listing showed an update from the day before this check, ahead of every other app we reviewed. It holds a 4.6/5 rating from about 105,000 ratings. Pricing is tiered: $7.99/week, $14.99/month, or $59.99/year for VIP, on top of separate coin packs ranging from $0.99 to $49.99 and individual song unlocks priced $6.99–$16.99. That's a meaningfully more layered cost structure than a flat subscription — VIP membership doesn't guarantee every song is included, and coins are a second, separate purchase path. StarMaker shares Smule's core limitation (a subscription gate on most of the real content), and user reviews report additional friction: bot-like activity in the social feed, account suspensions without a stated reason, and unwanted direct messages from unfamiliar users. More detail in our StarMaker review.

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Group 2: Active, But Pricing You Can't Pin Down

Vocaberry is still live and updating, but its pricing is the least legible of anything in this roundup. Its App Store listing shows at least six different price points — $6.99, $7.99, $9.99, $19.99, $29.99, and a $75 "lifetime" purchase — without clear documentation of what each unlocks or how they relate to each other. Its rating has also recently reset, meaning there's no stable representative number to cite. We're listing Vocaberry as a caution item rather than giving it a full comparison row: if you're considering it, verify inside the app exactly what a given price tier includes before purchasing, since the listing itself doesn't make that clear. More in our Vocaberry review.

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Group 3: Not a Karaoke App, But Frequently Confused With One

Voloco shows up in karaoke app searches, but it's a different category of tool: real-time pitch correction, vocal effects, and a beat library for recording, not a scored karaoke or duet app. It has the highest rating of anything in this roundup — 4.8/5 from roughly 84,000 ratings, with 70M+ downloads — and its pricing is comparatively simple: an All Access tier at $11.99/month or $59.99/year (some listings show $9.99–$11.99/month depending on the specific SKU shown). If what you actually want is a scored karaoke experience with a song catalog and social feed, Voloco isn't that; if you want vocal effects and pitch correction on your own recordings, it's worth a look on its own terms. Full review at our Voloco breakdown.

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Group 4: Excluded — And Why We're Not Hiding That

A roundup is only as useful as its willingness to say "this one doesn't belong here anymore." Three apps that still appear in older "best karaoke app" lists didn't make our active recommendations, for documented reasons:

WeSing has no confirmed US availability. As of 2026-08-01, its US App Store listing (id1163688749) returns a 404. The only live listings we found were in non-US App Store regions (Philippines and Maldives), with no confirmed USD pricing. If you're browsing from the US, there's currently no verifiable way to install or price WeSing.

Yokee is technically still listed and holds a respectable 4.5/5 rating from about 96,000 ratings — but its last update shipped 2024-01-18, meaning it has gone roughly two and a half years without a confirmed update as of this check. Reviews dated to 2024 describe unresolved sync and audio bugs, and we found no signs of ongoing developer activity since. A live listing with a decent historical rating isn't the same as an actively supported app; we're not recommending Yokee as a current pick for that reason.

Pokekara is active and well-priced (¥780/month, ¥2,200 for three months, ¥7,500/year, with a discounted ¥480/month student tier) — but it's a Japan-only App Store listing (id1435435090), priced in yen with no confirmed availability for English-language or non-Japan-region users. We're mentioning it as a footnote for readers specifically searching for Japanese karaoke apps, not as a general recommendation.

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If You Want to Improve, Not Just Sing: A Quick Signal Check

Karaoke apps are built around performing a song, not around structured skill progression. If what you actually want is to get better at singing rather than just record over a backing track, three apps come up repeatedly in that adjacent search — worth a one-line flag each rather than a full review here.

Yousician confirms Premium (1 instrument) at $19.99/month or $119.99/year, and Premium+ at $29.99/month or $179.99/year, both independently confirmed through its App Store listing as of this check. Notably, Yousician's own marketing site (yousician.com) no longer displays these prices directly — it shows a trial call-to-action instead, meaning the App Store listing is currently the more reliable source for a firm number. Full review at our Yousician breakdown.

Singing Carrots takes a different approach to pricing transparency: its official pricing page (singingcarrots.com/pro) does not display a price at all until after you complete a diagnostic quiz, confirmed directly as of 2026-08-01. What is free and unrestricted, without hitting that gate, is the vocal range test, pitch accuracy test, and range-based song search — all confirmed usable with no paywall. See our Singing Carrots review for the full pricing walkthrough.

Sing Sharp is the clearest example in this research of pricing that genuinely conflicts across sources, not a case we're comfortable resolving into a single number. Its official pricing page (lalasing.app/plans-pricing) lists $79.99/year. Its App Store listing shows an entirely different structure: $14.99/month, $39.99 for three months, or $29.99/year. Both were confirmed by direct fetch on the same day — the annual prices alone differ by roughly 2.7x depending on the channel. We're presenting both figures rather than averaging them or picking one, because averaging would misrepresent either path a real subscriber might take. See our Sing Sharp review.

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What "Subscribe" Actually Means: The Billing Friction Behind This Category

The pattern that shows up most consistently across complaint sources in this category isn't about song libraries or scoring — it's billing structure. Three mechanics worth understanding before you subscribe to any app in this space:

1. Cancellation happens at the store, not in the app. For Smule specifically, deleting the app does not stop billing — you have to cancel through whichever channel you originally subscribed via (the App Store, Google Play, or Smule's own site), a pattern documented by multiple cancellation-help resources. This is common practice across subscription apps generally, but it's easy to assume deleting the app is sufficient, and multiple user reports suggest that assumption is wrong.

2. Canceling doesn't refund the current period. Smule's stated policy is that canceling stops future renewals but doesn't refund the billing cycle you're currently in. Budget accordingly if you're subscribing to test something short-term.

3. The price on the marketing page and the price at store checkout can diverge. Smule's web price (~$44.99/year) and its App Store in-app purchase structure (separate weekly and multi-tier passes, with no clearly re-confirmed annual figure at time of writing) aren't the same shape of offer. Sing Sharp shows an even starker version of this — a 2.7x difference between its own pricing page and its App Store listing. Before subscribing to any app in this category, check whether a lower-cost web checkout exists as an alternative to the app store purchase flow, and confirm the actual renewal price inside the specific screen you're about to pay on, not just the marketing copy.

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Red Flags to Check Before You Subscribe

• No recent update. Yokee's 2024-01-18 last-update date is the clearest example — a live, decently-rated listing that hasn't shipped a fix in two and a half years.
• A store listing that returns a 404 for your region. WeSing's US listing is gone entirely; if a list recommends it without noting this, the list wasn't checked recently.
• A price that differs sharply between the official site and the app store. Sing Sharp's roughly 2.7x gap and Smule's web-vs-app-store structure are both documented examples — check both before assuming either is current.
• Fragmented, undocumented SKUs on one listing. Vocaberry shows six-plus different price points without a clear map of what each covers.
• "Free" that only covers a fraction of the core use case. Both Smule (no solo singing free) and StarMaker (most of the song catalog gated) restrict the feature most people install a karaoke app for.

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Where This Leaves You

If you want an actively maintained, mainstream karaoke app, Smule and StarMaker are the two still shipping updates as of 2026-08-01 — StarMaker more recently, Smule with the larger user base. Neither gives you unrestricted free solo singing, and both have documented billing friction worth reading before you subscribe, particularly around cancellation and refund timing. Vocaberry is alive but its pricing isn't legible enough to recommend confidently. Yokee, WeSing, and Pokekara are excluded from the active recommendations here for stated, checkable reasons — staleness, unavailability, and region-lock, respectively — not because we're guessing. If your actual goal is skill improvement rather than performance, Yousician, Singing Carrots, and Sing Sharp sit in an adjacent category with their own pricing quirks worth checking directly. Once you've picked an app, our guides on karaoke scoring algorithms, getting a high score, general karaoke singing tips, and microphone technique cover the performance side once the app choice is settled. This list will be revisited as update dates, availability, and pricing shift.

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Sources

• Smule — Karaoke, Sing & Record (App Store) — accessed 2026-08-01
• StarMaker — Sing Karaoke Songs (App Store) — accessed 2026-08-01
• Yokee — Karaoke, Start Singing (App Store) — accessed 2026-08-01
• WeSing — Your Pocket Karaoke (App Store, US listing — 404) — accessed 2026-08-01
• Pokekara (App Store, Japan listing) — accessed 2026-08-01
• Voloco — Vocal Recording Studio (App Store) — accessed 2026-08-01
• Karaoke Vocaberry (App Store) — accessed 2026-08-01
• Yousician — Your Music Teacher (App Store) — accessed 2026-08-01
• Smule — How to subscribe (official Zendesk article) — accessed 2026-08-01
• 19pine — How to cancel a Smule subscription — accessed 2026-08-01
• Smule reviews (PissedConsumer) — accessed 2026-08-01
• AndiTasten — Smule subscription costs — accessed 2026-08-01
• Singing Carrots — Pro pricing page — accessed 2026-08-01
• Sing Sharp — Official plans and pricing — accessed 2026-08-01

Note: Smule's official subscription marketing page could not be reached directly during this research (a recurring access pattern on prior checks as well), so its web pricing is corroborated through Smule's own support documentation and an independent third-party breakdown rather than a direct fetch of the marketing page itself. Sing Sharp's two publicly confirmed prices genuinely conflict and are both presented rather than resolved into one figure. Vocaberry's pricing and rating could not be resolved to a single confident figure at all. Verify current pricing and app status directly before subscribing to anything referenced here.

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This roundup was written by the Bloom Vocal team. We don't offer a karaoke app in this category and make no comparison to our own product here. Update dates, ratings, and pricing were verified against the sources listed above as of 2026-08-01 and may change — check each app's current store listing before subscribing.