I have personally used a ton of them.

For simplicity and robust, stable operation nothing even comes close to multitrackstudios. Yet it works very different from other DAWs. Once you get the flow down it flat out gets it done. The plugins are world class, and the ability to treat both audio and midi the same in a track is really cool. It makes a great companion for BiaB and RB.

Spent a long time with cakewalk products from home studio on floppy disk to Sonar 1 and now I have Bandlab. For free it is solid for sure. There’s a lot there. You can’t go wrong there. I did find since Bandlab took over it had a few things stripped out that Sonar had so you do need more third party stuff to add in than a few others that you pay for. I have read this is why it’s free they don’t have to pay for the licensing formplugins and VSTis.

Also bought Reaper a while back and it is solid as the folks say above. Also has extreme flexibility to route things in many different ways. The only downside to me was how much time I spent trying to set things up. I spent more time fiddling with stuff than completing projects. I did view many video tutorials but it seemed to busy and complex to me. Under the hood.

I have used RB since inception and still love it but always found it shackey at times and certainly missing a few things, but what else creates like it does.

I bought a Presonus interface a few years back and it came with studio one, I upgraded a time or two and now have the latest pro version. I must say for me it is the best for how I think and operated. The chord track, highly skilled comping features, solid simple and useable automation just work best for me. I think it just edges out Bandlab for me in how it works. I also love the ability to render stem files that open in Protools to be a plus.

I have four on my current Laptop, Studio one 4, Cakewalk by Bandlab, Reaper, and RB (powertracks also so 5) If I had to pick one to keep I would pick Studio one just because it fits my work flow best and finishes project for me with less issues.

HP Win 11 12 gig ram, Mac mini Sonoma with 16 gig of ram, BiaB 2025, Realband, Reaper 7, Harrison Mixbus 9 32c , Melodyne 5 editor, Presonus Audiobox 1818VSL, Presonus control app.