Roundup
The best music theory apps
Reference tools, drills and courses — three different things sold under one label.
"Music theory app" covers three products that do quite different jobs, and picking the wrong type is why people end up disappointed.
Reference — look something up. Chord spellings, scale fingerings, key signatures. Drill — test what you know until recall is fast. Course — teach you something you do not yet understand.
Most apps do one of these well and gesture at the others. Work out which you need first.
How these are judged. Depth of theory explanation first, since that is what "theory app" implies; then drill quality and configurability; then breadth of topics; then maintenance. Price is noted but does not drive placement — the whole page costs under ten dollars. Where we have not used an app at length, the text attributes the claim to whoever did.
Best for drilling: Tenuto
Tenuto
4.8 from 655 ratings$4.99Actively updated
From musictheory.net, whose free web lessons have been the standard reference for two decades. Tenuto is the exercise side: intervals, chords, scales, key signatures, note identification, keyboard and fretboard drills, all finely configurable.
No subscription, no ads, no gamification. You set what you want to practise and it asks you questions.
Good for: students and teachers who want exact control over what is being tested. Less good for: motivation. It gives you nothing to keep coming back for.
Best all-rounder: Perfect Ear
Perfect Ear: Music & Rhythm
4.7 from 1,883 ratingsFreeActively updated
Despite the name it is a full theory app: intervals, chords, scales, circle of fifths, rhythm training and short theory articles alongside the ear training.
Good for: one app covering theory, ear and rhythm without juggling three. Less good for: depth in any single area, which is the usual cost of breadth.
Best structured course: EarMaster
EarMaster - Music Theory
4.6 from 423 ratingsFreeActively updated
The most curriculum-shaped option here, built around graded courses rather than open practice, and used in formal music education.
Good for: systematic study, especially alongside a syllabus. Less good for: dipping in for five minutes.
Best for daily habit: Tomus
Tomus - music theory tutor
4.9 from 52 ratingsFreeiPhone and iPad, iOS 15.0 or laterNo update in over a year — last release 2025-05
This is our app — disclosure, not an independent review. We apply the same staleness test to ourselves: 15 months without a release.
Our app. Five areas — theory, sight-reading, ear training, rhythm and music history — as short game runs, with a Daily Jam that mixes exercises from across them each day and reports accuracy per game.
Good for: people who need the habit more than the depth. The daily set and short runs are the whole design. Less good for: fine-grained configuration. If you want to drill only diminished sevenths in second inversion, Tenuto is the better tool. Tomus also does not teach concepts from scratch — that is what the written Learn section here is for.
On the maintenance test this page applies to everyone else: Tomus's last App Store release was May 2025. By our own threshold that is "quiet", and several apps ranked below it here have shipped more recently.
Fifty-two ratings is a small sample. We would rather flag that than let a 4.9 average carry weight it has not earned.
Best free interactive tools: Musicca
Not an app — a website, and one of the better free music-theory resources online. Alongside lessons on notes, the staff, clefs, accidentals, intervals, chords, scales and keys, it runs a set of browser tools: a chord finder, scale finder, interval finder, note finder, an interactive circle of fifths, a metronome and a tuner, plus playable instruments from piano to drum machine.
Everything is free; an account removes ads. It works on a phone browser, which makes it the easiest thing here to try — no install, nothing to buy.
Good for: looking something up and immediately hearing it, without installing anything. Less good for: structured progress. It is a toolbox and a set of exercises rather than a course that takes you somewhere.
Weakest for theory, strongest for habit: Duolingo Music
Duolingo
4.7 from 5,418,781 ratingsFreeiOS and AndroidActively updated
Rating, price and release date above cover the whole Duolingo app, across all its courses. Duolingo has published no rating, download or usage figure for the Music course on its own.
Duolingo Music launched publicly in November 2023. It teaches pitch, meter, rhythm and interval through an on-screen keyboard — those four are Duolingo's own words from the launch announcement — with a large song library, free, on iOS and Android.
For theory specifically it is the weakest thing on this page, and that is a design choice rather than an oversight. Duolingo's own description of the course is learning "through interacting with game-like exercises" rather than "watching lengthy videos or reading long-form text to get explanations of musical concepts". A first-hand review from February 2024 reported note values, the staff and the clef all introduced without explanation.
Against this page's first criterion — explanation depth — that puts it last, and this is the one Duolingo ranking we hold with some confidence, because the vendor and an independent reviewer agree and the vendor is describing a deliberate choice rather than a shortcoming. On drill quality and breadth, the page's second and third criteria, we have not evaluated it.
Against a criterion this page does not rank on — whether you will still be practising in a month — it may well be first.
Not fully evaluated. We have not used the Music course. Its placement rests on Duolingo's own description of the curriculum and on a first-hand review from February 2024, which predates a substantial restructure in February 2025. Whether it covers chords, and how its exercises work today, we do not know.
- Best for
- Building a daily habit when nothing else has stuck.
- Less good for
- Understanding theory. By design it corrects without explaining.
Music is a course inside the main Duolingo app. See Duolingo on the App Store ↗
Free, with the usual hearts limit on the free tier. We have not verified what Duolingo Super costs or which Music content it unlocks.
Best free reference: musictheory.net
Free, on the web. Visit musictheory.net →
Not an app, and included anyway because it remains the best free explanation of music theory available. Comprehensive lessons, interactive exercises and useful tools, with no account required.
Good for: looking things up and reading properly. Less good for: mobile use and daily habit, which is where the apps come in.
Also worth a look
Waay — a well-regarded structured theory course app, though it has not been updated since late 2025.
MyMusicTheory — graded theory aimed at UK exam syllabuses. Useful for that; last updated in late 2024.
Complete Ear Trainer — level-based, with a strong rhythm component.
Which to choose
- You need to look things up → musictheory.net, free.
- You know the concepts and want them fast → Tenuto.
- You want one app for theory and ear → Perfect Ear.
- You are following a syllabus → EarMaster or MyMusicTheory.
- You keep failing to practise at all → something with a daily hook. That is what Tomus is built for.
What none of them replace
An app tests recall. It does not explain a concept you have never met, and it does not connect theory to the music you actually play.
Read the explanation first, drill it second, then find it in a real piece. The Learn section here covers the first step, and how to learn music theory sets out the order to work through.
More from Resources
- A field guide to music learning appsSix categories of music app, what each is genuinely good at, and where each one runs out of road.
- The best apps for learning a musical instrumentEleven apps that teach you to play, checked against their current listings rather than their 2023 ones.
- The best sight-reading appsEleven apps for reading notation faster — including which of the old favourites have stopped being maintained.
- The best ear training appsEleven apps for training relative pitch, sorted by what kind of listening they actually train.