Of all the apps in this corner, LinkeSOFT's SongBook is the one closest in spirit to Strumfolio. It is built on ChordPro rather than on a format of its own, it works with no connection, and it treats a repertoire as a set of plain files you own. If you are already using it, you have chosen well, and most of this article is about the one thing it asks of you that a browser does not.

What SongBook does well

It is genuinely cross-platform — iPhone, iPad, Android, Windows and macOS — which puts it ahead of every Apple-only app in this category before anything else is said.

It reads ChordPro and .crd/.tab files, transposes, auto-zooms and auto-scrolls, and ships chord libraries for guitar, ukulele, mandolin, banjo and piano that you can extend yourself. Tap a chord to see how it is fingered. It has a metronome, external display output, and Bluetooth pedal support. Songs sort into categories, filter by tag, and gather into sets for a performance. It syncs through SongBook Cloud, Dropbox, OneDrive or Nextcloud, and it is fully offline — no account required to use what you already have.

That is a mature, careful piece of software with years behind it. It is a paid app, priced per store and per region, and the purchase is per platform.

What a browser changes

Strumfolio is not installed. The same address is the app on every device you sign in on: the tablet on the stand, the phone in your pocket, the laptop where you actually type the words in. Add it to the home screen and it opens full screen like anything else, but there is no store, no download, and nothing to buy a second time because the drummer switched to Android.

Once a song has been opened it stays readable offline, the same as SongBook — that part is not the difference. The difference is what it takes to get a new device reading: a URL and a sign-in, rather than a purchase and an install.

A link, not a library sync

SongBook keeps your songs in step across your devices. That is a different job from the one Strum Together does.

Strum Together is a live session: whoever is playing shares a link, and anyone who opens it follows the same song in the same key as it changes, from their own screen. They need no account, no install and no copy of your library — just the link. A singer who turned up tonight and a room full of people who will never open this app again can all be reading the same page.

Starting a session is on the paid plans; following one is free for whoever opens the link.

Where the two differ on the sheet itself

Three things Strumfolio does that are worth naming:

  • Four notations, chosen per reader. International, Italian, German — where H is B and B is B flat — and Nashville numbers, each chord as its degree of the key. The same sheet reads in numbers for one player and in Italian for another, at the same time.
  • A capo the app works out for you. Rather than telling it where the capo is, you can ask which fret leaves you with the most open shapes, and it does the arithmetic across the whole progression. That one is on the paid plans.
  • A visual editor. Chords stay pinned to the syllable they belong to while you edit the words around them — split a line, join two, drag a chord to a different beat — without typing a bracket by hand.

And the door out is open in both directions: ChordPro in, ChordPro out.

When to stay with SongBook

Honestly, several cases:

  • You want to buy software once and never think about it again. Strumfolio's paid plans are subscriptions, plus a lifetime option. If a recurring charge is the thing you are avoiding, that is a real reason and it is yours to weigh.
  • You want no account at all. SongBook will read files off your disk with nothing signed in. Strumfolio is an account and a sign-in, always.
  • You need a metronome, an external display, or a Bluetooth pedal. None of the three exists here.
  • You play an instrument beyond guitar and ukulele. SongBook's chord libraries reach further — mandolin, banjo, piano — and Strumfolio draws guitar shapes on every plan and ukulele on the paid ones, and stops there.

When the browser wins

When the people who need to read your songs are not all on devices you chose, when you would rather send a link than ask somebody to install and buy something, and when you want the words you are editing on a laptop to be on the tablet before you have walked back to the stand.