Best Drum VST Plugins in 2023 (Free & Paid)

Owning this drum vst plugin is like having a cutting-edge drum studio on your computer. This is an incredibly powerful, professional drum plugin that is capable of producing an entire drum track with the most realistic drum sounds on the market.

This plugin gives you a huge range of drum samples spread over 230GB of content. It’s broken down into seven iconic kit sounds composed of 350 unique drum sounds. Each drum sound has a large range of velocities and articulations with round robin for even more realism.

The drum samples in this drum vst are truly capable of producing some truly incredible sounding drums. I will say that it’s generally more suitable for acoustic styles of music rather than electronic music, although it still has a few electronic drum kit sounds.

Many of these incredible drum sounds include different stick options like mallets and brushes. Some kits even have multiple drum head options, giving you complete control over your drum sounds.

This huge library has impeccable sound quality and is easily some of the most comprehensive drum software going. All of the drum samples were captured in Galaxy Studios which is a state-of-the-art environment.

SD3 has one of the best interfaces out of any drum vst plugins. The window can be split into different tabs and resized. It has a quick searchable browser for navigating the drum libraries, and it’s super easy to select and modify sounds.

Superior Drummer 3 has a full sample control for editing each individual drum to craft your perfect sound. This provides controls for attack, sustain, decay, tuning, and all the other parameters you’d expect in a drum machine/sampler plugin. Moreover, it featyures a built-in mixer with effects to balance the individual drums and tweak the mix of your kit.

Each kit also includes multiple microphone positions and types, which lets you create a sound that fits perfectly with the rest of your track.

This drum vst offers more than the sounds alone. It can also create arrangements and beats directly from the plugin with the grid editor which is perfect for programming drums. This arrangement section also provides swing and groove controls for creating more humanized beats, which we all know is important for the best-sounding drum tracks.

This is one of the more expensive drum vst plugins on the market, making it more suitable for professionals or producers with a large budget. I would say feature and sound-wise, this is the best drum plugin on the market.

This drum plugin goes above and beyond in terms of flexibility, customization, and sound. It provides a killer collection of drum hits, kits, and MIDI files.

XLN Addictive Drums 2 features a familiar pad-style interface that is accessible enough for beginners but also provides a level of depth that professionals need.

The Addictive Drums 2 plugin lets you build custom kits with 18 drums, cymbals, or percussion slots. It’s laid out to mimic the setup of a traditional kit, which helps to make sure you’re creating a realistic drum setup.

It features an intuitive kit and drum piece browser which lets you instantly load new sounds into the pads. The sound library comes with more than just standard drum sounds, and also gives you a large array of ethnic drums, percussion, shakers, cymbal swells, and more unprocessed sounds.

The Addictive Drums engine, interface, and design make it super easy to blend drum samples and match sounds to build your own custom drumkit. Another useful function is the ability to link sound slots together, letting you quickly trigger multiple drum pieces from the same midi note. This is powerful at many stages in production where you need to thicken up a drum track or give an arrangement a bit of a switch-up.

This drum software is decent overall, with little to criticize. My only real gripe is the interface which is a little bland in comparison to the above. Try out the free version for a demo!

Anybody who’s worked in music production will know how annoying and time-consuming it can be to work with real studio drummers and record an acoustic kit. With a plugin like the Steven Slate Drums, you can kiss goodbye to that stress and say hello to one of the quickest, most powerful drum vst plugins.

This plugin has a large set of samples and drum sounds. You get over 148 different kits covering a range of musical genres. Each of these kits is multi-sampled and velocity enabled, letting you create super realistic drum performances from the plugin alone.

Besides the samples, it also includes over 2000 midi drum loops for kick-starting your inspiration. These loops are ideal for people who are new to drum programming, or even experts who just want access to a bunch of production-ready drum beats. In conjunction with the rest of the plugin’s features, these loops make you feel like you are working with a real drummer (without the annoyance of real life…)

The interface is one of the better ones out there. It features a resizable GUI so you can see the controls in as much detail as you need. It provides all the controls you need for shaping your drum’s sound with critical precision and flexibility. The raw sound is great sounding drums on their own, but with the additional sampling, you can create pretty much any drum tone you can imagine.

The samples have wide velocity ranges, so you can create some very natural-sounding performances that don’t have to be at full aggression all the time. It literally comes with all the sounds you need for a drum kit. That’s bass drums, snare drums, toms, hats, rides, crashes, splashes, chinas, percussion, claps, tambourine, cowbell, sound effects, and more.

I love the external triggering functionality. This smart feature listens to another audio track (perhaps a recording of a real drum kit) and then automatically layers in the matching drum hits with the original. This sample replacement/enhancement tool can save a tonne of time in the studio compared to manual arrangement, and quickly lets you improve the sound of a real drum recording or your own beats.

Besides using the internal library, you can load it with any of your own samples. This is a nice feature as it means the plugin can be used as a general sampler, rather than a simple drum plugin.

Don’t let the affordable price tag put you off. This is actually a pretty decent plugin that offers users a range of drum sounds and sampling functionality. Made by industry leaders Loopcloud, the Loopcloud DRUM vst has a bunch of useful tools and intelligent features.

It’s not quite as advanced as the other plugins here. It also doesn’t have quite the same diversity of samples and kits. That said, you still get 1000 sounds and 30 drum kits.

The plugin is built around 16 configurable pads. Each of these pads has independent controls in the style of a classic sampler. This gives you control over volume, pan, pitch tuning, filters, and more. You also get a mixer to set the balance between each of the pads. It features a whole range of built-in effects including reverb, delay, lo-fi, distortion, a DJ filter, a limiter, and others.

One neat feature of Loopcloud DRUM is its 16 separate output channels. This means you can route each pad to a separate mixer track in your DAW, giving you better control and distinction in the final mix. This is a professional function that lets this affordable plugin keep up with the big boys.

One of my favorite features is the automatic kit generator that instantly builds you a custom kit. This uses artificial intelligence to choose a selection of samples and configures them to the pads. This instantly gives you inspiring new kit selections and is a fun way to find new sounds for your beat.

Another cool part of this plugin is the drum machine-like 16-step sequencer. This lets you create drum patterns directly in the plugin itself, and is intuitive and easy to use. The sequencer features both velocity and swing, which helps to create more human-sounding beats.

A final element worth noting is the audio and MIDI export functions. You can drag and drop the full MIDI arrangement or master audio from the plugin directly to your DAW. This saves a lot of time compared to manually bouncing it out and is a feature not found in many other plugins, even 5 times the price.

The TAL Drum plugin is another hidden gem. While the price is relatively low, the power and functionality of this plugin are high and offer great value for money.

This low-cost drum sampler is quick and easy to use. It provides a simple workflow that helps to speed up drum production while also creating high-quality beats.

It’s built around a drag-and-drop workflow and can be run in either 16 or 32-pad mode. You can customize the appearance of pads by changing the color and name to personalize the plugin to your needs. Like the Loopcloud plugin above, this also offers 16 independent outputs to give you more control when mixing in your DAW.

It features a bunch of built-in effects, particularly focusing on achieving a lo-fi sound. This plugin is highly inspired by early drum hardware and samplers, so it helps you to achieve an authentic old-school sound by using similar downsampling algorithms to the original 80s hardware. You can choose from a range of algorithms that mimic the time-stretching styles of classic sampler units.

The sample features are pretty decent, and let you quickly chop and edit samples to your liking. It isn’t as in-depth as other plugins, but still offers all the core controls you need in drum software.

A cool unique feature is the ability to record audio directly into the plugin. This is a lot of fun to play with and makes it easy to get creative by experimenting with new sounds. The fact that each pad has velocity gives this even more usability.

You also get access to a modulation matrix. This has a built-in ADSR envelope, LFO, spline envelope, and other sources which can be used to control the filter, tuning, pan, and other variables. The modulation matrix lets you spice up your sounds to create more interesting textures.

It has a small library of drum sounds and drum machine hits. It’s nowhere near as comprehensive as some of the other best drum vst plugins on this list, but that’s a blessing in disguise as it doesn’t use as much hard drive space. That said, you still get over 20 kits made from 600+ samples. These samples are designed and recorded by some of the biggest names from across the music industry, and offer excellent quality.

If you know your drums, you’ll be able to appreciate the beauty of a luxurious 1964 Ludwig Hollywood kit. This VQ Drums plugin is an expansion for Native Instruments Kontakt, which is an incredibly powerful sampling tool. It’s worth noting that you need the full version of Kontakt to run this pack, which makes it unsuitable for producers without access.

It’s simple but it sounds fantastic. It’s recorded in a wooded room with high-quality microphones and preamps. The interface is basic, but it gives you everything you need.

It gives you an extensive sampling of the kit, with 6 velocity layers and round robins for each drum, resulting in 36 recordings for each part. You also get a range of articulations and can choose between two snare drums and two ride cymbals.

It’s a relatively minimalistic drum setup, but still has all you need to build a killer groove. It has a kick, snare, 3 toms, hi-hats, and 5 cymbals. Each has a customizable velocity ramp to find that sweet spot in your performance.

Because it’s built into Kontakt, you can use all the effects and mixer capabilities which is a bonus.

A nice element is a fact it’s recorded with 8 individual mics, each with a separate mixer channel for tweaking the balance. This helps you blend the sound to match the accompanying instruments.

It’s also got a pretty small install size at just under 3GB of drive space required. This is relatively small, but still gives you a nice range of samples for a single drum kit.