Best Noise Gate VST Plugins in 2023 (Free & Paid)

Sometimes, simple is all you need. The SSi Pro Gate is a basic but effective plugin. Unlike many gate plugins, this is an analog modeled VST, which means it’s been designed to mimic the sound and workflow of real hardware devices. When using this noise gate plugin to remove unwanted noise it adds a nice subtle analog saturation.

In terms of features, it’s streamlined but has all the standard controls you need to gate signals and remove unwanted background noise. It comes with controls for gain, threshold, attack, release, and range control. It doesn’t come with any extra functionality like a sidechain control, lookahead, or filtering, but it gets the job done.

The built-in VU meter lets you monitor incoming levels, however, it’s not as useful as the full visual displays that other plugins on this list have. It’s probably going to have a similar level of functionality as your DAW’s gate, although it does have the analog sound.

While the plugin is limited, it is resource efficient and only uses a little amount of CPU for clean background noise attenuation. You can have a lot of these in your project before it will start lagging. It also comes with a bunch of presets designed to quickly solve a range of gate-related issues, and are geared towards certain instruments and scenarios.

Designed by Denise Audio, Poltergate is a creative gate effect with a unique approach to gating and diverse functionality.

This is more than a standard noise gate. Sure, it can perform all the standard gating tasks, but this plugin has a few extra tricks up its sleeve which makes it an exciting pick for creative producers.

Poltergate is sold as a hybrid noise gate plugin that mixes features from transient designers, gates, and bleed-removal tools all in one. This is a really powerful tool for shaping drums, although it works well on many instrument types.

The plugin comes with 4 distinct sections which work in tandem – Sidechain, Curve, Dynamics, and De-Bleed.

The de-bleed section is a powerful noise-removing tool that is ideal for removing unwanted tails and ‘bleed’ on mics from other instruments. This can instantly clean up a drum beat and leave it sounding much tighter and better defined. The Curve section lets you alter the transition curve.

The Dynamics section gives you precise control over the transient and sustained sections of your sounds. This means you can edit the punch and impact of sounds individually using the gate envelope. This section combines a mix of clipping, limiting, and transient shaping to let you sculpt the dynamics of your sounds in detail. You can push this area fairly hard too, which lets you add some saturation and distortion to your sounds.

My favorite feature is the EQ-based sidechain mode. This is a powerful (and rare) control that lets you choose which parts of the frequency spectrum are used in the detector circuit. This means you can focus on particular instruments or sections of a sound to activate the gate. For example, you could use it to only listen to the snare or kick drum frequencies in a drum recording.

Other features include a clean clipping algorithm to color sounds and give more warmth and thickness. Isolation mode – which you can use to listen to different parts of the incoming signal. A Flip mode switches the way the gate is working, so the sounds you can hear are swapped with the sounds that are removed, which can be used as a fun creative effect.

You also get a bunch of presets which demonstrate a range of situations where this plugin is useful.

Overall this is a powerful hybrid gating tool. It might be too complex and over-featured for basic gating tasks, but if you want something that offers a little more than the basic functions then Poltergate is a great pick.

The Oxford Drum Gate is a high-powered, premium drum plugin that comes with smart and futuristic features. This is a Sonnox plugin, so you’re guaranteed that it offers the highest quality in terms of design, sound, and power.

With an intuitive and productive user interface, this Sonnox plugin is probably one of the best tools for gating and controlling drum recordings. Sure, it’s mostly designed for drums, but it can still excel in many gating scenarios.

It has smart gating features, which detect the best way to process your drum audio. It understands the differences between different types of drum hit, like kicks, snares, toms, hats, and cymbals, and adjusts the transients and gating to compensate. This is incredibly powerful when working with a multi-mic’d drum kit, and saves a huge amount of time compared to manually processing the drums.

The Oxford Drum Gate has a whole load of other smart features – I can’t describe them all here! So check out the plugin page for more details. Most notably are the spectral decay editing and the built-in leveler. It can also automatically generate MIDI in real-time, which you can use to trigger additional samples. This feature could be an expensive plugin on its own. All of these features (and the others) are incredibly useful for a range of dynamics/gate-related tasks.

It’s going to be too expensive for many producers and might be overkill for basic gating work, however, if you spend a lot of time working with drum beats, this is one of the best tools out there.

FabFilter is one of the biggest names in the plugin industry. They are known to create some of the most powerful, efficient, and well-designed plugins on the market. They offer a range of professional, essentially industry-standard plugins that are designed with technical accuracy and clinical detailing in mind.

FabFilter’s Pro-G is the gating plugin on their lineup, and this is a beast of a gate. Like most FabFilter plugins, this has every control you need and more. The graphical user interface is incredibly intuitive and natural, and the visual display lets you see exactly how the gate is working. Fab’s plugins are designed to increase workflow efficiency whilst also providing a comprehensive level of control, and Pro-G exceeded my expectations.

Pro-G has all the essential gate controls – threshold, attack, hold, release, range, and lookahead. It comes with some extra powerful features too, like an internal filtered sidechain, external sidechaining, a multimode filter, a ratio control, independent controls for left and right channels, and knee control. You can also control the oversampling, which increases CPU usage to provide a boost in audio quality (up to 4x).

You can switch it into “Expert” mode, for even more detailed sidechaining and gating tools, including a multimode filter and a stereo sidechain input for triggering via an external audio signal. It also comes with 6 different algorithm modes including expanders and ducking. This is probably one of the best “technical” style gates out there. It has everything a professional needs without any unnecessary gimmick features.

The monitoring is clean, the gain reduction is precise, and the functionality is comprehensive – this is easily one of the best gate plugins you can find.

In terms of creative gating effects, I can’t think of anything better than Stutter Edit 2. This isn’t a traditional noise gate. It’s an expressive effect used to make sounds more exciting and rhythmic. Sure, you probably could use it as a standard gate, but I wouldn’t recommend it. However, if you’re looking for something more creative and colorful with sound design power, this is as good as it gets.

Stutter Edit is essentially a multi-effect with a strong emphasis on gating and envelope shaping using an internal step sequencer. Use it to quickly create classic pumping trance gate effects, rhythmic sequences, and more. It works like a dream on vocals, pads, synths, and other melodic and harmonic instruments. This rhythmic gate plugin is an essential tool for any electronic music producer.

It uses gates and a range of other effects to rhythmically process sounds. Effects processors include distortion, lo-fi, chorus, comb filter, reverb, flanger, phaser, low pass filter, tape stop, high pass filter, and delay. All these effects are activated rhythmically to enhance the motion and texture of input sounds.

The entire plugin and its rhythmic sequence can be synced to your project via midi to ensure the processing is perfectly in time with the rest of your track. It also comes with a bunch of professional presets to kick-start your inspiration, ranging from rhythmic patterns to a classic distorted gated sound.

Stutter Edit is ideal for making glitchy effects, rhythmic stutters, and sweeping filters. It’s perfect for chopping up samples and brings a new exciting dimension to old, static sounds. It’s not a standard corrective gate, it’s a powerful gate-based creative multi-effect. It excels when being used as a rhythmic gate to generate rhythmic patterns.

This isn’t as embellished as other plugins here but is still a powerful and efficient noise gate. Mr Gate 6 definitely more geared towards corrective than creative tasks. (Although you can use it just as creatively as any standard gate plugin.)

It has all the standard features and controls you expect from a gate plugin. Threshold, ratio, attack, and release. You also get control for changing the knee type, and it has a variable lookahead control for increasing transparency and clarity and minimizing unwanted late gating.

The visual display is easy to understand and helpful. The time/amplitude chart shows you everything you need and helps you to get the gate settings in the right place.

It’s also worth noting the monitor feature switch, which enables you to listen directly to the trigger signal without hearing the full audio recording.

You also get a bunch of useful presets built into this full band gate plugin.

This simple but refined gate vst plugin gives you everything you need for detailed and transparent gating and gain reduction, packaged in an intuitive and easy-to-use plugin.

The BT ExpanderGate GX622 was one of the first gate vst plugins I brought. I like the sound, and the analog rack noise gate approach it takes. Not only does it perform well as a gating tool, but it also adds a nice analog saturation characteristic to your audio.

In terms of controls, it provides everything you would expect – threshold, attack, decay, hold, and range. It also includes extra controls for a high pass and low pass filter section. These filters are part of an internal sidechain mode that helps you target the gate to specific frequencies, giving you more control, expression, and precision.

It features a VU style meter, which is good enough, although I prefer the more modern style time chart displays like the Wave Arts vst plugin above. Still, it helps you to find the sweet spot for your values and get your gate snapping just as you need.

It comes with a bunch of presets and is highly resource-efficient. It is nearly twice the price of the WaveArts plugin above but has a very different approach. This has a more retro-styled interface, which, while being more limiting, encourages a different workflow. I think the extra money is also going on the analog tone, which enhances the feeling of the audio you run through it.

Pitch shifters are another essential creative tool. Have a look at my review of the best pitch shifter vst plugins!