Tonara alternatives for piano teachers
Tonara closed at the end of 2023 and a lot of studios are still running on whatever they grabbed in a hurry. This is an honest look at the six tools that absorbed its users, what each one actually replaces, and what they cost now.
Last updated 23 September 2026. Prices read from each product's own pages on that date.
The short answer
Tonara shut down on 8 December 2023 and is not coming back — its apps were delisted and its domain parked. The closest single replacement is Practice Space at $15.99 a month, which took most of Tonara's assignment-and-rewards model. Practis, Vivid Practice and Better Practice each cover part of the job more cheaply, and Soundslice replaces the notation side rather than the practice-tracking side.
What happened to Tonara
Tonara was an Israeli music-education company whose app let teachers assign work, track how long students practised, exchange messages, and run points and leaderboards across a studio. It was free for up to ten students and $9.99 a month for unlimited, which made it the default in a lot of private piano studios.
It announced it was closing with little warning, and the apps shut down on 8 December 2023. The teaching community was caught flat-footed — there are still podcast episodes and blog posts from teachers working out where to go. If you are reading this because a student asked why their app stopped working: that is why, and the answer is that it is gone for good.
One thing worth taking from it. Tonara was funded, well-liked and widely used, and it still closed. When you pick a replacement, it is worth asking how the company makes money and whether that will still be true in three years.
The six replacements, compared
| Tool | Price | What it replaces |
|---|---|---|
| Practice Space | $15.99/mo, one teacher | The closest match. Assignments, rewards, recordings — Tonara's engagement model, more or less intact. Where most former Tonara studios ended up. |
| Practis | $9.99 / 5 students $14.99 / 10 $39.99 / 30 |
Practice evidence rather than gamification: piece-level logs, teacher notes, recordings, lesson prep and recaps. Good if you cared more about what happened between lessons than about badges. |
| Vivid Practice | $9/mo, up to 10 students | Structured practice with deliberately no gamification. The cheapest way back to assignments if your studio is small. |
| Better Practice | $4.25 per student/mo | Lesson plans and student motivation. Watch the arithmetic — a twenty-student studio is $85 a month, which is more than any flat-rate option here. |
| Soundslice | $20/mo, up to 100 students | A different job: interactive notation, synced video, private courses, student recordings, and its own sheet-music scanner. Replaces the score side of Tonara, not the practice-streak side. |
| My Music Staff | $16.95/mo | Scheduling, invoicing and studio admin. Tonara had some of this bolted on; this is the tool that does it properly. Not a practice app. |
| PianGo | Free | The practice session itself, for beginners: automatic fingering, animated hands on the keys, and a step that waits until the note is right. No assignments and no teacher dashboard — see the honest note below. |
How to choose
- You want Tonara back, more or less. Practice Space. It is the closest thing to what you lost, and the migration path most teachers already took.
- You have five to ten students. Vivid Practice at $9, or Practis at $9.99. Both are cheaper than Practice Space and cover the core of it.
- You want evidence rather than points. Practis. Its whole design is about showing you what happened between lessons.
- Your students are older or more advanced and the score matters more than the streak. Soundslice.
- What you actually miss is the scheduling and invoicing. My Music Staff, and pair it with one of the practice tools above.
- You want something free your students can open right now. PianGo, with the caveat in the next section.
Where PianGo honestly does not replace Tonara
We make PianGo, and this page would be less useful if we pretended it was a drop-in replacement. It is not. PianGo has no accounts today, which means no assignments, no practice logs, no messaging and no teacher dashboard — the four things Tonara was actually for. Nothing is saved between visits.
What it does instead is the practice session itself. It reads MusicXML and MIDI exactly, plans fingering for the whole piece using Parncutt's ergonomic span rules with a Viterbi pass, draws the hands over the keyboard so a beginner can see the shape, and listens through the microphone or a MIDI keyboard, waiting for the right note before moving on. It is free, needs no account, runs in a browser tab and speaks eight languages.
So: pick one of the paid tools above for assignments, and point beginners at PianGo when they cannot work out what to do with their left hand. Teacher accounts are what we are building next, and we would rather hear from you before we build them than after.
Questions teachers ask
What happened to Tonara?
Tonara shut down its apps on 8 December 2023. The iOS and Android listings were removed and the company domain is parked. It had been free for up to ten students and $9.99 a month for unlimited students.
Is Tonara coming back?
No. The apps have been delisted for nearly three years and the domain is no longer operating. Treat any site claiming otherwise with suspicion.
What is the closest replacement for Tonara?
Practice Space, at $15.99 a month for one teacher. It carries over the parts most studios relied on — assignments, student rewards and recordings — and it is where the largest share of former Tonara teachers moved.
Is there a free Tonara alternative?
Not a full one. Every tool that does assignments and practice tracking charges, from $9 a month upwards. PianGo is free but does not do assignments; Soundslice has a free tier that does not include the teacher features.
What is the cheapest Tonara alternative for a small studio?
Vivid Practice at $9 a month covers up to ten students, and Practis is $9.99 for five. Below about twelve students those beat Practice Space; above roughly twenty, flat-rate plans beat Better Practice's $4.25 per student.
Can I still get my data out of Tonara?
Almost certainly not — the service has been off since December 2023 and the domain is parked. If you exported anything at the time, keep it; there is no live service left to export from now.
Tell us what your studio actually needs
We are designing teacher accounts for PianGo now — assignments, a student invite link, and seeing whether a piece was practised. If you lost a studio's worth of history when Tonara closed, we would like to hear what you would not want to lose again.