PianGo vs Soundslice
Two browser-based tools for practising from real sheet music, built for very different jobs. This page is written by the people who make PianGo, and it says plainly where Soundslice is the better choice.
Last updated 23 September 2026. Prices and features read from each product's own pages on that date.
The short answer
Soundslice is the more complete teaching platform: synced video, courses, student recordings and its own sheet-music scanner, at $20 per month for up to 100 students. PianGo is free with no account, and is the only one of the two that plans fingering automatically and draws the hands on the keys. Beginners who need to see which finger should use PianGo; studios that need assignments and recordings should use Soundslice.
At a glance
| PianGo | Soundslice | |
|---|---|---|
| Price for a student | Free | Free |
| Price for a teacher | Free today | $20/mo or $200/yr, up to 100 students |
| Account required | No | Yes, for both teacher and student |
| Automatic fingering | Yes — planned for the whole piece | No |
| Animated hands over the keys | Yes | No |
| Import MusicXML / MIDI | Yes, exact | Yes |
| Scan a photo or PDF | Beta — converted by hand, free | Yes — its own scanner since 2022 |
| Listens through the microphone | Yes | No |
| MIDI keyboard input | Yes | Yes |
| Synced video and audio | No | Yes |
| Courses and assignments | Not yet | Yes |
| Student recordings for the teacher | No | Yes |
| Saved progress | No | Yes |
| Interface languages | 8 | English |
Where Soundslice is genuinely better
Soundslice has been built since 2014 and it shows. It has its own optical music recognition engine, developed in-house since 2022, which reads PDFs and photographs directly — including skewed phone photos, poor lighting, automatic slant correction, chord diagrams and lyric OCR in twenty languages. PianGo has nothing comparable; during our beta, photos and PDFs are emailed in and converted by hand.
It also does the things a working studio needs and PianGo does not yet do at all: private courses, comments on a bar, student performance recordings sent back to the teacher, controlled sharing, and practice history that persists. Its player syncs notation to video and audio, which is how most teachers want to demonstrate a passage.
If you are running a studio today and need to assign work and see what came back, Soundslice is the tool to buy. $20 a month for up to 100 students, with students paying nothing, is fair for what it does.
Where PianGo is different
PianGo answers a narrower question: which finger, on which key, right now?
It plans fingering for the whole piece before you play a note. Every step gets candidate finger assignments scored against Parncutt's ergonomic span rules — stretches, thumb on black keys, crossings, hand shifts — and a Viterbi pass picks the cheapest sequence through the entire score. Fingerings already printed in the file are kept as-is. Those assignments then drive an animated hand that lies over the keyboard, so a beginner can see the shape of the hand rather than read a number above a note.
No other tool in this category does this, Soundslice included. It is the reason PianGo exists.
The rest follows from the same goal. It listens through the laptop microphone using YIN pitch detection with a spectral check so chords register, which means it works at an acoustic piano with nothing plugged in. It waits for the right note before moving on. It opens in a browser tab with no account, no install and no trial, and the interface is available in English, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Spanish, French, German and Portuguese, with song titles and composer credits translated too.
Who should use which
Use PianGo if
- You are teaching, or are, a beginner who needs to see the hand position and the fingering.
- You want a student to start in the next thirty seconds, on a shared family laptop, without an account.
- You have the music as MusicXML or MIDI — exported from MuseScore, say — and want it turned into a key-by-key lesson.
- Your students are not comfortable in English.
- There is no MIDI keyboard, only an acoustic piano and a laptop.
Use Soundslice if
- You need to assign work and see recordings of what your students actually played.
- Most of your material arrives as PDFs or photographs and you need them readable today.
- You teach guitar or other instruments as well as piano, or you need tablature.
- You want notation synced to a video of the passage being played.
- You need practice history that persists between lessons.
These are not mutually exclusive, and plenty of teachers will want both: Soundslice as the studio's system of record, PianGo as the free thing a beginner opens when they cannot work out what to do with their left hand.
Questions teachers ask
Does Soundslice show piano fingering?
Soundslice displays fingering numbers that are already written into a score, but it does not generate them. If your edition has no fingering marked, Soundslice will not suggest any. PianGo plans fingering for the whole piece automatically and keeps any that is already printed.
How much does Soundslice cost for teachers?
The Soundslice Teacher plan is $20 per month or $200 per year and covers up to 100 students, with additional students at 20 cents each per month. Students do not pay; they only need a free account. Soundslice also offers a free tier and a $5 per month Plus plan for individuals.
Is PianGo free?
Yes. The app, the fifty-six-piece library, MusicXML and MIDI import, microphone and MIDI input, and the fingering and hand overlay are all free with no account. Teacher accounts and assignments are in development and not available yet.
Can I use my own sheet music in PianGo?
Yes, if you have it as MusicXML (.musicxml, .xml, .mxl) or MIDI (.mid) — those are read exactly, including chords, ties, both staves and printed fingering. MuseScore exports both. Photos and PDFs are in beta: you email them in and we convert them by hand and add them to the library, free during the beta.
Does PianGo work with a MIDI keyboard?
Yes, over Web MIDI in Chrome or Edge. It also works with no keyboard at all — it can listen to an acoustic piano through the microphone, or you can click the on-screen keys.
Can I assign pieces to my students in PianGo?
Not yet. PianGo has no accounts today, so nothing is saved between visits and there is no teacher dashboard. Teacher accounts with assignments are what we are building next, and we are looking for teachers to tell us what they need.
Try it on a piece you are teaching this week
Open a MusicXML or MIDI file, or pick from the fifty-six built-in pieces. No account, nothing to install.