Eh, bought it but got fed with numerous little annoyances (and one glaring omission) and jumped ship to Reaper. It has some nice features but the interface lacks, uh, logic.
There’s a significant difference between £110 and £179. That’s a lot of pints! Anyway, I love the workflow of Live 11, where I primarily use arrangement view. On a Mac.
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What are everyone’s current thoughts on Logic vs Live Suite for completely ITB production in a studio (not stage) context? I’ve thought about giving Live a go because the workflow seems like it could be a bit more intuitive/grooveboxy, but at this point it seems like Logic does just about everything Live does (apart from Max, Push to some degree), with some meaningful upgrades (step sequencer, session drummers), arguably better native plug-ins, and for much cheaper. What am I missing?
The greatest synth of all time: Operator 
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Logic gives you the best linear workflow in my book. That is, if you like to plan out your songwriting or approach it in a very structured way, it‘s a great DAW to employ.
Live and Bitwig have a very similar philosophy, combining non-linear, loop based experimentation with linear arrangement. Bitwig is created by a former Live developer team.
Live is arguably the most ubiqutuous DAW in the world today, it does a lot of things, does them really well and has a tried and tested UI. Plus Max4Live integration is amazing if you want to go down that route (it‘s a visual programming language — I think lol) or, if you don’t want to create devices yourself, there’s always third-party M4L devices that add significant functionality to Ableton Live, many of them free of charge.
Bitwig is very nice as well and does a few Live things better than Live lol. For example, I much prefer how Bitwig handles the bridge between session view (loop based creating) and the areanger view (linear songwriting). It has a mixed view between these modes that alignes different takes of the same track horizontally, and whichever you trigger gets written into your linear timeline…Ableton does exactly the same thing, but its takes are arranged vertically to the horizontal arranger view, so if you have a lot going on I find it easier to keep an overview of it all in Bitwig.
Bitwig also has conditionals & probabilities (akin to Elektron sequencers) baked into the DAW. Plus it has an incredible modulator system, where you can easily and quickly modulate anything in your session…it’s plug n play. Lastly Bitwig has got The Grid, which is a modular environment that allows you to build your own synths, effects and sequencers visually without any programming at all. The Grid is pretty amazing, in my book less powerful than M4L on the deep end, but MUCH more accessible and rewarding on the shallow and semi-deep end. Bitwig’s UI is more colourful than Live’s minimalist grey UI, this could be a plus or a minus for you, depending on how you look at it.
You really can’t go wrong with any of them. I own Live 10 Suite, Logic Pro X and Bitwig. I decided not to upgrade to Live 11 because Live 10 had some serious performance & optimisation issues and Live 11 was to slow to adapt to the M1 platform that I’m using. I got Bitwig for a great price so I figured it would be worth it for the Grid alone…which it definitely was/is. Logic also has a non-linear mode, I haven’t really messed with it, I still associate Logic with a purely linear workflow, so that’s a bit of bias working against Logic here 
Worth mentioning that the three have very different pricing models:
Logic Pro X you buy once and enjoy consequent updates for free…at least it’s been like this for freaking some 8-9 years now…so that’s huge. Logic also has a very decent instrument library it comes with, fantastic value for money.
Live has your more traditional pricing model, buy the current major version number, get the minor updates for free, pay an upgrade fee when a major version number is released…cycle should be around 3-4 years if I remember this correctly.
Bitwig’s model is more unusual. Buy it once and receive updates for 12 months, major or minor version updates are included. If your upgrade plan expires you no longer get version upgrades, neither major nor minor, however they so provide bug fixes still, at least that’s what I read lol. If after 3 years of not owning their upgrade plan to decide to buy another round of 12 months (usually anywhere from 129 - 159€) you instantly get upgraded to whatever is the most current version. So this can be very positive or really expensive, depending on how important it is to you to always be up to date
To wrap up, I’d say if you compose more structured / in a linear fashion, def get Logic. It’s a beast. If you prefer loop-based/non-linear creation (ie come up with four bars here, two bars there, mix and match them till you have something you like etc) then go Live or Bitwig based on above outlined differences (whichever suits you better / excites you more).
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Thanks for mentioning the education discount on the apple suite, I’m a professor and for me that’s a deal well worth considering in order to have them as non-subscription items. (Your campus might also have deals on Adobe suite for video, either for free or very reduced price, worth checking.)
I too am leaning toward getting Ableton suite eventually (currently using lite and skipping Overbridge), but as I saw recently in another thread, Logic is a pretty good deal for its sample library, plug-ins like pitch correction, and the like even if not used as a primary DAW.
I’ve been learning video basics with Resolve, and I’ve found it shockingly powerful for free software, especially after trying to work with the limitations of iMovie.
Why do you need to upgrade your DAW? Do you intend on using your DAW for more than a glorified tape recorder using OB?
If you’re wanting to use fx for mixing/masterign, then buy fx for mxing/mastering.
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gotcha well I like the ipad app for Logic and works fine. I find studio one the easiest to work in followed by logic. Hated Bitwig and Reason and Ableton. But that is probably just the way my brain works and workflow. Others love it. Had Cubase at one time that was pretty good composition DAW. Honestly for me, I prefer jamming live and dumping stems to an SD Card to deal with later.
Great post – have you tried live loops in Logic?
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I did a DAW beauty contest when I got back into production (former Reaper and Sonar user) and ended up choosing Bitwig over Live, FL, Reaper and Studio One.
That said knowing your tools beats everything else so if you know Live stick with Live.
That said Bitwig is probably not a massive jump if you are a Live user.
To my great shame I have to admit that I haven’t. It looks to work like Bitwig’s hybrid view (clip + arranger view), but I’m so used to Logic as a linear powerhouse that I didn’t even bother to check it out (similar to the Sketchpad in Studio One, which took me like three years to click on lol).
I got Logic and Studio One after nearly 20 years with Ableton Live, in an attempt to get away from loop/clip-based creation towards a more linear design. I find that I jam on hardware in loops and finally use my DAW more and more to just record the performances and then mix and master.
At least that’s mt most productive workflow so far (I currently use Studio One the most, cause it has a few things I really like, like ARA integration and the Project page with integrated mastering tools). Nevertheless, I still do mess about with a clip-based DAW, primarily Bitwig, in particular when eg traveling or when I want to explore my VSTs in more detail…basically anytime I want to jam when I don’t have my hardware around.
Long answer to a short question, I guess it’s the shame for not trying the live looping mode in Logic that made it this long 
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I’d say this is accurate. Loop-based creation with Logic is pretty solid at this point, for example (even including built-in support for launchpads). The one thing it doesn’t do yet that I really miss is Follow Actions for clips/loops.
And Logic still uses a channel-strip-style mixing which is arguably more intuitive but requires that whole click-to-open-a-floating-plugin-window-to-edit-settings thing instead of Live/Bitwig’s long-strip-of-plugins-along-the-bottom thing. This more than anything else trips me up when going back and forth. It requires different muscle memory/where am I looking instincts.
And as others have mentioned, M4L on Live and The Grid on Bitwig are just really freaking cool. If you want to do some sort of modular-like patching on the DAW level, Logic really doesn’t have a solution for that.
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Bitwig and Logic are both great products, but Ableton I would say has more of culture built around it, including having folded in the Max community. This has lots of benefits, from events, to a creative and maker culture around the product (ie packs, max devices, live sets), Ableton’s own regular updates and new products, companion iPad apps, and the way Ableton is often (like iOS) a place where developers focus their attention when looking for a host app - same goes for hardware things and midi controllers.
A lot of it points in Ableton’s favour, it can be a lot of fun, especially when you’re starting out (don’t forget to resample and record everything you’re doing) - but as others say another app like Pro Tools or Logic is probably a better place to mix and master once you’ve got your composition done.
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I really tried to love it, it’s optimized and the pricing is great, only beaten by Reaper. But I couldn’t.
Actually I sold my Mac and switched to the iPad, because Cubasis with select AUs turned out to be sufficient for my needs (recording and mixing hardware).
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Every time I try logic it just feels like a mess. I can’t stand those track icons either. Like I need a giant keyboard on a stand icon to tell me it’s an instrument track. LAME
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As far as I remember, you can replace the track icons. I added pics of my synths and they looked super neat.
Still couldn’t love it, though. But for those who can gel with its workflow, it’s a lot of good stuff for 200 bucks.
I feel the same about Live. I wouldn’t try to fight it. Different things click for different folks, but it’s all good.
I apologise if I’m repeating myself (I may have chimed in here or elsewhere already) but Bitwig is definitely worth a try if you want a music production “box of tricks” to play and experiment with. I appreciate that Live has M4L which is clearly very powerful, but the whole of Bitwig is a big modular playground. You can split/route audio from anywhere to anywhere else. You can use a many modulators as you want for any parameter (envelopes, LFOs, random stuff, sequences and many more weird things). You can use audio sidechain from any track to modulate any other parameter e.g. sidechain from your kick to modulate the filter cutoff on a totally different track, or do dynamic EQ natively by modulating an EQ band from another track.
It has a lot of shared DNA with Live but it’s definitely it’s own thing. I am not a “fanboy” as I hate all that crap but it’s definitely worth a look if you want an electronic music production toybox. You can go very deep down the rabbit hole, and the built-in modular synth/fx system called The Grid is very deep as well.
EDIT there are a few little mad professor things I haven’t seen elsewhere as well (although happy to be corrected) like the fact that they “open up” the FX devices e.g. you can use the native delay but stick any plugin you want inside the feedback loop, and the same with the reverb. They have a delay with 4 lines but you can stick plugins inside the pre input and the feedback for every different delay line and then use the feedback matrix to control the interaction between every delay line. It’s mad.
Another example is the new transient tools. There is a device called "transient split " where you can apply different plugins and FX to the transient and the tonal parts of a sound. In terms of sound design it’s pretty next-level stuff.
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If you can live with logic, it’s A LOT cheaper.
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I don’t know why more people don’t use bitwig, it really does everything well. Only thing is that I wish more people would use it so it would get better daw hardware controller integration. Everything works with live and ableton, but poor bitwig has to have driven by moss kludging everything together for it.
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