Deezer VS. Spotify, which is better?

Spotify is the biggest premium music streaming service globally, with 182 million paid users as of May 2022. Deezer is quite a bit smaller, with a subscriber base of around 16 million. But is Spotify that much better than its rival? We’ll take a look at all the differences between Spotify and Deezer to figure out which one comes out on top.

Deezer vs Spotify: Pricing and Music Quality

Deezer Free is an ad-supported plan designed for mobile devices. If you listen to Deezer Free on your phone or mobile device, for example, you can enjoy an excellent variety of playlists, with lyrics support for most tracks. If you listen to Deezer Free on your browser or the PC app, you'll only hear 30-second song snippets. You can subscribe to a premium account to remove this 30 second limit, but if you stick to the free music tier, Deezer is largely useless for computer-based listening. Deezer Free limits you to six skips per hour, has no offline mode, and has 128kbps, compressed MP3 streams. These are decent offerings, not unlike what you would see from a free Spotify account.

The cheapest paid-for plan is Deezer Premium, which costs $9.99 per month. Premium grants unlimited listening on all devices, unlimited song skips, full lyrics, and offline listening. Like Spotify, Deezer also offers a $14.99-per-month family plan that blesses six people with Deezer Premium access. A $4.99 student plan is available for college students between the ages of 18-25. In terms of audio quality, Deezer Premium serves up 320kbps, compressed MP3 streams.

Deezer HiFi (also known as Deezer Premium+ in some regions) costs $14.99 per month, and provides access to CD-quality music in the 16-bit/44.1kHz FLAC codec, as well as tracks in Sony’s 360 Reality Audio format. Deezer doesn't offer anything above CD-quality, so if you want cutting edge, Hi-Res Audio tracks, you must look elsewhere. Amazon Music Unlimited, Qobuz, and Tidal feature Hi-Res audio tiers.

Spotify also offers a popular free tier that gives access to the entire music catalog, but with significant restrictions. You’ll get ads with your music and, if you want to listen to a particular album, you’ll only be able to play it on shuffle. Free users cannot play individual tracks on demand. Finally, streaming quality on the free tier is limited to just 160Kbps.

Spotify Premium costs $10.99/month. This tier also increases audio quality to 320Kbps. Spotify's Family Plan grants six people individual premium accounts for an incredibly wallet-friendly $16.99 per month. If you need a Spotify plan that only covers two people, Spotify Duo is the way to go. The $14.99-per-month tier is essentially a Family Plan for a pair of people, minus Spotify Kids. It even has its own take on Family Mix: Duo Mix.

A Spotify student plan is available for $5.99 per month, but it's not your typical student plan. This one also includes an ad-supported Hulu plan. That's a ridiculously good deal that no other streaming music service can match.

And the Winner Is: Deezer

As you can probably tell, the prices only have slight differences. This means that you should base your selection on the quality of the platform. However, Spotify lacks the option to listen to HiFi quality. Spotify HiFi is slated to arrive in select markets, at which point Spotify Premium users, who pay $9.99 per month, will be offered the chance to upgrade. Last February, Spotify promised to launch Spotify HiFi "beginning later this year". That phrasing led us to believe it would be nearer the end of 2021 rather than imminently. But it's now 2022 and there's no Spotify HiFi. Yes, it's late.

Deezer vs Spotify: Music Library

Both Spotify and Deezer have massive music libraries with over 82 million and 90 million tracks, respectively. There isn’t really a glaring difference between Spotify and Deezer in terms of the amount of music content. As expected, both apps have different approaches to playlist curation, and the choice will be down to what your preferences are. In addition to music, Deezer and Spotify also offer a selection of non-music content, such as podcasts, audiobooks, radio, and more.

Spotify's a rich collection, and we're pleasantly surprised that it includes Dr. Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech (part of the HistorySpeaks podcast) in its entirety. In fact, Spotify has a lot of non-music extras, such as The Joe Budden Podcast and select Hulu Originals soundtracks. These extras act as a counter to LiveXLive's DJs and music history channels, as well as Tidal-like, in-depth music editorials and exclusive videos.

And the biggest difference is in the podcasts. Spotify is notorious for making an exclusive deal with Joe Rogan, but he’s not the only one. Other huge names like Michele Obama, Kevin Bacon, and Dax Shepard make Spotify the go-to for podcasts.

At Deezer, you will find the Shows category that contains a multitude of programs and all the broadcasts of the major conventional radio stations. Note that podcasts are only available on the Deezer website.

And the Winner Is: Spotify

All-in-all, both platforms are great at this point. The music selection is bigger by a margin, and nothing can beat the Spotify podcasts library.

Deezer vs Spotify: Music Discovery

Deezer and Spotify each have options that allow their users to receive personalized music recommendations. Spotify has Daily Mix, Discover Weekly, Release Radar, as well as Artists, Genre, Mood, and Decade Mixes. Deezer has multiple daily mixes, as well as Monday Discovery, Sunday Chill, and Flow.

Both also recommend playlists, new artists, and music by mood and genre, which helps you discover new music. The one main difference is Deezer’s Flow mix, which keeps going indefinitely, and can be modified in real-time based on your preferences. When you click on its banner on Deezer, you are redirected to a playlist specially created for you. The selection of recommended tracks is made based on your heart usage, whether you like a song or not, and on your genre and artist preferences when you created your account.

Deezer approaches music discovery with the help of Collaborative Filtering. This basically gives you recommendations based on what people with similar tastes as you like. In addition to this, Deezer also makes use of your likes, listening history, and general activity on the app to lock down your musical preferences.

Spotify, on the other hand, uses a hybrid algorithm consisting of three types – Collaborative Filtering, Natural Language Processing, and Raw Audio Modeling. The latter two types work by analyzing a song’s lyrics and melody. When combined with your activity on the app, it produces a pretty powerful algorithm capable of giving you accurate recommendations. It has the popular Discover Weekly playlist containing songs from artists and genres you usually listen to. You get a new one every Monday with 30 tracks. The service also creates up to six daily mixes based on your listening habits. There’s also a Release Radar playlist with songs from new releases the service thinks you’ll like.

And the Winner is: Spotify

Deezer undoubtedly has some pretty good discovery features, most of which probably require more time to calibrate. Spotify, in particular, is really good at this not just because of the sheer amount of playlists it offers, but also because of how specific they can be.

Deezer vs Spotify: Which is Better?

Spotify is probably the world’s number one on-demand music streaming platform out there, but Spotify has its downsides too – lowest per stream royalty rates, obnoxious ads, missing and unavailable albums, etc.

While the premium plan of Deezer maxes out at 320 kbps, same as Spotify, Deezer does have the HiFi plan which offers CD-quality music at 1,411 kbps. So, Deezer does have an edge over Spotify when it comes to streaming quality. Which streaming service you crown the winner here depends on what you’re looking for in a streaming service. If HiFi audio is the most important thing to you and you’re not willing to wait for the release of Spotify HiFi, get Deezer HiFi.

However, Spotify is still a brilliant service and has a few advantages over Deezer. The main one is the selection of podcasts. There are more of them available, and a few popular and exclusive ones will make it to the service soon. As far as musical discoveries are concerned, we are more inclined towards Spotify. If these things are more important to you than the better audio quality, Spotify is the way to go.

Fortunately, you can try both platforms for free, so you can always change your mind later.

How to move playlists from Deezer to Spotify?

If you need to transfer playlists from Deezer to Spotify, you’d better download Deezer playlist, then you can upload them to your Spotify. To download playlists from Deezer, Ondesoft Deezer Music Converter is your best choice. For Deezer users, no matter for free or HiFi users, it enables you to convert your Deezer songs into several formats including MP3, M4A, WAV, FLAC, AIFF, and AAC. Ondesoft Deezer Music Converter is able to download and convert Deezer Music at 5X faster speed, making it really convenient and fast. It allows you to download Deezer Music offline without any limitation, then you can move playlists from Deezer to Spotify with ease.

1. Launch Deezer Music Converter

Download, install and run Ondesoft Deezer Music Converter on your Mac or Windows. Click the Sign in button and log in your Deezer account.

Click the Key icon to register it if you have purchased a license. If you don't have a license, go ahead with the free trial version.

2. Change output format(optional)

The default output format is lossless M4A. Ondesoft Deezer Music Converter also supports converting Amazon Music to MP3, AAC, FLAC, WAV and AIFF.

Output File Name: name the songs with any combination of Title, Artist, Album, Playlist Index, Track Number. For example, if you choose Title and Artist, Tylor Swift's song Lover will be named as Lover Tylor Swift.mp3.

Output Organized: organize downloaded songs by Artist, Album, Artist/Album or Album/Artist.

3. Select music

Follow the on-screen instructions to choose the playlist or album you want to convert.

Click Add songs.

4. Start Conversion

By default, all songs in the playlist/album will be checked. If there are songs you don't want to convert, please uncheck the box. Then click Convert button to start downloading songs to the format you choose.