Artlist vs Pixabay

Meet the contenders

Artlist — All-in-one creator subscription

A music-first creator bundle: music, SFX, footage, templates and a large AI suite under one Max subscription.

Artlist began as a music licensing service for filmmakers and has grown, tier by tier, into the closest thing the market has to Brollvia's shape: one subscription that bundles royalty-free music, sound effects, stock footage, video templates and LUTs, wrapped in a fast-growing AI toolkit. Its flagship Max plan adds AI video, image and music generation, AI voiceover and avatars, and a Studio product for keeping characters and locations consistent across AI-generated scenes. Reviewers count roughly 60,000 music tracks, 50,000 sound effects, 180,000 footage clips and 20,000 templates — a mid-sized but carefully curated catalogue, positioned on quality and ease rather than raw scale.

Two Artlist features deserve respect from any filmmaker. The first is music depth: Max includes stems, so an editor can rebalance a track or lift the vocal out of a cue, and the catalogue is organised into playlists by mood, genre and use case. The second is Clearlist, which connects to your YouTube channel, monitors uploads and automatically clears the false copyright claims that plague stock-music users — unglamorous, monetisation-saving work that most libraries, Brollvia included, do not yet do for you. Artlist also ships plugins for Premiere Pro, After Effects, Final Cut and DaVinci Resolve, so its media can be pulled into the timeline without a browser round-trip.

Where Artlist's model differs from Brollvia's is openness. There is no documented public API for searching and licensing its catalogue, and the one report of an MCP integration — a secondary source describing Claude-based in-chat generation — is about generating media, not licensing the library, and was not verified on an Artlist page in our research. Licensing proof is account-bound: your coverage lives in your Artlist account rather than behind a public verification anyone can check. And while Max is a strong bundle, its price — $39.99 a month for Pro, before the RAW/LOG upgrade — sits well above Brollvia Pro.

Pixabay — Free stock library

The free library with audio: 6.2M+ assets including a real music and SFX catalogue — the most complete free option, with free's usual paperwork gap.

Pixabay is the other half of Canva's free-media empire, and in one respect it out-guns its sibling: breadth. Alongside photos, videos, illustrations and vectors, Pixabay carries music and sound effects — 230k+ music tracks within a claimed 6.2M+ assets — making it the only free library where a complete short film's media can, in principle, come from one free tab. For the world's zero-budget creators that is not a footnote; it is the product.

The caveats are the free model's caveats, plus one specific to audio. Pixabay's own documentation acknowledges that some music may be registered in YouTube's Content ID, meaning a track you are fully licensed to use can still draw an automated claim you must dispute — a rite of passage every volume creator eventually meets. And as with Pexels, free means no licence record per download, no extended licence, no indemnification, no teams product and contributors paid in exposure. The licence is clear and permissive; the evidence trail is yours to improvise.

Against Brollvia the shape of the choice is identical to Pexels, shifted by audio: Pixabay removes the "no music" argument, so the paid case rests entirely on paperwork, workflow and accountability — verifiable licences, panels in both NLEs, script-to-B-roll, agent licensing, generation on the record. For commercial producers those are the costs that actually bite. For everyone else, Pixabay is a genuinely good free library, and these pages say so without flinching.

Pricing, in each platform's own terms

Artlist

Artlist pricing rewards commitment and bundles. The entry point looks gentle — Music & SFX Social at $9.99/mo — but that buys no footage at all. The honest comparison against Brollvia Pro ($15/mo, unlimited everything) is Max: $29.99/mo for Social, $39.99/mo for Pro, billed annually, so $360–$480 a year against Brollvia's $99 annual launch rate. AI usage is where Artlist bills get unpredictable: Max Pro's price climbs steeply through AI-credit tiers, from around $50 at 16,500 monthly credits to $300+ at half a million, per Artlist's launch materials as summarised by reviewers. If you generate heavily, model your credit burn before the annual bill surprises you.

The RAW/LOG upgrade (+$20/mo) deserves a line of its own, because for colour-critical work it is not optional decoration — it is the difference between footage that grades like your camera originals and footage that does not. Brollvia has no equivalent tier today (its absence is scored honestly in the matrix below), so a fair total-cost comparison for a professional colour workflow is Max Pro + RAW/LOG at roughly $60/mo against Brollvia Pro at $15/mo with that format gap accepted. For everyone else — social, corporate, YouTube, most commercial work — the $15 flat rate is simply cheaper for a comparable bundle.

Pixabay

Pixabay costs $0 for everything, including the audio that makes it uniquely complete among free libraries — so the pricing analysis is really a risk analysis. The free licence's costs are probabilistic: a Content ID claim to dispute (an hour of admin), a client who wants licence evidence you cannot produce (a credibility cost), a takedown argument with no indemnifier behind you (a real cost, rarely). Brollvia Pro at $99/yr prices all three risks at roughly $8 a month. High-volume or client-facing work clears that bar easily; a hobby channel may never clear it at all, and should not pretend otherwise.

One more pricing reality: "free" libraries monetise attention, not licences, so their incentives run toward catalogue growth and ecosystem pull (both Pexels and Pixabay sit inside Canva's orbit) rather than toward the licensing paperwork professionals need. That is not a criticism — it is why the paperwork does not exist, and why a paid specialist can charge $15 for what is, in the end, mostly evidence and machinery.

In the edit: workflow

Artlist

In daily use, Artlist feels like a well-stocked record shop: strong playlists, quick previews, plugins that drop media into four different editors, and Clearlist quietly defending your monetisation after publish. The gaps show up when the workflow leaves the browser-and-timeline loop: there is no API for your tools to license footage programmatically, no script-to-shots matching, and no public page where a client or a platform can verify your licence — your proof is your account. Brollvia was designed for exactly that wider loop, at the cost of a younger catalogue.

Pixabay

Pixabay's workflow is generous and simple: search everything, download, keep a note of the source page if you are disciplined. Its API is free and capable within rate limits — fine for tools and prototypes, but it licenses nothing and records nothing. Brollvia's loop assumes the delivery end matters: assets arrive in Premiere or Resolve with licence records attached, searchable by frame or by script, and provable to a third party. Creators feel the difference exactly once — the first time a client or platform asks — and it tends to be decisive.

Switching away

From Artlist

Moving from Artlist to Brollvia is mostly a matter of re-downloading: footage you licensed under Artlist stays licensed under its terms for the uses you made, but your working library, playlists and project organisation do not transfer — no platform in this comparison offers library migration, Artlist included. The practical path is to let the annual plan lapse at renewal, run both for a month on active projects, and rebuild your staples as Brollvia collections and packs. If you rely on stems or Clearlist, weigh those two features honestly before switching; they are Artlist's strongest hold.

From Pixabay

As with any free library, there is nothing to cancel; the switch is a workflow habit for new commercial work. Keep source URLs for past Pixabay downloads in the project files (your only evidence trail), and be especially careful to note which audio tracks you used, in case a Content ID claim needs a dispute months later. Contributors weighing where to upload should compare exposure honestly against royalties: free libraries give reach; paid platforms give income; many portfolios use both deliberately.