We've all heard of Pandora, Spotify, Apple Music, Google Play Music, and others. But have you ever heard of Deezer? Deezer has been around since 2007 but wasn't made fully available in the United States until July 2016. For once, users in the US were one of the last to receive access to a service, and, having tried Deezer, all we can say is, "It's about time!"

Yes, Deezer is good enough to compete with the big boys like Spotify and Apple Music. Here's everything you need to know about Deezer if you're thinking of switching over.

Feature Breakdown: Deezer Free vs. Premium

Before diving into the features, you should know that Deezer has four account types, similar to Spotify's subscription plans. The four account types are Free, Premium, Family, Student, and Hi-Fi. Paid plans have their prices and slight variations in available features.

Here's a brief overview of the different plans and their respective subscription prices:

  • Free—the basic free account.
  • Premium—Full access for $9.99/month or $7.49/month paid annually.
  • Family—Curated for family users with Premium benefits for up to six users, including a kid-friendly profile, for $14.99/month.
  • Student—Full Premium benefits but at half the cost ($4.99/month).
  • Hi-Fi—Premium benefits plus access to lossless audio files at 16-bit/44.1kHz for $14.99/month. In some instances, Hi-Fi tracks have 360 Reality Audio which outputs immersive spatial sound.

We're only going to focus on the first two account types for this article. The rest build upon these two.

What Features Does Deezer Free Tier Offer?

Deezer free sign up

Deezer's free tier offers the following features:

  • Mixes: A dynamically-generated sequence of songs that sound similar to a given artist or belong to a given genre. Think of it like the "artist radio" feature that other music streaming services have.
  • Flow: A mix of songs based on your tastes, at least according to the songs you listen to on Deezer and the songs you add to your favorites. It's always evolving and adapting. Deezer also offers Flow Moods, an extension of flow that allows you to pick a mood. Available moods include You & Me, Motivation, Chill, Melancholy, Focus, and Party.
  • Lyrics: You can play any song and jam along with Deezer's Lyrics feature powered by LyricFind.
  • Personalized recommendations: Enjoy custom recommendations based on your listening history.

Now that you know the benefits offered by Deezer's free tier, it only makes sense that it doesn't come without limitations.

Deezer Free accounts have these limitations:

  • Only play songs in shuffle mode—you can't pick and play a track. Selecting an individual song from an artist's page only plays a 30-second preview.
  • Periodic unskippable audio ads between songs.
  • Up to 128 kbps MP3 audio quality.
  • Six song skips per hour.
  • No audio scrubbing.
  • No offline listening.
  • Limited access to tracks.
  • Mobile-only streaming. While you can access your free account via Web or desktop apps, playing a song only gives you a 30-second snippet. If you wish to stream music for free, there are plenty of free online music streaming platforms without limitations.

You can sign up and stream music and podcasts for free on Deezer. Alternatively, if you start with a 30-day trial, then cancel afterward, Deezer will switch your plan to free when the period ends.

What Features Does Deezer Premium Offer?

360 Reality Audio on Deezer
Image Credit: Deezer

The Premium plan includes everything in the free plan plus the following:

  • Offline playback: Download songs to your device so that you can play them from anywhere at any time. Possibly the most important feature offered by Deezer (or any music streaming service).
  • High audio quality: Deezer automatically optimizes audio files and upgrades the audio quality from 128 kbps to 320 kbps, which is about the best level of quality that most users can hear but not the highest quality on the market. If you want the best, you have to pay for Deezer's Hi-Fi plan, which includes FLAC files at 1411 kbps.
  • Play on-demand: Select any song you want and listen with unlimited skips.
  • Ad-free listening experience: Stream content without ad interruption.
  • Unlimited access to tracks: Play all tracks in Deezer's music catalog.

The closest competitor to Deezer is obviously Spotify, and it's safe to say that, when it comes to the differences between Spotify Free and Spotify Premium, Spotify's free version might be better than Deezer's. However, Deezer paid plans shares a lot of the same benefits as Spotify Premium. Feature-wise, they're pretty much neck and neck.

Which Devices Can You Use Deezer On?

Stream Deezer across compatible devices

Deezer is available on a wide range of devices and platforms. Here are some of the platforms from which you can stream your content on Deezer:

  • Web (Chrome, Firefox, Safari)
  • Windows 7 or later
  • macOS (version 10.13 or later)
  • iPhone, iPod, and iPad (iOS 14 and iPadOS 14 or higher)
  • Android (version 6.0 or higher)
  • Smart TVs (Available on popular smart TV operating systems including Android TV, Hisense Vidaa, LG's WebOS, and Samsung's Tizen OS)
  • Smart speakers (Apple HomePod, Amazon Echo, Google Home, Google Nest, and Sonos, among others)
  • Wearables (Apple Watch, Fitbit Versa 2, Versa, and Ionic, Garmin, and any watch running Google's Wear OS)

Deezer is also available on many other platforms, like Waze, Apple CarPlay, and Xbox, to name a few. Head over to Deezer's supported devices page to see if your device is supported. Additionally, Deezer allows you to control playback hands-free using Siri, Google Assistant, or Amazon Alexa.

Deezer Web Player: Solid With Room to Improve

Deezer's Web player has plenty of white space and may be unintuitive for someone used to a jam-packed UI like Spotify's Web player that gives you more information at a glance. Deezer has a number of categories on the left, while most of the space is dedicated to content, as you'll find on modern music players.

Your current song plays at the bottom of the page, and you get easy access to playback controls and essential features like lyrics, shuffle, streaming quality settings, and more. The availability of dark mode does make things look a little bit better, but the UI will grow on you in no time.

Deezer's Web player

Like other music streaming platforms, Deezer prioritizes personalized recommendations over everything else. You can search for everything from the universal search feature at the top of the page.

The search feature is surprisingly good. Typing out a query brings up a sub-panel with quick matches: hashtags, artists, albums, tracks, playlists, and various mixes. Hitting "Enter" takes you to a full search.

You can filter the results further by type, artist, album, playlist, podcast, profiles, etc.

The explore page in Deezer's music streaming app

Overall, the Deezer Web player is solid. It takes a bit of getting used to, but once you're comfortable with it, Deezer proves itself more than capable.

Deezer Desktop Apps: Simple, Identical Design

Deezer's desktop app on macOS

Deezer offers desktop apps for both Windows and Mac. The app's user interface is identical on both platforms and, even better, looks similar to the Web player. This is a plus as it makes it easy to navigate around after switching between Deezer apps and the Web player or between the app on macOS and Windows. Using the Deezer desktop app, you get access to all mobile and Web player features.

The app has four major options on the left for navigation, Music, Podcasts, Explore, and Favorites. Explore gives you access to the entire Deezer's channels. You can navigate through the different options and select what's best for you. The Favorites tab is where all your favorites live, whether it's an artist, your recently played song or podcast episode, personal playlists, albums, and more.

However, what's unique to the desktop app and Web player is the ability to upload MP3 files to your Deezer account. You can upload up to 2,000 files. One limitation to this awesome feature is the MP3 file must not be larger than 200MB. But, well, as long as you don't plan to upload your FLAC files, you should be good with this limit.

Deezer Mobile Apps: Clean, Smooth, and Beautiful

Deezer is also available on mobile, and this is probably where you'll spend most of your time listening to music, live radios, or podcasts. It's a good thing that Deezer's mobile apps are the most developed and pleasant to use.

Deezer on mobile isn't all too different from most other music streaming apps, but it has a level of polish and speed that can set it one pace ahead.

Simply put, it looks nice. The screen estate is used well, and it never feels sparse or wasted, yet there's enough white space in all the right places so that it never feels cramped either.

We love that it has modular audio quality settings that you can set to make sure you strike the perfect balance of quality and data usage. You can select the streaming and download quality over Wi-Fi and mobile data. However, remember that available audio quality options depend on your plan.

Is Deezer Right for You?

Deezer's 90 million track library contains a lot of mainstream music and lesser-known niche music. Additionally, the platform has a rich catalog of podcasts, including those from top brands like BBC, CNN, Netflix, The New York Times, TED, and more. While not as popular as Spotify or Apple Music, Deezer has solid features.

One of its best offerings is the ability to stream lossless FLAC files at 16-bit/44.1kHz, which offers the best music quality. In addition to the standard features, Deezer has some additional unique ones like its lyrics' translation feature, the ability to upload MP3 files, and special live programming sessions called Deezer Sessions. It also has thousands of live radio stations from around the world. At the time of writing, Deezer boasts over 32,000+ radio stations playing a wide variety of music.

Despite having all of these features, whether Deezer is right for you will depend on what you're specifically looking for in a music streaming service. Fortunately, Deezer offers a 30-day free trial on its paid plans. You can give it a try and see if it works for you.