The Best Guitar Amp Plugins, Paid and Free, Sorted by What They Do Best

The best guitar amp plugins sound and feel like an amp when you play through them: they clean up when you roll back the guitar's volume, compress when you dig in, and sit in a mix without fizz. Below are well-established picks for high gain, for variety and for bass, the free guitar amp plugins worth installing, and the amp sims already included in your DAW.

Guitar amp plugins at a glance

What makes a good amp simulator plugin

• Feel, not just tone. A good amp sim responds to your picking and your guitar's volume knob. If every note comes out equally distorted, it plays like a distortion pedal.
• Interactive tone controls. On a real amp, Bass, Mid and Treble affect each other. Sims that model the tone stack feel more familiar to players who know real amps.
• Cabinet and mic options. The cab and mic shape the sound as much as the amp. Look for mic position control or IR loading.
• Clean high gain. Distortion creates high harmonics that can turn harsh. Oversampling keeps high-gain tones smooth.
• Practical extras. A noise gate, a tuner and level-matched presets save time on every session.

Best amp simulator plugins for high gain and metal

Neural DSP's Archetype plugins are a common choice for modern rock and metal. Each one is built around a theme or an artist and bundles a few amps, a cabinet section with mic choices and a set of effects. They're best known for tight, modern high-gain tones.

On no budget, Ignite Amps Emissary is a free high-gain amp that's been in players' toolkits for years. Pair it with an IR loader, such as Ignite's free NadIR, to add the cabinet. For any high-gain sim, a noise gate before the amp and a tight drive pedal in front are what keep palm mutes clean.

Best guitar amp VST plugins for variety

IK Multimedia AmpliTube has a very large library of amps, cabinets and effects, including officially licensed models from several well-known amp makers. You can buy it as a full suite or add gear piece by piece. Native Instruments Guitar Rig takes a rack approach: drag amps, cabinets and effects into a rack in any order. It's especially strong on creative and modulation effects.

Line 6 Helix Native is the plugin version of Line 6's Helix processors, with the same models, so presets move between the plugin and the hardware. That makes it a natural pick for players who use Helix on stage. Positive Grid BIAS FX uses a pedalboard-style layout and has a large community preset library, so you can find a starting tone for most songs quickly.

Free guitar amp plugins worth trying

• Neural Amp Modeler (NAM): free and open source. It loads captures of real amps and pedals, many shared online by players. Most captures are amp-only, so add an IR loader for the cab.
• AmpliTube Custom Shop: the free version of AmpliTube, with a starter set of gear and the option to buy more.
• Guitar Rig Player: the free version of Guitar Rig, with a limited set of amps and effects.
• Ignite Amps Emissary and NadIR: a free high-gain amp and a free IR loader to go with it.
• Your DAW's stock amps: see below. Logic's Amp Designer alone covers a lot of clean and crunch ground.

Best bass amp plugins

Bass needs its own amp and cabinet voicing, because a guitar amp model thins out the low end. Logic Pro includes Bass Amp Designer, with several bass amps and cabinets. Neural DSP's Parallax is a bass plugin aimed at modern rock and metal tones. AmpliTube and Helix Native both include bass amps in their libraries.

A common bass trick in any of them: blend the amped sound with the clean DI. The DI keeps the low end solid while the amp adds grit and character on top. Make sure the blend is latency matched, or the two signals will phase against each other.

Stack (ours): four amps, five cabs and three pedals

Stack is our amp sim. It has four amps: Clean (glassy US-style), Crunch (British-style), Lead (modern high gain) and Bass (warm tube bass). The Bass, Mid and Treble controls are solved from each amp's real passive tone-stack circuit, so they interact the way they do on hardware. Gain stages run at 4× oversampling, and turning Master up adds power-amp sag.

In front of the amp sit a noise gate and compressor, drive and chorus pedals. After it come five cabinet choices with a movable mic, a small room, and an Off (DI) setting for your own IRs. The Mix knob blends in your clean DI, latency matched, which is the bass trick above in one control. There are 49 level-matched presets, from Glassy Clean to Djent Tight and Vintage Tube Bass. It runs as VST3, AU and AAX, and every preset plays in the browser.

British Crunch Rhythm below is the Crunch amp at gain 6 into the 4x12 closed cab, a classic British-style rhythm tone.

Stock amp sims in your DAW

Logic Pro has Amp Designer, Bass Amp Designer and Pedalboard, and GarageBand includes amps from the same family. Ableton Live has Amp, Cabinet and Pedal devices, depending on your edition. Other DAWs vary, so check what came with yours before you buy, and see our guitar plugins guide for the full chain after the amp, such as Drift for slapback and Lumen for reverb.

How to choose amp plugins

• Record a DI first. Run the same DI through every trial so you compare amps, not performances.
• Level-match. Louder always sounds better. Match levels before you judge.
• Check it in the mix. A tone that sounds huge alone can be muddy against drums and bass.
• Check formats and CPU. Pro Tools needs AAX and Logic Pro needs AU. Several instances of a heavy amp sim can strain an older computer.
• Mind the setup. Low latency matters more than any plugin. Our guide to recording guitar into a computer covers interfaces, Hi-Z inputs and buffer size.