Cycles vs ostinata
Price, ratings, monetisation and update history for both apps, side by side — with what reviewers say about each.
Cycles
Explore curated music playlists and share your own collections. Preview tracks and connect with other music lovers, regardless of your streaming service. Find new inspiration or share your favorite songs.
- Discover curated playlists
- Share music collections
- Preview tracks
- Connect with music lovers
- Cross-platform music sharing
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Discover a new way to connect with music lovers! With our app, you can explore curated playlists, share your own music collections, and even preview tracks before diving in. Whether you’re a Spotify user or not, enjoy a seamless music-sharing experience that’s designed to bring people together through the love of music. Perfect for finding inspiration, exploring genres, or sharing your latest favorites with friends!
ostinata
Visualize and share your music discovery journeys. Map connections between artists, albums, and genres, explaining your reasoning. Explore and remix others' musical paths or create discovery challenges for the community.
- Create visual music discovery paths
- Connect artists, albums, and genres
- Add reasoning to connections
- Search music via MusicBrainz
- Fork and remix existing journeys
- Post community discovery challenges
- Private iCloud data sync
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ostinata lets you map the actual paths you take through music. ever gone from radiohead to aphex twin because kid a changed how you think about electronic music? from miles davis to j dilla because someone sampled a love supreme? ostinata turns those invisible threads into visual, shareable directed graphs. — how it works — create a journey by adding nodes — artists, albums, genres, emotions, or concepts. connect them with directed edges that show which discovery led to which. add reasoning text to explain the connection. the result is a map of your taste that others can explore, fork, and build on. — search & discover — search for artists and albums via musicbrainz, the open music encyclopedia. album nodes display cover art. long-press any node to open its musicbrainz page for deeper exploration. — fork & remix — see a journey that resonates? fork it. you get a copy of the entire graph — all nodes, edges, and reasoning — that you can extend, rearrange, or take in a completely different direction. — bounties — post discovery challenges for the community. set a topic like "find the link: kraftwerk to detroit techno," define seed nodes as starting points, and offer resonance as a reward. other users form guilds of five to tackle the challenge together. — your data, your cloud — everything syncs privately via icloud. we store nothing on our servers. your journeys, your data, your control. — design — black canvas. white lines. ibm plex mono. all lowercase. album art in grayscale. ostinata is built for people who care about how things look as much as how they sound. ostinata — discovery through human curation.
Screenshots
Verdict
The clearest difference is ads: ostinata at none against Cycles's shown. ostinata also leads on update cadence (every 9 days vs every 3 months) and monetization model (free vs ad-supported). Cycles's advantage is ratings volume (9 vs 1) and iOS requirement (15.1 vs 17.0). On price, rating, in-app purchases and device support there is nothing between them.
Scored on Price · Rating · Positive reviews · Number of ratings · Update frequency · Ads · In-app purchases · Monetization · Best chart rank · Devices · Requires iOS
Both are free to download. Neither carries in-app purchases, so what you see is what you pay.
On the App Store both sit at effectively the same score — 5.0 for Cycles against 5.0 for ostinata. That said, the two scores are not equally well evidenced: Cycles has 9 ratings behind it against 1, so its average is the more settled of the two.
Cycles ships an update every 3 months, ostinata every 9 days. The most recent releases landed on November 3, 2026 and November 5, 2026 respectively.
| Parameter | Cycles | ostinata |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free | Free |
| Rating | 5.0 (9 ratings) | 5.0 (1 ratings) |
| Positive reviews | 100.0% of reviews | — |
| Number of ratings | 9 — better | 1 |
| Update frequency | Every 3 months | Every 9 days — better |
| Ads | Yes | No — better |
| In-app purchases | No | No |
| Monetization | Ad-supported | Free — better |
| Devices | iPhone, iPod | iPhone, iPad |
| Requires iOS | 15.1 — better | 17.0 |
| Further details — not scored | ||
| Size | 33 MB | 2 MB |
| Age rating | 9+ | 4+ |
| Developer | Cycles Studios Inc. | Joachim Groeger |
In-app purchases
Cycles
No in-app purchases
ostinata
No in-app purchases









