SongUp vs. Festify — Voting Queue or Fair Request Queue for Your Party?
Festify and SongUp are the two apps most likely to show up side by side in a “party song request app” search — both are free and both run entirely in the browser. But they solve the “who picks the music” problem in genuinely different ways: Festify lets guests vote songs up a queue, while SongUp keeps things simple with a fair, capped request queue. The right pick depends on which model — and which music library — fits your party.
What Festify is
Festify is a free, browser-based party queue: the host logs in with a Spotify Premium account and gets a party code to share. Guests join by entering that code in their mobile browser — no app download — and vote for songs to move them up the queue. It also has a TV Mode that shows album art or fan art on a bigger screen, and a fallback playlist for when the queue is empty.
What SongUp is
SongUp works similarly at a glance — host opens a room, guests join by scanning a QR code — but it works differently under the hood. There’s no voting: guests add songs from YouTube search, each capped at a few requests at a time (configurable), and songs play in the order they were added. The host doesn’t need a paid subscription of any kind to run a room.
Comparison
| SongUp | Festify | |
|---|---|---|
| Host account required | No | Yes — Spotify Premium |
| Guest sign-in required | No | No |
| App download required | No | No |
| Song library | YouTube (any song with a video, no account needed) | Spotify catalog |
| Queue ordering | Fair — requests play in the order added | Guest voting moves songs up |
| Fair per-guest limit | Yes, configurable | Not built in |
| TV / big-screen display | Yes | Yes (TV Mode with fan art) |
| Fallback playlist | Yes (free tier up to 50 songs, unlimited on Pro) | Yes |
| Host override controls | Pro only — bump to next, skip, remove | Yes — skip, remove, pause |
| Cost | Free, or $5 one-time for Pro features | Free |
| Open source | Yes | No |
Where Festify wins
If you (the host) already have Spotify Premium and want a queue that pulls directly from Spotify’s catalog and playlists, Festify’s TV Mode with automatic fan art is a nice touch for a screen near the dance floor. Its guest voting is also a genuinely different way to surface popular requests, if that’s the model you want — every guest gets a say in what moves up, not just what gets added.
Where SongUp wins
The biggest practical difference is the host’s account requirement. Festify needs the host to have Spotify Premium — no Premium, no room. SongUp has no such dependency: since it searches YouTube directly, anyone can open a room for free, and the host never needs an existing music subscription.
SongUp also caps how many songs each guest can add at once, so one enthusiastic guest can’t stack the queue with their whole watchlist — a different, simpler kind of fairness than Festify’s voting, but one that doesn’t require guests to keep checking back and voting throughout the night. And because SongUp is open source, venues and hosts who want to self-host or customize it have that option.
The verdict
If you’re already a Spotify Premium subscriber and like the idea of guests actively voting songs up the queue, Festify is a solid, purpose-built choice. If you don’t want the host’s music subscription to be a dependency at all — or you’d rather keep things simple with a capped, first-come queue instead of ongoing voting — SongUp is the more flexible option.