Best free plugins 2025: 14 free drum machines that’ll help you make beats fasterPhysical drum machines are brilliantly tactile and can give you punchy percussion sounds that aren’t always immediately available in your DAW. However, there are plenty of plugins that can get you in the groove and shake up your workflow with functions that most hardware is simply not capable of achieving. We love the charm of hardware, but sometimes it’s best to build interesting beats in the box and experiment with the power of software.

READ MORE: Best free plugins 2025: 15 free synths that you didn’t know you needed

What’s even better is there is a range of drum machine plugins out there that are free to download, with many compatible on both macOS and Windows. We’ve collated some of the most impressive drum machine plugins that come at no cost at all and are far more fun than lining up samples in your DAW’s arrangement window.
The best freeware drum machines at a glance:

Native Instruments Beats Collection
BPB Cassette Drums
99 Sounds Drum Machine
606 Koncept
Synsonic BD-909
AudioSpillage MiniSpillage
Beat Factory Drums
Drum Pro
MeldaProduction MDrummer Small
Manda Audio MT Power Drum Kit 2
Jamstix 4 Free
Speedrum Lite
Triaz Player
BFD Player

Native Instruments Beats Collection
Image: Native Instruments
NI’s Beats Collection is part of Native Instruments’ free Komplete Start plugin suite. It offers 288 pre-made Grooves across 90 kits for fast rhythmic patterns. You can play your own rhythms with a keyboard or pads, export Groove patterns with MIDI drag and drop, and customise drum sounds with studio-grade effects like chorus and reverb.
Features:

288 pre-made Grooves across 90 kits
Customisable drum sounds with studio-grade effects
Dedicated parameters for tweaking built-in effects
Grooves page for pattern playback adjustment

Find out more at Native Instruments.
BPB Cassette Drums

The BPB Cassette Drums plugin bundle includes three digital drum machines, using sounds sampled from BPB’s Cassette 606, Cassette 808 and Cassette 909 drum sample packs. You get Roland TR-606, TR-808 and TR-909 replicas that sound pretty convincing. Not bad, considering you’re not paying a dime for them.
Each of these lovely-looking and easy-to-use plugins have three modes, effectively giving you nine separate drum machines to play with. The clean original sounds of each drum machine are available, while the Warm and Hot modes give you saturated recordings and have been re-sampled from an audio cassette deck, giving each engine a slightly different feel.
Features:

Compatibility: VST/AU, 32-bit, 64-bit, PC/macOS
Number of voices: 7
Clean, Warm and Hot kits
Release and volume knobs
Options to route drums to individual outputs
On-screen keyboard

Find out more at BedroomProducersBlog.com.
99 Sounds Drum Machine

The simply named Drum Machine by 99Sounds is a nifty little thing used, in the developer’s video tutorial, to make bright, energetic EDM beats. But, of course, it can be used to build drum patterns for any genre and style, so long as you spend the time getting to know it.
It boasts 12 kits with the ability to include eight drum sounds per kit, with each sound being sourced from the 99Sounds Drum Samples library. Users can pan each drum sound, or the whole pattern, to their preference. There is also a low-pass filter and a high-pass filter, giving you options to tweak your sound within the plugin.
Features:

Compatibility: 64-bit VSTi/AUi Host, macOS & PC
Number of voices: 8
12 drum kits
Low filter & high filter
Multiple outputs

606 Koncept

Sample Science’s 606 Koncept plugin is a free 606 emulation with its unique own processing capabilities.
You can pitch sounds down or up using the plugin’s intriguing pitch control feature, change the decay of each track, and set the individual levels and panning. There are multiple LFO options including the depth and rate of filters. You can add glide, reverb and set the cutoff of your drum sequence, and, on top of all that, users are able to add vinyl, tape and sub sound layers to provide a layer of texture over everything.
Features:

Compatibility: 64-bit VSTi/VST3/AUi Host, PC & Mac
Number of voices: 7, each with polyphonic, monophonic and legato modes
Vinyl, tape-hiss & sub sound
Multi-pitch sum mixers
LFO & room reverb effects
Amplitude range controls

Find out more at Sample Science. 
Synsonic BD-909

You didn’t think we could possibly do a freeware drum-machine round-up without including at least one TR emulation, did you? This is (obviously) a 909 emulator, but only the actual kick drum from that machine. Okay, that’s not a lot, you might think, but the 909 kick has backed tens of thousands of dance tracks and there are plenty of controls to shape it into just any incarnation of that sound you can imagine. There are 16 presets, too, if you think you need them.
Features:

Compatibility: macOS and PC, 32/64-bit
Multiple tweaking controls: pitch, accent, decay, tune decay, attack, hold, tune depth, noise decay, distort
Distortion effect
MIDI control
Factory presets

Find out more at Synsonic.
AudioSpillage MiniSpillage

A returning drum favourite and must inclusion is MiniSpillage, a synth/drum plugin. It’s still macOS only, we’re afraid, but an essential download for that platform. It’s a cut-down version of AudioSpillage’s DrumSpillage with three drum pads for kick, hat and hollow drum. It comes with several kits and synth features – LFO, filter, modulation and distortion – to stretch those kit sounds far and wide. It’s been around for aeons, but several updates keep this as one of the best macOS drum/synth freebies.
Features:

Compatibility: macOS (AU), 64-bit
LFO, filter, modulation & distortion
12 exclusive drum models
Classic analogue, physical modelling and FM synthesis

Find out more at Audio Spillage.
Beat Factory Drums

Some of our free drum plugins do dance music, some rock – and Beat Factory Drums is designed to fill in the gaps, since it’s aimed primarily for hip-hop, dubstep and more. It features 10 kits, limited but essential sonic tweaks and hands-on MPC pads. It sounds great and is very well worth the 50MB download, which gives you the kick sounds and a plugin that runs on any system, old or new.
Features:

Compatibility: macOS & Windows/ 32/64-bit
10 drum kits
120 drum hits included

Find out more at Beat Skillz.
Drum Pro

Make no mistake, Drum Pro is unashamedly a shell drum machine to add paid-for kits later, but it does come with 20 kits sampled from nine drum machines (from Roland, Boss, Novation and more) so you get a very decent start, without paying a thing. You get MPC-style pads and basic mixing and while it won’t quite cover all your drumming needs as developers Studio Linked claims from the off – but will with their paid-for packs – it still delivers a great variety of beats, for free.
Features:

Number of voices: 12
Compatibility: macOS and PC, 32/64-bit
Attack, decay, sustain & release
Global ADSR/ reverb

Find out more at Studio Linked.
MeldaProduction MDrummer Small

Melda doesn’t seem to be shouting about MDrummer Small as much as it once did, but you can still download it from the download/archive part of the company’s website. It’s well worth it, featuring hundreds of drum sets, components, multisamples, rhythms and loops and some of the features from the larger, paid-for MDrummer. So it might be worth downloading fast before it (possibly) disappears.
Features:

Compatibility: macOS and Windows
30 drumsets
500MB of samples
400 drumset components
AI engine loads new editable loops (2,500 available)

Find out more at Melda Production.
Manda Audio MT Power Drum Kit 2

It was all getting a little bit too electronic around here, so how about a piece of freeware to rock your world? This will still shake your cones like any TR drum machine, though, because MT Power Drum Kit 2 is all about power sounds, albeit from a pop, rock or metal perspective. You get plenty of kit sounds and groove, fill and rhythm MIDI files to get you up and running. It’s a great real and acoustic option if your world is to machine led.
Features:

Compatibility: macOS and Windows
32/64-bit
Number of voices: 13
1000s of assorted rhythms
In-built compresser
Easy-to-use Composer tool
DAW-like track dashboard
MIDI capability

Find out more at Power Drum Kit.
Jamstix 4 Free
Jamstix 4 Free. Image: Press
This lite version of Rayzoon’s drum modelling instrument has no restrictions that will slow you down – just a smaller content set than the paid version. In VST and AAX formats for Windows only, it has 8 drummers and 21 style models as well as 200 acoustic drum samples. Focusing on the feel and style of a real drummer, it provides 3D models of real drums that sound great when programmed by MIDI or played by hand.
Features:

VST for Windows
Onboard sequencer
Onboard FX
200 drum samples
Can be upgraded to the full version with all content

Find out more at Rayzoon. 
Speedrum Lite
Speedrum Lite. Image: Press
This cool MPC-style sampler instrument comes for macOS, Windows and Linux. Designed to be quick and easy to use with a fast workflow, it provides 16 MPC-style pads onto which you can drag and drop samples, plus swap samples between pads.
There are a couple of filters and mono or poly voice modes, and flexible pad behaviours, including cut and cancel for more advanced performance styles. Edit waveforms inside the plugin and route each pad to one of 16 outputs if required.
Speedrum Lite has support for all major audio formats so you don’t even have to convert files first – just get making beats and loops! Also check out Transperc by the same developer, a transient shaper that pairs well with the instrument.
Features:

16 MPC-style pads
Supports multiple audio file formats
Onboard sample waveform editing
Cut and choke groups for pads
Multiple audio output routing

Find out more at Apisonic Audio. 
Triaz Player
Triaz Player. Image: Press
Triaz Player by Wave Alchemy is a surprisingly fully-featured free version of Triaz, a sample player plugin for macOS and PC. It comes with 4,000 samples and 200 presets and lets you tweak sounds with filters, envelopes, LFOs and other effects. You can import expansion packs, and though some features of the full instrument are disabled in this free version, you are able to export beats by dragging and dropping audio stems, mixes, one-shots or MIDI right into your DAW. While the full version offers more content, this free one has a ton of cool stuff to get you started.
Features:

4,000 samples
200 presets
Mac or PC plugin
Sound tweaking
Drag and drop from plugin to DAW

Find out more at Wave Alchemy. 
BFD Player
BFD Player. Image: Press
BFD is a legendary “real” drum plugin, and the Player version is completely free! With a slick interface based on the paid version, it runs as a plugin or in standalone mode, and the developers have provided a mixture of professional drum kits sorted into separate elements and grooves to get you up and running, making beats in no time. It also supports expansions, should you want to grow your sound set in future.
Though you can play it manually, BFD Player encourages you to use any of the 340 bundled grooves across the different kits to make a backbone for your tracks. Then, use the built-in mixer to tweak your sound, even routing the drum sounds out individually for more processing with your favourite effects plugins.
Features

Plugin or standalone for Mac and PC
340 bundled grooves
Expandable with new packs
Built-in mixer
Kits split by drum element

Find out more at BFD. 
For more buyer’s guides, check here. Looking for more freeware? Head this way.
The post Best free plugins 2025: 14 free drum machines that’ll help you make beats faster appeared first on MusicTech.