Gigvault vs setlist.fm: Do You Need Both? (2026)

By Alexandra P. · Published 2026-09-05 · 8 min read

Founder of Gigvault — the concert tracker for live music fans.

You just got home from a show. Ears ringing, voice gone, phone full of blurry photos. You open setlist.fm to check whether they really opened with that song — and there it is, song by song, three minutes after the encore.

Then you close the tab, and nothing about that night is saved anywhere except your camera roll.

That gap is the whole story of this comparison. setlist.fm is very good at one thing: knowing what a band played. It was never built to know that you were there, who you went with, or what it meant to you.

Here is the honest breakdown — including the part most comparison pages leave out: Gigvault pulls setlist data from setlist.fm rather than competing with it.

Quick comparison

What setlist.fm does better than anyone

Credit where it is due. setlist.fm is one of the most valuable music archives on the internet, and none of the following is a weakness:

• Depth no one can match. Millions of setlists going back decades, including shows from long before the app era. If a band played it, someone probably typed it in.
• A community that corrects itself. Got the encore wrong? Anyone can fix it. That self-repairing quality is why the data stays trustworthy.
• Open to everyone. No account, no paywall, no app install. Just search and read.
• It powers other tools. Including this one — more on that in a second.

Where setlist.fm stops

The limits are not flaws. They are simply the edge of what a public database was designed to do.

It is organised by show, not by you. The page belongs to the concert, not to your night at it. There is an "I was there" marker, but your attendance is a footnote on someone else's page rather than a record of your own.

Nothing personal attaches to it. No photos. No ticket stub. No rating. No note about the support act that turned out to be the best part. Those things live in your camera roll and your memory, which is to say they are slowly disappearing.

No sense of the whole. How many shows have you seen this year? Which venue do you keep going back to? How many hours of live music is that? setlist.fm holds the raw material for those answers but was never meant to calculate them.

Nobody records who you were with. This is the one that surprises people. Years later you can find the exact setlist in seconds — and have no idea whether you went with your sister or your flatmate.

Festivals get fragmented. Three days, twenty acts, four stages. On setlist.fm that is twenty separate pages with nothing tying them to your weekend.

What Gigvault adds on top

Gigvault starts where that page ends. You log the show — artist, venue, city, date — and it becomes yours.

• The setlist comes with it. Gigvault queries the setlist.fm API for your exact date and venue and attaches the songs to your entry. You get the archive's accuracy inside your own history.
• Photos and stubs live with the show. Filed with the night they belong to instead of scattered across a camera roll.
• Ratings and notes. What you thought, while you still remember it.
• Concert Wrapped. Shows counted, hours of live music, top artists, venues and cities — after every show and at the end of the year.
• Tag who was there. The detail no database keeps, and the one that turns out to matter most a decade later.
• Festivals as a single entry. One weekend, every set inside it, stages and clashes included.

So we are not really competitors

This is worth stating plainly, because most "X vs Y" pages pretend otherwise.

Gigvault is built on setlist.fm. When your setlist appears, that is the community's work — thousands of people typing in songs after shows for twenty years. Without them, the feature would not exist.

The honest framing is not "replace setlist.fm with Gigvault." It is:

setlist.fm is the library. Gigvault is your shelf inside it.

One is a public record of what happened on stage. The other is a private record of your life in front of it. Most people who care about live music genuinely want both.

Which one should you use?

Use setlist.fm on its own if you mainly look things up — settling arguments, researching a tour, checking whether a song is back in rotation. It is free, thorough, and needs no account.

Add Gigvault if you have ever thought "how many shows have I actually been to?" and had no way to answer. Or if your concert history is currently a spreadsheet, a note, or nothing at all.

Use both if you are the person who checks the setlist on the train home. That is the intended combination, and it is why the setlist lookup is built in.

Moving an existing concert history over

If you have been marking "I was there" on setlist.fm for years, that history does not have to start from zero. Log your biggest shows first — the ones you would name if someone asked. The setlist attaches itself as you go, so a night from 2014 arrives complete rather than as a bare line in a list.

Most people find the first twenty take an evening, and the rest arrive one show at a time.

The short version

setlist.fm answers what did they play? — better than anything else, and it will keep doing that.

Gigvault answers what have I seen, who with, and what did it feel like? — and quietly borrows setlist.fm's answer to the first question along the way.

If you only ever need the first answer, you already have the right tool. If the second question has been nagging at you, that is the gap Gigvault fills.

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Related: The 5 best apps to track concerts you've been to · Gigvault vs Concert Archives · Gigvault vs Last.fm · Setlist tracker

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