The only reason not to use them is basically money. As you said, they are as good as anything else when used collectively. When you want a DBX160, you don't have to pick from the ten someone else may have installed because every one of those 10 are "maybe as good" as UA's or any of the other 10 plugins. There is no guesswork layer to deal with, no Plugin Doctoring to be done. You decide you want an 1176 compressor, and then you move on. Even if there's a few variants, it's a very limited number and it remains obvious which does what best.

The CPU argument is "UA Connect uses CPU!", which is true of course, because all applications use resources while running. Same with iLok. But what people always fail to mention is how little it actually uses, and how well they run because they are not varying degrees of "properly coded and optimized" like random stuff people download from the internet. So instead of a 20mb Pultec, you end up with a 200mb Pultec. Those UA Connect resources that are "too heavy for my 100+ channel count projects" are gone in an instant using something from Pulsar. Until a few weeks ago I was running them on a 16 year old Mac Pro with no additional weight compared to any other plugins, and the UA ones were actually some of the lightest I was using.

People provide all these excuses nobody ever even asked for. " The don't work offline", etc etc. The only valid reason to not use them is that they are not cracked (which I do not believe for a minute), and not wanting to pay for them. The rest just is a sideshow on here.

 

Also they do work without UA Connect (that's how I use them).

 

Last edited: Jun 13, 2026 at 5:28 PM