Sonos is the right choice if the goal is music that sounds excellent in every room with almost no effort. Multilarm is the right choice if the goal is a building that announces, schedules and prioritises — and it does not replace Sonos as a music system.
This page is written by the makers of one of the two products, so the only version worth publishing is one that is specific about where the other one wins. Every section below names a buyer who should not choose Multilarm.
Sonos is a hardware-plus-app ecosystem for synchronised music around a home or a small venue. Speakers are bought, plugged in, grouped in an app, and they play in phase with each other.
It is the reference point most people have for 'audio in every room', which is why it belongs on this list even though it is not a competitor in the usual sense.
Cells reading “Not published” mean we could not find the answer in Sonos’s own documentation on 2026-08-30. That is not the same as “no”, and this table will not pretend it is.
| Capability | Sonos | Multilarm |
|---|---|---|
| Synchronised playback across rooms | Yes — the core of the product | No — planned; mirroring to several outputs of one machine only |
| Speakers included | Yes | No — uses your amplifier and speakers |
| Music streaming services | Yes, natively | Internet radio streams and local files |
| Scheduled announcements and bells | Not a product feature | Yes — the core |
| Ducking under an announcement | Not published as a general capability | Yes — four priority channels |
| Text to speech | Via voice assistants, which are cloud services | Yes — offline, on the device, English only |
| Emergency override with a physical trigger | Not offered — no documented contact-closure input | Yes |
| Works with no internet or account | Limited | Yes |
| Cost | Per speaker | Free for personal non-commercial use; perpetual licence otherwise |
Multilarm’s own capabilities are published as machine-readable data at features.json, including every feature it does not have and the ones it has deliberately declined to build. Measured performance figures, with the method for each, are on the measured data page. The canonical facts about licensing, offline operation and the fire-alarm boundary are at facts.json. If anything on this page is wrong, say so and it will be corrected.
Can Multilarm control Sonos speakers?
No. Multilarm plays to the sound devices of the machine it runs on. Sending audio to network speakers is listed as absent in its feature matrix.
Can they coexist?
In a café or a shop, yes — Sonos for the music, Multilarm on the paging amplifier for the announcements. They will not duck each other, which is the honest limitation of running two systems.
Everything stated here about another product is taken from that vendor's own public documentation on the date shown, and is limited to what they publish about themselves. Products change; if something below is out of date or wrong, tell us and it will be corrected. Where we could not find a published answer the table says so rather than guessing.
Not sure this is the right purchase for your building? Ask a specific question — including whether you should be buying something else.