NAM vs ToneX vs Kemper

Three ways of doing the same thing: taking a real amplifier and turning it into something you can play through later. They differ less in how they sound than in what they tie you to.

What they have in common

All three are captures rather than models. A modelled amp is somebody's engineering effort to recreate a circuit, with knobs that behave like the original's. A capture is a snapshot of one specific amp at one specific setting — no knobs, because the settings are already baked in.

That trade is the same whichever format you choose. You lose adjustability and gain fidelity to a particular rig, plus the ability to have hundreds of rigs without owning any of them.

Kemper profiles

The oldest of the three and the one that made the idea mainstream. Profiles are made and played on Kemper's own hardware, which is well-built, widely trusted on stage, and expensive. The catch is straightforward: the profiles live inside that ecosystem.

ToneX

IK Multimedia's format, played through their software or their pedal, with a large commercial library alongside user captures. Cheaper to get into than Kemper and easier to make your own captures with. Still a company's format, running where the company ships it.

Neural Amp Modeler

Open source, and that single fact explains most of the differences. Nobody owns the format, so anybody can write software that makes or plays captures — which is why there are free desktop plugins, hardware pedals from several makers, and a dozen independent iOS apps including ours.

It also explains the library. Because the format costs nothing to use, the community built an enormous free collection of captures instead of buying packs.

So which should I use?

If you already own a Kemper or a ToneX pedal, use what you own — nothing here is worth buying a second thing for. If you are starting from nothing and you want to run captures on a phone or a laptop without buying hardware, Neural Amp Modeler is the one that goes there, because the openness that makes it free also made it portable.

What none of this decides is how good it sounds. That is down to which amp was captured, how carefully, and whether you are feeding it the level it was trained at.