The community discussion on this is extensive and fairly nuanced. Here’s what emerges from forums like VI-Control, the Sibelius Forum, Steinberg Forums, and Scoring Notes: Condensing / Part Extraction — the core divide This is where the philosophical difference is sharpest. Dorico works “top down”: you create individual players, compose on separate staves, and then Dorico’s automatic condensing merges them onto shared staves for the conductor’s score. The parts are always clean and unambiguous because Dorico knows exactly which notes belong to which player. Sibelius historically worked the opposite way: you write on a condensed staff (Fl. 1&2 sharing a line) and then have to decondense into separate parts. Until recently this was a multi-step manual process involving hidden staves, the Explode plugin, voice filtering, and “Show in Parts” / “Hide Empty Staves.” As of 2025.2, Sibelius added a one-click “Decondense into Parts for Two Players” command with Staff Filters, which is a major improvement but still requires manual cleanup for things like “a2”, “1.”, “solo” markings, slur handling across voice boundaries, and accidentals. The community consensus is pretty clear: Dorico showed how it should be done — you select players who get individual parts, and the score offers condensing to group them onto staves as expected in conductor scores. ben trigg music One commenter on the Scoring Notes NAMM coverage put it memorably: “Dorico is the best thing that ever happened to Sibelius” Scoring Notes — meaning the competitive pressure has driven Sibelius to finally address this long-standing weakness. Where Dorico wins (community view) The strongest consensus points are around engraving quality and automation. Dorico’s automatic spacing and formatting achieves a much better result than Sibelius without manual intervention, and its management of global/flow/local settings is more flexible and consistent. VI-CONTROL Users frequently cite Dorico’s handling of rhythmic notation (correct beaming and note values based on meter position), cross-staff notation, multiple voices, and pedaling as areas where there’s simply no comparison. For orchestral work specifically, Dorico’s player/layout model is architecturally superior for the score-and-parts problem. Each player has their own part automatically; condensing is a display option you toggle on. Changes propagate cleanly. In Sibelius, even with the new decondensing, part directions can be unintentionally ambiguous, whereas with condensing as in Dorico, there is never any doubt as to which notes belong to each part. Scoring Notes Where Sibelius wins (community view) Several recurring themes favour Sibelius: First, industry compatibility. In the scoring world, established working methods are hard to break up. Sibelius is still the default when working on orchestration teams, to the degree where it is simply assumed you work on either Sibelius or Finale. VI-CONTROL Multiple professional orchestrators on VI-Control report being forced to use Sibelius on collaborative projects even when they prefer Dorico personally. Second, flexibility and “hackability.” Sibelius lets you force things onto the page that the software wasn’t designed for. As one professional put it, Sibelius is easier to wrangle into doing unconventional things on tight deadlines. Dorico’s semantic model sometimes fights you — if you want a non-standard label for divisi staves, or need to fake something visually, Dorico’s desire to “know what you want” can become an obstacle. Third, raw note input speed. Several users note that initial note entry, especially via MIDI keyboard, is quicker in Sibelius. The renotate (quantize/clean-up) function after live MIDI recording also works better in Sibelius according to pianists who use this workflow. But Dorico gets to a finished product more quickly because less cleanup is needed afterwards. Fourth, the plugin ecosystem. Bob Zawalich’s plugins (Explode Staff to Parts, Reduce Staves to Full Score, Edit Instrument Names, and hundreds more) give Sibelius a flexibility that compensates for many missing built-in features. The switching calculus A VI-Control poll (admittedly post-Finale-shutdown, so somewhat skewed) showed about 60% of Finale refugees heading to Dorico, 8% to Sibelius, and the rest split between MuseScore and staying put. But for existing Sibelius users, the picture is more mixed. If you are free to choose and only want to use it for your own stuff, there really is no need to still consider Sibelius VI-CONTROL — that’s a common Dorico-advocate position. But the learning curve is real: Dorico’s UI paradigm is genuinely different, and several experienced users report struggling with it initially despite being technically savvy. Bottom line for orchestral scoring specifically If you’re starting fresh and your primary concern is producing professional orchestral scores with clean individual parts, the community leans toward Dorico as the better-designed tool for that specific workflow. The condensing feature is a genuine architectural advantage, not just a convenience. But if you’re already deep in Sibelius, the 2025.2 decondensing feature has narrowed the gap meaningfully, and the industry inertia is real — especially if you collaborate with others. Both tools can produce professional results; it’s more a question of how much manual labor you want to do to get there.