Multitrack recording, real plugins and a full loop library, included with hardware you already own. If you have an Apple device, start here.
GarageBand suffers from being free and friendly, which people read as "not serious". It is a genuine multitrack digital audio workstation with unlimited audio tracks, real-time effects, a large library of loops and software instruments, and Apple's own Core Audio engine underneath. Hit records have been tracked in it. It costs nothing because it comes with the hardware.
If you own a Mac, an iPad or an iPhone and you want to record something more ambitious than a voice memo, this should be your first stop before you download anything at all.
Create a project, add an audio track, choose your input, arm it, press record. Latency on Apple hardware is excellent out of the box, so monitoring yourself through headphones while you play against a backing track works properly without configuration, something that takes real effort in Audacity.
You get the DAW essentials: multiple takes with quick comping, cycle recording that loops a section while you try it again, a metronome and count-in, and non-destructive editing so every effect stays adjustable. Track a guitar, then a vocal, then a harmony, and mix the three. All of that is straightforward here and awkward or impossible in a single-file editor.
It works, with caveats. Multitrack recording of two people, ducking music under narration, compression and EQ on voices, and export to MP3 or AAC are all there. Apple has thinned out the podcast-specific features that older versions had; chapter markers and the dedicated podcast track are gone, so it is now a music program you can also record speech into, rather than a podcast tool.
For a two-person conversation with a music bed, it is fine and free. For repairing a noisy interview, Audacity's noise reduction or Audition's spectral tools do more.
The obvious one: Apple hardware only. No Windows version exists and none is coming.
Beyond that, GarageBand is deliberately simplified. Track counts for software instruments are capped depending on your machine, there is no proper mixer window with buses and sends the way Logic has, automation is basic, and you cannot use third-party plugins on iOS outside Apple's own framework. The projects are large, too: the full sound library runs to several gigabytes.
And it has no equivalent of a spectral repair tool. It records well; it does not rescue.
The best free DAW anyone can get, provided they bought the right computer. For music, demos and layered recordings on a Mac there is no reason to install anything else until GarageBand's simplifications start annoying you, and at that point Logic Pro opens your projects unchanged.
On Windows, the closest free equivalents are Cakewalk by BandLab for music and Audacity for everything else.