Best piano vst

For what its worth the Bit Sonic Keyzone has a damn good piano sound or 2 in it. Free.

I use Synthogy Ivory II Grand pianos. $349, but you may find deals. Very good IMHO. Classical, Jazz and "modern" demos. So you can hear stuff on its own or in a mix. Worth a listen ... They also do "individual" pianos as well which are of course much cheaper. The upright pianos are cheaper again! dB

Ivyaudio. Piano 162 sounds damn good too for those of you with kontakt

The uprights are in the right ballpark costwise ... pretty realistic sounds and you have a lot of control over all manner of "piano" things, hammer, resonance etc etc. Here's the Soundcloud page ... plus the links to the other pianos they do! dB

Synthogy Ivory maybe Addictive Keys

Ivy Piano: Free, but a bit over-kill. Being samples only it's not as feature rich as a dedicated Piano VSTi, some of which can do things like change microphones and position, open and half open the lid, and usually do nuances like pedal noise, sympathetic resonance (actually that's not at all a nuance), and control over hammer and key noise. A good piano if you're really serious about emulating it should at least have the sympathetic resonance and on/off sounds like hammer and release sounds. The previously mentioned Salamander also sounds pretty good. I also get a lot of use out of the SF2 file acoustic_grand_piano_ydp_20080910, maganda piano, Motif ES6 Concert Piano, and steinway_concert_piano. Google should find these quick.

I think Addictive Keys is a no-brainer for what it costs. It is very versatile and sounds great in any mix. What's cool is that it is also a container for the electric grand and the Mark One which are also very well done. Then there's the Pearl Concert Grand. It's very versatile and the cost was very reasonable. For a classical piano sound, I think the Grandeur from Native Instruments is amazing and very versatile. Since it comes with Komplete, I guess it is free.

Naturally my system doesn't see the bitsonic plugs, just like some other plugs recently. I may need to go look for those updated c++ libtaries...

Synthogy Ivory is a little more than your $300 but worth every penny. I haven't heard anything else come close if realism is your main interest.

If you do invest in Kontakt, I'm going to add another vote for The Grandeur. Piano is my main instrument (been playing it now for around 30 years) and I have a number of piano vsts of various types and Grandeur is by far my favourite when it comes to a combination of playability (I've played on six figure Steinway Ds) and quality sound. For raw playability, Pianoteq is hard to beat but for me, it still lacks realism with the sound. I'm particularly fussy when it comes to piano sounds though and Pianoteq sits fine in a mix.