  AdS$_7$ supersymmetric solutions in type IIA have been classified, and they
are infinitely many. Moreover, every such solution has a non-supersymmetric
sister. In this paper, we study the perturbative and non-perturbative stability
of these non-supersymmetric solutions, focusing on cases without orientifolds.
Perturbatively, we first look at the KK spectrum of spin-2 excitations. This
does not exhibit instabilities, but it does show that there is no separation of
scales for either the BPS and the non-BPS case, thus proving for supersymmetric
AdS$_7$ a well-known recent conjecture. We then use 7d gauged supergravity and
a brane polarization computation to access part of the spectrum of KK scalars.
The result signals an instability for all non-supersymmetric solutions except
those that have a single D8 on each side. We finally look at non-perturbative
instabilities, and find that NS5 bubbles make these remaining solutions decay.
