The Best Meditation Apps to Help You Find Your Zen
You no longer need to travel to find your teacher on a mountaintop. Today, you can have your guru in your pocket with meditation and mindfulness apps.
It’s ironic. While our smartphones are our main source of distraction, mobile meditation and mindfulness apps can be very effective in helping us achieve the peace we seek. Although they have recently flooded the market, only a few are worth it. We tested some of the best apps and found the best mindfulness and meditation apps.
What is meditation?
Meditation is a practice that has been around for hundreds of years. Originally, it was a spiritual and religious practice in Buddhism and Hinduism. Meditation also improves health and well-being, trains breathing, concentration, and mindfulness.
You may be anxious and stressed, or you may be constantly trying to calm yourself down with logic. Meditation, with its various techniques and breathing exercises, can help you break free from your habitual thought patterns.
Best Meditation Apps Compared
1. Headspace
Headspace is introducing its Take 10 program, a 10-day guided meditation taught by Andy Puddicombe, a former Tibetan monk and current mindfulness advocate and meditation teacher. Andy’s meditations offer simple, 10-minute daily sessions that can help anyone develop a habit of relaxation through thought-provoking metaphors and simple, easy-to-understand instructions.
The first 10 days go by quickly, and then you’re invited to subscribe for $12.99 per month or $94.99 per year. The good news is, you’re not alone. The fun buddy feature lets you sync with your friend within the app and encourage each other to reach nirvana.
2. Omvana
The biggest difference with Omvana is that the app allows you to fully customize your meditation experience. The app offers a mixing console that lets you combine your favorite guided meditations, narrated lessons, and inspiring talks with thousands of high-quality audio recordings and ambient background sounds. You can even upload your own voice and mix it with any of their recorded songs to create your own meditations and share them with others. It’s awesome.
The app also includes free starter meditations. It gives you access to the Omvana store, where you can purchase thousands of different meditation songs, ranging from three minutes to an hour long, on hundreds of other topics, for less than $1.80.
3. Calm
Headspace, Calm offers a free seven-day guided meditation class, followed by a monthly subscription for $12.99 or an annual subscription for $59.99. Once you become a paying user, you’ll unlock a 21-day wellness plan and a week of bedtime stories to help you sleep better every night, plus over 50 guided meditations and bedtime stories to help you deal with anxiety and stress. Focus, better breathing, and more.
Individual sessions last from 2 to 20 minutes, and countless unguided sessions immerse the listener in the sounds of rain, jungle birdsong, campfires, and more that make this app ideal for a relaxing, restful sleep. Name:
4. Simple Habit
Simple Habit is a mindfulness and mental health app designed for people with fast-paced lives, especially those who want to incorporate wellness into their busy days. The app offers over 2,000 short meditations and audio therapy sessions that you can use to strengthen your mind, gain flexibility, or improve focus. There are even more sessions for specific purposes, such as meditation for children or focused sounds for stressful situations or emergencies. One of the best things about the app is that the content is created by psychology and health experts.
Simple Habit is priced on a “Habit’sium” basis, which means that most of the features are free, but to unlock some meditations or sounds, you’ll need to pay for a premium subscription ($89.99/year, $11.99/month, or $299.99 for life).
5. Buddhify
Buddhify is for those who have always wanted to start meditating but didn’t know where to start. The app’s rainbow-colored rotating indicator asks you what you’re doing right now, then suggests a series of meditations that are tailored to your situation and can be done right away. Are you struggling to sleep? Are you spending unproductive time online? Or are you dealing with difficult emotions? They have something for every situation, and with over 80 different meditation tracks, each lasting from 5 to 30 minutes, there’s probably something for everyone.
Buddhify also offers a timer, a stats page to track your progress, and social sharing to connect your meditation practice with the community. However, unlike the other apps on this list, Buddhify offers a model where you pay the full entry fee upfront ($4.99 for iOS and $2.99 for Android), with no trial period or additional in-app purchases.
6. Insight Timer
Insight Timer is a meditation app that’s full of surprises. It’s suitable for both amateur and professional meditators, as it has over 100,000 guided meditations to suit any level of practice. The free app offers a lot of flexibility and features, including a customizable meditation timer and the ability to track your progress through milestones and statistics. Insight Timer’s interface is relatively modern and welcoming.
One of the most interesting features of Insight Timer is the ability to join a community of meditators. With Insight Timer, you can improve your breathing, relaxation, and sleep, join groups, discuss spiritual topics, read poetry, practice transcendental meditation, and much more.
7. Smiling Mind. Mindling Mind is a nonprofit organization from AMindalianMind that works to make mindfulness meditation accessible to everyone. Its free version is a little different from the others on this list, as psychologists and meditation educators originally developed it for children ages seven and up. The content is categorized by age group: 7-9, 10-12, 13-15, 16-18, with specific meditations for children and adults. Even for children who shy away from the idea of meditation, Smiling Mind is a great starting point if they’re struggling with emotions, anxiety, or insecurity. The tour guide’s weird Australian accent doesn’t help either.
8. The Mindfulness App
The Mindfulness app offers everything from multi-hour meditations with influential teachers, ranging from 3 to 30 minutes long, personalized one-on-one meditations with guided presentations and callbacks, insights to help you stay on track, and optional daily reminders to give you free time for your meditation practice. The app also has a unique timer that displays a 360-degree circle of slowly moving dots instead of numbers, helping you focus on the moment.
Like the other apps on this list, there’s a one-month introductory period to learn everything the app has to offer. And there’s plenty of time to explore. If you decide to go all-in after that month, a monthly subscription will cost you $9.99, and a yearly subscription will cost just $59.99.
9. Healthy Minds Program
One of the things that sets Mindfulness Program apart is its scientifically proven process. The app was developed at the University of Wisconsin-Madison using a neuroscience approach. Mindfulness offers meditations, shorter sessions, and a curriculum to help you track your progress and build long-term skills. You can also reflect on your progress and see how your health and learning are doing. Ultimately, Mindfulness focuses on four core concepts of your wellness practice: awareness, connection, self-observation, and purpose.
The Mindfulness Program app is completely free and is part of the program’s mission to help people heal and thrive through mindfulness. Mindfulness Innovations is a nonprofit organization funded by donations.
10. Breathe
The Breathe app focuses on offering you meditations that are adaptable to any weather and time of day. Through the app, you can get into the habit of incorporating these habits into your daily routine. You can answer questions through the “My Life Collection” to help the app better help you, start listening to a variety of super-specific sounds and meditations, or participate in master classes with experts. Breethe’s offerings are creative and practical.
You can sign up for a 14-day free trial of Breethe; the app costs $12.99 per month. The most competitive pricing plan is a lifetime subscription for a one-time payment of $170.00.
Breathe
Breathe
Visit website
Benefits of meditation
Meditation is known to reduce stress in those who practice it. It can also significantly increase self-esteem and inner peace, and is an active tool for combating neurological and mental health issues. Here are some of the benefits of meditation:
- Anxiety control
- Pain control
- Improved emotional health
- Helps with problem solving. Helps with sleep quality
- Attention stability
- Reverses present-centered attention
- Reduces resting heart rate
- Stabilizes blood pressure
- Minimizes side effects of attention deficit disorder, cancer, heart disease, irritable bowel syndrome, headaches, and migraines.
- Improved thinking and cognitive skills. Reduces age-related memory loss.
- Helps build self-love and kindness.
- Prevents addiction.
Important Meditation App Features
Beginner courses
If you’re new to meditation, look for an app that offers beginner courses to avoid feeling overwhelmed. Even if you’re inexperienced or haven’t enjoyed previous apps, beginner courses will allow you to open the app and learn that simple habits are acquired gradually.
Number and range of meditation options
When choosing the best meditation app, consider the different types of meditation you want to practice. Beginner meditators may prefer guided sessions. You can experiment with Transcendental Meditation or Loving Kindness Meditation practices as you progress. Most importantly, you can meditate at your own pace, according to your preferences.
Clear curriculum
Meditation requires discipline. With a clear curriculum, reasonable goals, and incentives, an app can help you meditate for longer. A well-designed app will allow you to see results.
Well-designed platform
A meditation app today doesn’t have to be complicated or difficult to use. Meditation is about reaching a higher level of mindfulness without stress. A streamlined interface should reduce additional stress or distractions and allow you to focus on the task at hand.
Reasonable trial periods
The easiest way to get started with meditation is to try out a great app. A free trial, free version, or free meditation can help you get used to the process and see which meditation schedule or program works best for you.
Downloadable meditations
It’s great to have everything you need in one app, whether online or offline. If you can download your meditations through the app, you can set up a meditation studio anywhere in the world, even in the most remote locations.
