There’s no shortage of mindfulness and meditation apps these days, promising to help you combat anxiety, sleep better, hone your focus, and more. In fact, the Wall Street Journal reports that more than 2,000 new meditation apps launched between 2015 and 2018, and offerings have only increased as a result of higher demand during the pandemic—according to the New York Times, mindfulness apps surged in 2020. We took the overwhelm out of finding the most valuable and easy-to-use meditation apps that are available free and narrowed it down to these five apps.
Summary
Mindfulness.com
- Platforms: iOS, Android, web
- Highlights: Over 2,000 guided meditations with a customizable “For You” experience, quick mini exercises,sleep aids, and calming soundscapes.
- Paid Upgrade: Offers Mindfulness Plus+ for enhanced features like daily coaching.
Insight Timer
- Platforms: iOS, Android, web
- Highlights: Massive library of 80,000+ free meditations from 10,000+ teachers, live events, and a global community showing real-time meditation stats.
- Paid Upgrade: Annual subscription unlocks courses, offline downloads, and advanced player controls.
Smiling Mind
- Platforms: iOS, Android, web
- Highlights: Not-for-profit with structured programs for different age groups and needs, including quick sessions and family-friendly content.
- Cost: Entirely free with no premium options.
UCLA Mindful
- Platforms: iOS, Android
- Highlights: Developed by UCLA’s Mindful Awareness Research Center, featuring bilingual guided meditations and research-based practices, plus longer “podcast” sessions.
- Cost: Free.
Healthy Minds Program
- Platforms: iOS, Android
- Highlights: Merges neuroscience with meditation training using a four-pillar approach (Awareness, Connection, Insight, Purpose) and offers micro practices for on-the-go mindfulness.
- Cost: Free.
5 Free Meditation Apps We’re Happy We Downloaded
1) Mindfulness.com
Available for iOS, Android, and web
Entry price: Free
With over 2,000 guided meditations from world-leading teachers, this app caters to both beginners and seasoned practitioners.
The interface includes five tabs: Mini, where you can find quick and easy mindfulness exercises you can do anytime throughout the day; Meditate, where you’ll find all of the app’s 2,000+ guided meditations; Sleep, which houses restful and relaxing meditations for deep sleep; Radio, where you can find mindfulness music and sound scapes for focus and calm; and finally the For You tab, which is really what makes this app stand out.
Throughout your use of this app, you’ll be prompted to provide information about your preferences, goals, and the type of support you’re looking for. The app will then offer personalized daily coaching videos paired with guided meditations on the For You tab. You can choose what length you’d like your daily meditations to be—from five to 30 minutes—depending on your schedule and level of practice. Opportunities to dive deeper include meditation courses, expert Q&As, breath work, journaling prompts, and more.
Whether you’re looking to reduce stress and anxiety or seeking support for overall mental health, the Mindfulness.com app is a solid resource. The multitude of functionalities offered by this app puts your mindfulness journey in your hands and enables you to grow in the direction of your choosing at your own pace.
Paid option: For $84.99 per year (with a 14-day free trial) or $169 for a lifetime membership, both with a 30-Day money-back guarantee, Mindfulness Plus+ includes: daily mindfulness video coaching and meditations; courses and tools to help manage anxiety, sleep, and stress; over 2,000 meditations, calm music, nature soundscapes, and more.
2) Insight Timer
Available for iOS, Android, and web
Entry price: Free
Insight Timer has a huge library of content: over 80,000 free guided meditations from over 10,000 teachers on topics like stress, relationships, healing, sleep, creativity, and more.
Right from the beginning, the app feels like a global community—the world map on the home screen shows a collective of 18 million meditators, and announces, “741k today, 7k now.” After you finish a meditation, you’ll learn exactly how many people were meditating “with you” during that time—and by setting your location, you can even see meditators nearby and what tracks they’re listening to.
Once you find a teacher you enjoy—like Jack Kornfield, Tara Brach, Sharon Salzberg, or Rhonda Magee—you can follow them to make sure you don’t miss any new content. You can also tune in to free talks for life advice and inspiration. For those craving real-time interactions, Insight Timer offers live events every hour of the day to join on a whim or plan into your schedule.
You can even sign up to Circle for Teams, one of their newer offerings, which allows you to create circles (read: groups) to meditate in real-time with friends or colleagues.
If you prefer a quieter meditation, however, you can simply set a timer and meditate to intermittent bells, calming ambient noise, or soothing music.
Depending on your preferences, Insight Timer’s extensive collection can be either a blessing or a curse—an endless list of choices that leave you overwhelmed or a buffet of tempting options to sink your teeth into.
Paid option: For $60 per year (with a 30-day free trial), you get access to courses with well-known teachers, the ability to download meditations and listen offline, and advanced player functions like repeat mode and fast forward and rewind.
3) Smiling Mind
Available for iOS, Android, and web
Entry price: Free
Smiling Mind hits the sweet spot for a free mindfulness app in so many ways.
The not-for-profit app features hundreds of meditations, enough to keep you engaged without overwhelming you with choice. They are organized into structured programs like Mindful Foundations (35 sessions), Sleep (6 sessions), Digital Detox (8 sessions), and Stress Management (10 sessions), but you have the flexibility to choose where to start and to easily jump between programs. Most meditations are in the five- to fifteen-minute range, with a few practices up to 45 minutes for advanced meditators. Smiling Mind also offers bite-sized meditations between 2 to 5 minutes for moments when you’re in need of a quick, mindful pause in the day.
Downloaded by over 5.5 million people, the app also has a variety of specialized programs for families, children and teens of various ages, healthcare workers, and educators (including curricula they can use in the classroom); all developed with the help of psychologists and health professionals.
While you could use a meditation app as a temporary break from your hectic life, Smiling Mind wants you to take your mindfulness practice off the cushion and into the rest of your day. Interspersed with some of the meditation programs are instructions for “activities” like Journaling Exercise, Go Offline, Where Did My Food Come From, and Count Your Senses. In the Count Your Senses activity, for example, the audio prompts you to bring your attention to your senses by counting things that can be seen, felt, heard, smelled and tasted.
Smiling Mind was originally created for kids, so they offer a robust selection of kid- and youth-appropriate mindfulness sessions.
Created by a nonprofit by the same name, Smiling Mind is entirely free—so you don’t have the distraction of paid content that’s inaccessible to you as a free user. The app wants to put a “smile on your mind”—and it might just succeed.
Paid option: None
4) UCLA Mindful
Available for iOS and Android
Entry price: Free
If all the research on mindfulness has persuaded you that you need to meditate, the UCLA Mindful app could be a good place to start.
Developed by the Mindful Awareness Research Center at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), the app features about a dozen meditations of different types in English and Spanish. You can learn to focus on your breath, your body, or sounds; work with difficult emotions; and cultivate loving-kindness in sessions ranging from 3 to 19 minutes long.
If you’re new to mindfulness, you might choose to take advantage of their Getting Started section, which offers information on what mindfulness is, how to choose a meditation, which posture is best for your practice, and what research-backed benefits you might expect from it.
As a bonus, the app also offers longer meditations that it calls “podcasts.” These are half-hour audio recordings of meditations that include talks, typically by UCLA Director of Mindfulness Education Diana Winston, before and after the meditation, as well as plenty of silent practice time.
If you’re looking for an app that is heavily grounded in the science of mindfulness, you can put your trust in UCLA Mindful.
Paid option: None
5) Healthy Minds Program
Available for iOS and Android
Entry price: Free
The Healthy Minds Program app wants to help you develop the skills for a healthy mind—by strengthening mental focus, decreasing stress, and growing resilience, compassion, and better immune health.
Founded by neuroscientist Dr. Richard Davidson (who also founded the research institute Center for Healthy Minds at the University of Wisconsin-Madison), the app integrates neuroscience and research-based techniques with meditation training to increase overall well-being.
The framework of the app’s mindfulness and well-being training is organized into four pillars: Awareness, Connection, Insight, and Purpose. Each pillar consists of three to five parts, and each part contains three series and multiple sessions within. For the Connection pillar, for example, the Innate Self-Worth series includes five sessions packaged to foster self-worth (think sessions like Practice Seeing the Good In Ourselves, and Learn Negativity Bias). You have a choice of either a Sitting or Active type of practice—“active” practices include guidance for being mindful while you exercise, or during your commute—and you can customize the length of time (five minutes to 30 minutes).
The app offers a collection of 27 meditations outside their four-pillar wellness framework, including one-minute Micro Practices for when you’re in need of a brief respite.
At times the podcast-style app may encourage more thinking compared to typical guided meditations, but for the listener who is seeking guided meditations with the greater goal to increase awareness, cognition, and well-being, Healthy Minds Program app may be just the ticket.
Paid option: None
