If you’re wanting get recovery better and perform better – sleeping better is the number 1 thing you can do.
You can start by testing out a sleep drink or night time drink to help you get better results, but how do you know if they work?
What apps and technology can you use to help you figure out if you’re actually sleeping better or if you’re just spending more time unconscious.
Luckily, there’s no lack of sleep apps in the App Store – so we’ve gotten to work seeing which ones are the real deal.
So we’ve gone ahead and downloaded them, tested them out and yes – even slept with them – so you don’t have.
Save your time, your money and your sanity and get better sleep today.
The Best Sleep Apps In 2023 Overview
The Best Sleep App For Productivity: Rise Science
The Oldest Sleep Tracking App: Sleep Cycle
The Best Sleep Meditation App: Calm
The Best Sleep Noise App: Noisli
The Most Featured Sleep App: Pzizz
The Best Sound Machine App: Endel:
The Best Sleep App / Wearable Combo: Oura / Whoop
The Best Sleep App For Productivity: Rise Science
Rise Science is a relative newcomer on the sleep app scene, but they are here to play.
They use data from other sources that write to Apple Health to calculate your “sleep debt” for the week and how much sleep you need to get in order to catch up and perform optimally.
However, once you start digging, you find that there’s a slew of things within Rise including circadian rhythm chart that can help you chart your optimal energy times (and even map it to your calendar), a slew of sleep hygiene recommendations and habit builders, as well as even a bed-time noise machine (although, if we’re honest, this is nearly impossible to find unless you’re explicitly told where to look).
Rise is maybe the top player in the sleep app space and it’s the one app that’s gotten us a metric (sleep debt) that feels like something we can work on and optimize over time.
Our biggest issue with Rise is that they have TOO MANY things in one app. They almost need to split it into a “data app”, a “sleep noise app” and “habit forming” app so you can do what you need to do in each app.
Download Rise Science on Apple here
→ Read our full in-depth review on Rise Science here.
The Oldest Sleep Tracking App: Sleep Cycle
Sleep Cycle might be the OG sleep app of the sleep app universe (correct us if we’re wrong here).
Sleep Cycle used to have a companion app – the power nap app – which we loved, but they no longer support this. Sad day.
Sleep Cycle does a great job of detecting your sleep, tracking it over time and letting you see more and more details related to it.
However, some of the stuff recently – we don’t love so much. Notably, them wanting more and more access to upload your sleep data to their servers and record audio recordings of your sleep. Don’t get us wrong – we know why they do this (you can listen to hear snoring, etc), but it seems a little more than we asked for when we wanted to know about our sleep cycles.
That said, it’s still a great app and maybe the market leader for a reason.
→ Download Sleep Cycle on the App Store
The Best Sleep Meditation App: Calm
Calm isn’t usually thought of as a sleep app, but with the focus on meditation, calming yourself and lowering your heart rate – sleep is a natural fit.
Beyond the standard meditations, they have a series of recordings aimed towards sleep. Between their stories and their sounds, Calm has something to lull you to sleep and help you recover.
Note – this is the extent of Calm’s help for sleep. It doesn’t help with tracking or analytics – so if you want those details, you’re going to need to combine some apps here.
→ Download Calm on the App Store
The Best Sleep Noise App: Noisli
Noisli is just a sleep noise app. That’s it. And that’s what we love about it. In a world where people are jamming more and more features into their apps making them feel bloated and confusing – Noisli knows exactly what it is – it’s right in the name after all – and they do a good job at it.
We appreciate you Noisli.
→ Download Noisli on the App Store
The Most Featured Sleep App: Pzizz
The first thing we noticed about Pzizz was how big of a download it was (and also how much the name looks like “pizza” but that’s another tangent).
Pzizz has morphed over the years, but is primarily a hybrid music system designed to help lull you into sleep. Like other apps on the list – they allow you to personalize sounds and narrations and pair that with fade-ins/fade-outs and alarm clocks.
While Pzizz does offer tracking – it’s relatively minimal compared to the other offerings on this list – so we’d recommend this in combination with a sleep tracker of some sort.
→ Download Pzizz on the App Store
The Best Sound Machine App: Endel
We didn’t find Endel. Endel found us.
With their targeted ads that are almost hypnotic, we clicked before we knew was it was.
Endel is an overall sound machine app that’s similar to binaural beats and aims to help different “peak states” – one of those states just happens to be sleep.
Personally, we think this app is beautifully done but just a bit too complicated for our needs. Call us old fashioned, but “rain” is a bit more soothing to us than a custom sleep sound algorithm we have to set every night before bed.
→ Download Endel on the App Store
The Best Sleep App / Wearable Combo: Oura / Whoop
If you have a wearable, we’d be remiss to say the obvious – use their app! While Oura and Whoop both have different pros and cons, if you already have one – just use their app. The consistent tracking of the data will be more useful on it’s own than any one feature of the app above (although Rise will give you another layer to look at this data).
We won’t dive into the differences on which you should get in the Oura vs. Whoop debate (we’ll leave that for another blog), but if you already have them – make sure you’re using them properly!
→ Download the Oura App on the App Store
→ Download the Whoop App on the App Store
What do you think? Did we miss any sleep apps? What would you add to the list?
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Photo by Artur Łuczka on Unsplash
