Do you struggle to wake up in the morning or get to sleep at night? Do you think you might be sleep talking or snoring? We all have nocturnal secrets that are just waiting to be uncovered with the right sleep app.
With so many options available, from sleep recorder apps, sleep talking apps, and free sleep apps, you'll get the full picture on the state of your sleep health.
Listen to playback of any talking or snoring, track your health using breathing and heart rate data, understand your sleep cycle, and learn different strategies that use meditation, breathing techniques and white noise for an easier drift-off.
Learn to sleep smarter, with eight of the best sleep apps.
Headspace
Headspace is an everyday mindfulness meditation app that can teach you how to relax, manage stress, find focus, and release tension in your body.
Sleep is very often a by-product of this relaxing app, which takes you through guided meditations, breath work, and mindfulness exercises on stress, worry and general anxiety.
The three-minute sessions are easy to weave into your bedtime wind-down routine, on your daily (car-free) commute, or as a quick boost within a busy day.
Listen to soothing stories, calming sounds, and music to promote sleep and better rest. It requires a subscription that many are happy to pay for, but you can try it for a limited period for free.
Calm
The award-winning sleep and meditation app claims to have over 100 million users worldwide. Calm opens with a reminder to take a deep breath and offers guided meditations that vary between three to 25 minutes, so you can do as little or as much as you can find time for.
The 10 minute Daily Calm feature is narrated by famous voices, so you can get carried away by the dulcet Texan tones of Matthew McConaughey, a music library with tracks from top artists like Keith Urban and Disney and learn new tips and tricks from short videos covering stretching and mindful movement. You’ll need to cough up for premium content, from £49.99.
Simba Sleep Coach
Ok, humble brag time. No round up of the best sleep apps would be complete without an honourable mention of our very own, completely free Sleep Coach app, developed with esteemed sleep expert, author, speaker and physiologist, Dr Nerina Ramlakhan.
The sleep expert in your pocket, our app is engineered to move you away from obsessing about total sleep time and towards a better understanding between sleep and energy.
Using the latest sleep and psychological research and behavioural science techniques, it’s packed with practical insights, advice, and positive reinforcement, to create sleep enhancing habits, like teaching you how to calm a racing mind.
The Sleep Coach tracks vital health points such as breathing rate, body temperature, resting heart rate, and menstrual cycle, along with other sleep-impacting factors, such as caffeine and alcohol intake.
We aim to get every app user to feel better within three weeks using quick, daily check-ins, and with significant improvements after 4-12 weeks.
With clear and simple analysis, personalised psychological insights, practical hints and tips, meditation, and a choice of relaxing sounds, we promise to noticeably improve your sleep performance before you can say ‘goodnight.’
Ōura
Ōura is a sleep and wellness app that offers advanced sleep monitoring. It tracks the various sleep cycle changes and recommends an ideal bedtime for your personal sleep pattern.
Using three daily scores for sleep, activity, and readiness, it gives simple, personal insights with actionable guidance to improve your sleep quality.
The Readiness score reveals the impact of sleep, recovery, activity, and lifestyle choices on your health.
Over time, the app will produce long term trends from daily, weekly, and monthly analysis by measuring resting heart rate and HRV, nighttime body temperature, and dynamic activity, such as calories and step count, with the option to add your own tags to log sleep spoilers like caffeine or alcohol.
Sleep Cycle
Struggling to get out of bed in the morning? Hitting snooze like a whack-a-mole? Sleep Cycle is a comprehensive app that’s geared towards making mornings easier and more energised.
It’s designed with a gentle alarm to wake you during a light sleep cycle, so you’re in the best position to hop out of the sack. There’s nothing to wear or put under your pillow, just turn the app on and leave on your nightstand or floor.
Sleep Cycle uses sound analysis and the phone microphone to identify sleep states, tracking your cycle through the night. It provides detailed analysis with daily graphs and stats, not to mention carefully selected alarm melodies, a library of sleep aids, a customisable wake-up window, and it can even tell you how the weather is affecting your sleep.
SnoreLab
Do you honk like a goose or wheeze like an empty bagpipe when you sleep? SnoreLab will reveal all.
This app records, measures, and tracks your snoring, while helping you to find effective solutions to reduce it.
SnoreLab will listen to you through the night - provided your battery has enough life - recording your nasal-tonsil gymnastics. In the morning, it will crunch the data and give you a Snore Score covering when and how loudly you snored - with added playback for the highlights.
You can log and track lifestyle factors - and work out if that extra glass of red wine is the real culprit - and analyse the effectiveness of any snoring remedies.
SnoreLab uses advanced snore detection algorithms, will email you the files and compare the data across nights. Of course, none of this will be news to your bleary-eyed bedfellow with the ear plugs, but SnoreLab might just put some harmony back in the bedroom.
Pzizz
Want someone to whisper quietly in your ear? Get ready to sleep, nap or focus with Pzizz.
This mix of dreamy music, voiceovers, and sound effects based on the latest clinical research, can help you sleep better at night or power nap during the day.
The Sleep Module allows the user to customise their sleep sessions with different genres of narrations or ‘dreamscapes’ designed to invoke deep rest and relaxation.
The Nap Module will sharpen focus and elevate your mood using specially designed nap narrations that will shake off groggy feelings and boost energy levels. The Focus Module will increase your productivity, by helping to get you in the zone.
Each module has a focus section and a ‘cooldown’ to bring you back gently. It’s simple, highly customisable, clinically validated and every session is unique.
Sleep Talk Recorder
Talking in your sleep? Acting out your dreams? Worried you’ll let something slip? Had a full conversation and zero recollection? Find out what you said with the Sleep Talk Recorder.
It doesn’t rely on an ongoing recording, rather, the app uses an advanced filtering function to qualify each sound and trigger the recorder. With a full history, it saves every night’s activity and creates a timeline - and you can even share your best bits for easy laughs. Also beneficial for snorers. One reviewer even credits the app with diagnosing a case of severe sleep apnoea.
