The 3 Best Meditation Apps of 2025

Free or donation-based apps

Blackfullness (iOS, Android) doesn’t have enough content to compete with our picks, but its offerings, including daily affirmations, are meant to fill gaps in inclusion and belonging. “We’re creating a space that helps people have more access to mindfulness, where they can see themselves in the experience, where it doesn’t feel like it’s so far off,” said David Walker Jr., who co-founded the app after a camping trip in 2020.

Medito (iOS, Android) is run by a nonprofit foundation focused on building a more mindful world. A customizable timer helps you meditate for as long as you choose, from a minute to an hour. To access insightful sessions, though, you have to go back and forth within the app to play the next track.

Paid apps

Aura (iOS, Android; $70 per year) has a massive library with more than 10,000 meditations, life-coaching articles, stories, and music tracks, including live sessions, celebrity instruction, and themed series such as the three-day course “Beginners Breath Meditation” or the seven-day “Wonderful Morning Affirmations.” It provides a great diversity of instructors, a massive sleep section, and, for an additional fee, one-on-one coaching. However, the app doesn’t always load properly, and in our experience it closed at times without warning. Saving tracks to create playlists can be cumbersome.

If you already know how to meditate and want to get into a deeper zone or flow state, Brain.fm (iOS, Android; $70 per year) is a favorite, particularly among neurodivergent people. The app is known for its AI-generated music based on rapid modulation of brain wave frequencies. With limited options for guidance, it is not the best choice for people who want to learn how to meditate. You can pair audio content to your mental state, for focusing, relaxing, meditating, or sleeping.

Happier (iOS, Android; $100 per year), formerly Ten Percent Happier, is an easy-to-navigate app with a clean interface. Its targeted and tailored approach, with topics such as chronic pain and illness, neurodivergence, and celebrate Pride, set the app apart. Two flagship courses, “Getting Started” and “The Dalai Lama’s Guide,” the latter of which includes videos with the Buddhist master, stand out. Like many other apps, Happier also has an unguided timer (which lasts from one minute to 90 minutes). This app has a variety of voices, plus unguided meditations. Its shorts feature offers quick, insightful three-minute videos and actionable-practice tips, such as meditating while using the timer on an electric toothbrush. Still, our picks have much larger libraries and therefore provide better value overall.

The colorful home screen of Mindwell (at the time of publication, iOS only; $60 per year) is meant to help assess your mood, slotting it into one of four quadrants — frustrated (red), energized (yellow), discouraged (purple), or relaxed (blue) — or somewhere in between. It provides a lot of options, including meditations grouped together by themed topics and encompassing everything from sports and fitness to “destructive behavior” to living with cancer. In our experience, however, the library seemed disjointed and scattered.

Simple Habit (iOS, Android; $90 per year) is marketed for busy people. The app offers a lot for beginners and for those seeking stress management. Through its On-the-Go option, you can select a five-, 10- or 20-minute meditation based on your mood. Although Simple Habit provides a wide selection of meditations with a paid subscription, it has a limited amount of free content; some people complain that if they try the paid version and then decide to switch back to free, their app freezes. At this price, which is more than what most competitors, including Insight Timer and Headspace, charge, a meditation app needs to be really good to be worth the money.

Breethe (iOS, Android; $89 per year) presents a personalized approach in English or Spanish with more than 1,700 tracks. Unlike most meditation apps we tested and reviewed for this guide, Breethe also provides access to alternative therapies, such as hypnotherapy, tapping, and music therapy. Six AI coaches offer to help with sleep, relationships, and parenting, among other topics. Unlike with Headspace, where you can opt out of the AI chat, if you don’t use the coach feature in Breethe, there isn’t a good way to get a suggestion quickly. It took six of my responses (13 total messages between us) before Breethe’s AI parenting coach finally asked, “Would you like some advice on how to approach this?” (Headspace’s Ebb chat bot was more helpful, more quickly.)

To access content on Meditopia (iOS, Android; from $80 per year), you need to take an extensive quiz that feels quite invasive — and quite aggravating by the time you’ve completed it. It’s enough of a barrier to entry that we think most people are likely to quit before they get through it. For example, when it asks about your experience with meditation, it doesn’t even give you an option to say you’re advanced; the choices are simply “I’m not interested,” “I have little to no experience,” or “I meditate every now and then.” It also asks questions about age and gender that seem invasive. And the pricing structure is complicated, with 10 different options listed on iTunes.

Sattva (iOS, Android; $50 per year) includes guided meditations, mantras, chants, and sacred sounds in a Vedic-meditation-based app that prominently features global humanitarian and Indian spiritual teacher Gurudev Sri Sri Ravi Shankar. A quick-start timer makes it easy to meditate as soon as you fire up the app. The ability to add shortcuts helps you find tracks you’ve saved. Many of the mediations are at least eight minutes long.

Caira Blackwell contributed reporting. This article was edited by Tracy Vence and Kalee Thompson.