Best Meditation Apps
So you’re interested in practicing mindfulness and you don’t know where to get started. This page is for you. Here we will cover some of the most commonly used apps for mindfulness – Calm, Headspace and Aura.
What is a Meditation App?
There’s an app for everything, and mindfulness and meditation is no exception. More broadly, mindfulness apps contain great content for learning how to meditate and generally how to adopt a mindfulness practice.
Many of us men often think of meditation as corny, religious, dogmatic, or just outright feminine. But that is completely untrue, and there are numerous benefits to meditation, as evidenced by scientific studies.
Here we will look at Calm, Headspace and Aura to help get you started.
Similarities
Platforms – all apps are available on Apple Store and Google Play Store (see links below).
Suited for Beginners – all apps suit anyone wishing to start a meditation practice. They offer free trials, but both are also very reasonably priced at less than $100 USD per year (less than $10 per month).
Course content – Calm and Headspace provide a wide range of courses – including various topics such as dealing with stress, sleep, learning basics of meditation, grieving, depression, relationships, loneliness, eating – the list goes on and on. Aura is a little more self-guided.
Navigation and Favourites – both apps are very easy to navigate and find the content you’re looking for (such as search capabilities). In addition, both offer the ability to favourite your preferred courses and individual content to access them more easily.
Great for sleep – the apps provide various content for helping you overcome sleep challenges. Very often sleep becomes a “thing” where we start depending on external resources (sleep meds, etc.) and become more and more obsessed, making sleep even more challenging. Mindfulness and specifically meditation helps to teach us how to be in the “present” which helps us fall asleep faster and stay asleep longer.
TIP – don’t just try a meditation app a couple times. Commit to at least a week and make it a daily habit (only takes 10-20 mins per day). Like any new skill (yes meditation is a skill), it takes practice – and with repeated effort it will become more comfortable and you’ll reap huge rewards in improving your stress levels and overall mood.
Differences
All these apps are great, but the similarities primarily end here. Below are key differences to help you decide which app may be better suited to you.
User Interface – if you’re looking for a more simple user interface, then Headspace might be better for you. It’s simple interface makes it pleasantly easy to navigate with simple controls with a focus on minimalization. Calm on the other hand is a little more robust in terms of its interface, such as more background photos, menus, and text. Aura is in the middle, offering a little more visuals than Headspace, but still very simple to navigate.
Session Options – all apps provide different options and settings when listening. Headspace for example gives you the option to have different people narrate the same content (most of the time) while also providing duration options such as 10, 15, or 20 min sessions. The spoken content is the same, but there is just more silence between the speaking in case you don’t have the full 20 mins per session (but the silence is great practice to help build the skill of meditation). Calm offers alternative options, such as the ability to have background calming nature sounds in the background (a nice touch if pure silence is difficult). Aura is a little more focused on individual sessions, with not as many options such as duration, background sounds, timers, etc.
Guided Courses – Calm and Headspace both provide courses, but if you’re really looking for beginner guidance on how to meditate and want the repetition to help practice and build the habit, Headspace might be easier for you. However, Calm also provides great courses, and provides a more varied experience with differing explanations and content if you find that the repetitiveness of Headspace gets boring. Calm also has shorter individual sessions within each course.
Simplicity – plainly speaking, Headspace has a simple interface that is not too busy (their logo for example is simply an orange circle). One very noticeable thing about Headspace is the repetition of content – some may find that content is repeated, but just like any new skill development, it is all about the repetition. Whereas with Calm, there is a little more variety, more visuals, and thus if you prefer that style, Calm might be more suited towards you.
Nature Sounds – there is a clear difference on this one. Whereas Headspace is more focused on the silent part of the meditation practice (which is important), Calm offers numerous nature sounds as part of their “Soundscapes” collection to help you to sleep such as rain, flowing water, or evening crickets, along with other white noise options such as the sound of being in a commercial airliner, distant traffic, or even purring cats. Although Headspace does not offer pure nature sounds, they have an extensive collection of what they call “Sleepcasts” that help you drift off to sleep and often contain background calming sounds.
So Which One is Best?
Which is better – a fork or a spoon? It all depends on your own personal preferences and needs, and above helps to highlight both the similarities and differences to help guide your decision.
Our recommendation – all 3 are great, so review on your own and give a try by using their free trial option. Within a few days you will likely get a sense of which one you prefer.
Also, you may want to explore if your employer has any corporate plans that either offer free or discounted plans to either of these apps, or access to other meditation options as part of your employee benefits package.
Register now to receive more personal advice and recommendations on developing a mindfulness practice, and to receive special discounts.
