Headspace Alternatives: 6 Honest Options (Including Free Ones)
If you’re looking for an alternative to Headspace, it’s usually for one of three reasons. Knowing which one you are makes this a much shorter search.
- The price. $12.99 a month adds up, and you’re not sure you’re using it enough to justify it.
- The style. The cheerful animation and the upbeat voice work beautifully for some people and grate on others. That’s allowed.
- It stopped working. You subscribed, you meant it, and somewhere around week three you quietly stopped opening it.
Reason 3 is by far the most common — and, I’m afraid, the one that a different app is least likely to fix. I’ll come back to that honestly at the end. First, the actual alternatives.
I’ve taught mindfulness for over twenty years and spent time in all of these. Here’s my straight assessment.
The quick answer
| If you want… | Try |
|---|---|
| To pay nothing | Insight Timer |
| Better sleep content | Calm |
| Secular, philosophical depth | Waking Up |
| A no-nonsense practical teacher | Ten Percent Happier |
| Something for the kids | Smiling Mind |
| People, not recordings | (see the last section) |
1. Insight Timer — the best free alternative
The obvious first stop if the price is your issue. Its free tier is genuinely enormous: over 100,000 guided meditations, a proper timer, and no ads. Not a trial — free. MemberPlus ($9.99/month, $59.99/year) adds courses and offline listening, but most people never need it.
Strength: unbeatable value, thousands of teachers, you’ll find a voice you like. Weakness: it’s a library, not a curriculum. Without Headspace’s structure, beginners can drift and browse instead of practise. Use the beginner courses, not the search box.
Best for: anyone whose main complaint is the cost.
2. Calm — the best for sleep
The other giant. Calm is less a course and more a beautiful place to go, and its Sleep Stories are the best sleep content of any app — over 100 of them, read by voices like Matthew McConaughey and Stephen Fry.
$14.99/month or $69.99/year — so it’s slightly more than Headspace monthly, and identical annually. It also has children’s content, which Headspace doesn’t.
Weakness: less structure than Headspace, so it’s a step sideways rather than up if you wanted to learn properly.
(Full breakdown here: Headspace vs Calm.)
Best for: poor sleepers, and parents.
3. Waking Up — for the philosophically curious
Sam Harris’s app, and a genuinely different animal. It’s secular, intellectually serious, and interested in the nature of mind rather than stress relief. The daily meditations sit alongside long conversations about consciousness, free will and ethics.
Strength: depth. If Headspace felt shallow to you, this is the correction. Weakness: it’s demanding, and not everyone wants their meditation app to be a philosophy course. It’s also one of the pricier options — though notably, they give it free to anyone who genuinely can’t afford it, which I’ve always thought is rather decent.
Best for: people who found Headspace too light, and who like Einstein-shaped questions.
4. Ten Percent Happier — for sceptics
Born from Dan Harris’s book of the same name, and aimed squarely at people who find meditation a bit woo. The teaching comes from serious teachers (Joseph Goldstein among them) and the tone is dry, practical and refreshingly unprecious.
Strength: excellent teachers, no incense, no whale song. Weakness: smaller library; a similar price bracket to Headspace, so it won’t help if cost was the issue.
Best for: anyone whose objection to Headspace was the vibe rather than the price.
5. Smiling Mind — free, and good with children
A free Australian non-profit app with programmes designed for schools, families and workplaces. Genuinely free — not freemium — and the children’s material is thoughtful.
Best for: families, and anyone who’d rather support a non-profit.
6. No app at all
Worth saying plainly: you don’t need one. A chair, a timer on your phone and ten minutes will do everything an app does, minus the subscription. If you want a starting point, here’s my guide for beginners and a five-minute self-compassion meditation you can use free, forever.
The honest bit, if you’re here for reason 3
If you cancelled Headspace because you stopped using it, please read this before you subscribe to something else.
Switching apps very rarely fixes that. I’ve watched people move from Headspace to Calm to Insight Timer to Waking Up, collecting subscriptions like unread books, each one bought in a burst of good intention and abandoned in the same quiet way as the last. The problem was never the library. All of these apps have more content than you could finish in a lifetime.
The problem is that a recording has nobody in it. Nothing expects you. Nobody notices if you drift off for three weeks. And on a genuinely hard day — precisely when you need it — a thousand tracks feels like a fridge full of food when you’re too tired to cook.
An app gives you content. What most of us are actually short of is rhythm, and company.
A different kind of alternative (and yes, this one’s mine)
I should be upfront: I run the Daily Mindfulness Club, so treat what follows with an appropriate pinch of salt. But if you’ve just cancelled an app because it didn’t stick, it’s only fair to tell you there’s a different sort of option — not a better app, a different kind of thing.
The Club is a live sit every weekday morning at 7:30am UK time, guided by me, with a small friendly group of people who show up too.
- It’s live and human. I’m actually there, responding to how the room is that morning — not a recording made three years ago.
- There are people. A small community who notice you, and whom you notice. Being mildly expected somewhere is the most underrated habit-builder there is.
- It’s rooted in ACT — so it’s not only about relaxing, but about living in the direction of what matters to you.
- You get the recording if 7:30am isn’t your hour.
Is it for everyone? Honestly, no. If you want Sleep Stories with a Hollywood narrator, get Calm — it’s far better at that than I’ll ever be. If you want a vast free library, Insight Timer is remarkable and costs nothing.
But if you’ve now bought two meditation apps and drifted from both, the missing piece probably wasn’t more content. It was somebody expecting you.
No card needed. Come and sit with us one morning and see how it feels.
Frequently asked questions
What is the best free alternative to Headspace? Insight Timer, comfortably. Its free tier includes over 100,000 guided meditations and a full-featured timer, with no ads and no trial limit. Smiling Mind is a good free option for families.
Is Calm better than Headspace? Neither is better outright. Calm wins clearly for sleep; Headspace wins for learning to meditate properly. See the full comparison.
Is there a Headspace alternative with a real teacher? That’s a fair thing to want, and it’s rarer than it should be. Live classes at a local centre are one route; the Daily Mindfulness Club is another, with a live guided sit each weekday morning.
Why do people cancel Headspace? Usually cost, or the cheerful style, or simply that they stopped opening it. The last of those is the most common — and switching apps tends not to fix it.
Can I just meditate without an app? Absolutely, and many people practise better that way. A timer and ten minutes is a complete practice. The apps sell structure and company; you can find both elsewhere.
In short
Cancelling Headspace over price? Go to Insight Timer — you’ll lose almost nothing. Over style? Try Ten Percent Happier or Waking Up. Over sleep? Calm.
But if you cancelled because it quietly stopped happening, be honest with yourself about that before you hand over another $70. Another library won’t fix it. A smaller session, a set time, and someone who notices — that will. :)