Best Apps

By Filip Kowalski · Published August 2, 2026

Calm alternatives in 2026: pick one by what you used Calm for

Atmospheric night scene illustrating Calm alternatives in 2026: pick one by what you used Calm for

Slo is the Calm alternative for people who paid for the soundscapes rather than the meditation: an ambient sound library and mixer on iPhone, Android and Mac, free to test in the browser at slonoise.com before you touch another subscription.

Calm is three products under one icon: a meditation library, a catalogue of narrated Sleep Stories, and a set of ambient soundscapes. Almost nobody uses all three. Work out which one you actually opened, because the replacement differs for each, and for two of the three the best replacement costs nothing. We make Slo, which belongs in one of these groups and is the wrong answer for the other two. Everything said about the other products comes from that product’s own site or its live App Store listing, checked on 2 August 2026.

Why people leave

Price, in nearly every case. Google search data we pulled on 2 August 2026 clusters around leaving rather than around comparing: roughly 3,600 searches a month for “calm app free” across seven English-language markets, 390 for “calm subscription cost”, 260 for “cancel calm subscription”. Four of the ten busiest phrasings of “Calm alternative” contain the word free, including the top two.

So the free options come first in each group below. If you were happy paying, you would be reading a comparison instead.

Work out which Calm you were paying for

Check your screen-time breakdown, or think back to the last five times you opened the app.

What you opened Calm forWhere to lookFree option exists
guided meditation, the Daily Calm, breathing exercisesInsight Timer, Meditoyes, both
Sleep Stories and other narrated contentBetterSleep, Insight Timerpartly
soundscapes and noise at bedtimemyNoise, Dark Noise, Sloyes, all three

Skip to your row. The three sections run in the same order.

If you used the meditation

Two products cover this, and both give away what Slo does not have at any price.

Insight Timer publishes the largest free library in the category. Its own site describes guided meditations from psychologists, spiritual leaders and mindfulness teachers, alongside live yoga and a breathwork section, and presents that library as free. A paid tier sells courses on top. If the Daily Calm was your habit, this replaces it at no cost.

Medito takes the harder line. It runs as a registered Dutch non-profit, and its foundation site states the position without hedging: no paywalls, no ads, no premium tier, no trial, source code public under AGPL. Fewer tracks than Insight Timer, more coherent as a course.

Both beat Slo outright here. Slo carries no guided content of any kind. No narration, no courses, no breathing exercises, no teacher, and no plan to add them. If meditation is why you subscribed, stop reading and go to one of those two.

If you used Sleep Stories

This group has no clean answer, so here is the honest version rather than a substitute dressed up as one.

Calm commissions, produces and narrates Sleep Stories at a scale nobody else has matched, and the celebrity narration is a real moat. Insight Timer carries bedtime tales in its free library and Medito carries sleep stories, but neither catalogue matches Calm on size or production. BetterSleep runs a narrated library next to a sound mixer and comes closest as a paid swap, though it trades one subscription for another rather than ending one.

Slo has none of this. No stories, no narration, no voice at all. If falling asleep to someone reading aloud is the thing that works for you, a sound app will not replace it, and we are not going to pretend otherwise.

If you used the sleep sounds

This is the group where the subscription was doing the least work. Calm’s soundscapes are a small part of a large product. If they were the only part you opened, you were paying for a meditation library and a story catalogue that sat untouched.

You can test the replacement now, in this tab, without installing anything.

Three products cover this group, and they suit different people.

myNoise goes deepest. Its generators expose per-frequency sliders and a calibration step, so you can push a noise lower or thin out the band that bothers you. Slo does none of that. Our mixer balances whole sounds against each other and cannot reshape a spectrum, which makes myNoise the better tool for anyone who enjoys tuning. Its US App Store listing on 2 August 2026 shows a free download with a paid in-app purchase covering the full catalogue, and the website has always been free to use.

Dark Noise is the Apple answer. Sounds, custom mixes, widgets, Siri Shortcuts and a Mac presence, built by a small independent developer since 2019. Its US App Store listing on 2 August 2026 shows a free download with a paid tier above it. There is no Android version. Its Shortcuts and widget support beats anything Slo offers, so if your bedtime already runs on an Apple automation, this is the one that slots into it.

Slo is ours. A curated library of noise colours, rain, water, fire and room ambience, a mixer that gives every layer its own volume, and browser players with a timer that need no download at all. The browser players and presets are free; the app sells paid entitlements, so read your own listing for what it currently includes. Pick it if you want one product across iOS, Android and Mac, and you would rather move two sliders than ten.

For single sounds instead of a mix, brown noise is the low, steady one most people mean when they say white noise, pink noise sits a little brighter, and ocean gives you movement with no rhythm to follow. The rain and brown noise preset and the ocean and pink noise preset open with the layers already balanced.

What none of these do

None of these products treats a condition. People use ambient sound to cover a noisy street, to make a quiet room less quiet, or simply because they like it, and that is the entire honest claim. If you have not slept properly for weeks, an app is the wrong tool: that warrants a conversation with a doctor, and cognitive behavioural therapy carries stronger clinical support for persistent insomnia than anything you can download.

For Slo specifically, we claim no offline playback, no account sync, and no presets that follow you between devices. Calm’s support pages document offline downloads for Sleep Stories, which matters if you fly often.

Questions people ask

Is there a free version of Calm?

Calm downloads free on the App Store, checked on 2 August 2026, and some content opens without Premium. Calm’s own support pages, which we last read on 31 July 2026 for our Slo and Calm comparison, put the Sleep Stories catalogue and the wider library behind Premium. The free selection changes, so check inside the app for what your account currently gets.

What is the closest free alternative to Calm?

For meditation, Insight Timer or Medito, and Medito has no paid tier at all. For sleep sounds, any browser player on this site, with no account and no install. Nothing free replaces all three parts of Calm, because nothing free does all three.

Can anything replace Sleep Stories?

Not really. Insight Timer and Medito both carry narrated bedtime content in their free libraries, and BetterSleep sells its own catalogue, but Calm’s runs larger and more heavily produced. If that is your main use, staying put is a defensible answer.

Do I need an app at all?

For ambient sound, no. A browser tab with a player and a timer does the same job, and every sound page on this site works that way. An app earns its place when you want playback to start without touching your phone, continue with the screen off, or run from a watch.

Sources checked 2 August 2026

A note on prices. We publish none. Every product here downloads free and charges through in-app purchase, and those amounts differ by storefront, by promotion, and by web or in-app checkout. A figure written today would be wrong for someone reading it next month in another country, and a wrong price does more damage than no price. Open the listing on your own device.

Explore more sounds in Slo

Stack two or three sounds, keep the blend, and let the timer stop it. Slo, on iOS, Android and Mac.

Download on the App Store Get it on Google Play

Filip Kowalski is the developer of Slo and writes about sound, sleep, and focus.