The Underrated Meditation Apps Hiding Behind Calm and Headspace

Open the wellness section of the App Store and two names do most of the talking. But sort the meditation category by rating instead of marketing budget and a stranger picture emerges: the apps sitting at the very top are frequently the ones with no billboard campaign, no celebrity sleep story, and no Super Bowl slot. This is a roundup of the mindfulness apps the apptidal desk thinks deserve a second look, loosely ranked by how strong their case is against the household names. Every app here is free to download, though most reserve their full library for a subscription.

The genuinely free ones that do not punish you

Medito is the one we point people to first. It is run as a non-profit, which means the whole library is free with no paywall waiting three sessions in, and the content is far better than that funding model would suggest. At a 4.9 store rating it is one of the best-reviewed apps in the entire category. Its honest limitation is scale: the catalog is a fraction of what the paid giants carry, and the production feels functional rather than cinematic.

Insight Timer reaches the same free-forever idea from the opposite direction, offering tens of thousands of genuinely free guided sessions from a huge roster of teachers. The trade-off is obvious the moment you open it: the sheer volume is overwhelming, and because almost anyone can publish, quality swings hard from session to session. Treat it as a library to mine rather than a guided path, and its 4.89 rating makes sense.

Plum Village rounds out the free tier with something quieter. Built around the teachings of Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh, it is ad-free, calm to the point of sparse, and carries more than 100 guided meditations plus bells and chants you will not find elsewhere. Its 4.96 rating is among the highest here. The caveat is that it is narrow by design: this is one specific tradition, and people who want variety or sleep-focused content should look further down the list.

Apps built around a single voice

Some of the best meditation apps are really one teacher's project, and that focus is the point. Waking Up, anchored by neuroscientist and author Sam Harris, is the most intellectual app here, pairing daily practice with longer talks on the philosophy of mind. It rewards curiosity but can feel demanding; if you just want soothing audio to drift off to, this is not it. Rated 4.92.

The Way strips out playlist browsing entirely and replaces it with a single linear program led by author and meditation teacher Henry Shukman. That structure is its strength for beginners who freeze at a wall of choices, and its weakness if Shukman's voice does not land for you, because there is no plan B inside the app. At 4.96 it is clearly working for most people.

Happier Meditation, formerly Ten Percent Happier, carries real credibility and an Apple Best Of nod. Its skeptic-friendly, no-woo framing is a genuine relief if incense-and-crystals language makes you wince. The rebrand churn is the main knock, and the dry, journalistic tone can feel cool for anyone who actually wants the softer, atmospheric version of meditation.

Faith, tradition, and teachers with a lineage

Hallow is a Catholic prayer and meditation app whose library has grown past 10,000 sessions since 2018. Within its audience it is excellent and clearly beloved, reflected in a 4.89 rating. The obvious caveat is that it is built for one faith, so it is a non-starter if you want secular mindfulness, and the upsell is persistent.

Sadhguru, maintained by the Isha Foundation since 2012, is the central hub for one teacher's yoga and meditation work, and its 4.92 rating reflects a devoted following. It reads less like a tight meditation trainer than a sprawling content archive, so newcomers can genuinely struggle to know where to begin.

The personalizers, the breath specialists, and the giants

Meditation | Down Dog and Balance share a clever trick: instead of handing you a fixed catalog, they generate a session on the fly. Down Dog brings the customizable engine that made its yoga app popular, while Balance asks about your mood and goals each day and stitches something to match. The risk with both is that an algorithm-built session can feel a touch generic next to a great human teacher. They rate 4.91 and 4.88 respectively.

Open earns its place by treating breathwork as seriously as seated meditation, blending neuroscience with guided breathing classes; Glo goes wider still, layering meditation on top of a mature on-demand yoga platform with more than 25 practice styles. Both lean premium, and in Glo's case meditation is honestly the side dish to the yoga.

Which leaves the two you already know. Headspace hands you a curated path rather than a library, and that structure is still the friendliest on-ramp for a total beginner, even if the subscription has crept upward. Calm is the most polished and the least underrated app on this page, and tellingly it carries the lowest rating of the group at 4.77. Its atmosphere and celebrity sleep stories are divisive, and its paywall is aggressive. Worth a look, but only after you have tried the quieter names above.

The pattern across this list is hard to miss: the apps with the highest ratings are rarely the ones with the biggest ad budgets. If Calm or Headspace never quite stuck for you, the fix may not be trying harder with them, but trying one of the free, focused alternatives that App Store users quietly rate higher.