If you're having trouble getting a good night's sleep, you're not alone. Millions of people struggle with falling asleep and staying asleep, and many are turning to sleep aid apps for help. Two of the most popular sleep aid apps are Sleepiest and BetterSleep, but how do they compare? In this article, we'll take a closer look at the features and effectiveness of these two apps to help you decide which one is right for you.

The Offerings of Sleepiest vs BetterSleep

Sleepiest and BetterSleep both have fairly similar offerings. Both focus solely on improving your sleep and offer bedtime stories, sleep sounds and meditations as part of their feature set. Both also have sleep sound creation tools allowing you to craft the perfect sleep sound to drift off to. Both also offer very high quality sleep aid content which is sure to help get you to sleep.

When it comes to sleep tracking - once again, both have support for this, but take different approaches to integrating it. BetterSleep rely upon active sleep tracking where you are required to press a button in the app before you go to bed in order to begin tracking your sleep. This can be frustrating for some people as if you forget to press the button to start tracking before you go to bed, or fail to press the button when you wake up, you're likely to end up with incorrect sleep tracking data. However active sleep tracking can access more sensors such as the microphone or very small movements of your device, which can be used to evaluate how likely it is you're in "deep" or "light" sleep.

Sleepiest on the other hand uses passive sleep tracking. This relies upon measuring the more general movement of your phone (this works even when when the app isn't open once enabled in the app). The movement data is then passed through an algorithm to determine when you were likely to be awake or asleep during a given time frame. Once enabled this allows Sleepiest to immediately and accurately show you the times you went to bed and woke up on a day to day basis without any manual intervention needed - simply open the app, and your sleep data is there to see without pressing any buttons before you go to sleep / when you wake up. This makes it far simpler to keep track of your sleep health compared to BetterSleep's approach.

The fact both apps support tracking in some form means both apps can optimize their content offerings towards actually improving your sleep outcomes, though the ease of use of passive sleep tracking in Sleepiest means theres likely more actionable data available within Sleepiest.

The price

In terms of price; BetterSleep costs $59.99/yr or $9.99/mo, while Sleepiest costs $49.99/yr or $9.99/mo. So a slight saving with Sleepiest if you go yearly, but no difference if you're going monthly.

BetterSleep offers a small number of free bits of content; but most is locked behind a free trial or subscription. Sleepiest on the other hand offers over 100+ bits of entirely free content, accessibly without committing to a free trial and is therefore simpler to try out in a non-committal way.

Both BetterSleep and Sleepiest offer a 7 day free trial allowing you to explore their wider premium catalogue of content before paying for a subscription.

Ratings

Sleepiest and BetterSleep have both been downloaded several million times, with the vast majority of users of both apps rating them 5*. The user interface of both apps is superb, and both are easy to navigate and use.

Detailed comparison

Conclusion

BetterSleep and Sleepiest are very similar apps. Both focus on getting you to sleep, and both offer sleep tracking, albeit taking different approaches. You may want to read up on the differences of Passive vs Active sleep tracking here to help you make a decision.

The quality of content in both apps is high - you're sure to get to sleep quickly with either offering. Sleepiest however does put out content more frequently.

In terms of cost; Sleepiest is a little more affordable when on a yearly plan, but pricing is the same for monthly subscribers. Sleepiest offers a much wider selection of content available entirely for free (without even starting a free trial) which makes it the more obvious choice to try first, as you can do so without any financial commitment.

So; why not try Sleepiest for yourself tonight?