Meditation apps are growing at a phenomenal rate, with Headspace, Calm, and Insight Timer leading the charge and battling for dominance. After all, they're big business. A recent report from ResearchAndMarket pegs the US meditation app market at over $1 billion.
For clients, meditation apps provide a way to learn Meditation , keep in mind, and keep focused.
After being a Headspace user for a year, I started looking for alternatives and found Insight Timer.
Andy Puddicombe, the monk-turned-entrepreneur who owns Headspace, wants to teach meditation and help you practice it with his strong, relaxed British accent.
Christopher and Nicholas Plowman own Insight Timer and want to create a community of meditators and teachers. Insight Timer aims to be a platform for teachers to teach or sell meditation methods and for meditators to follow and evaluate them.
1. Application interface
Headspace has a sleek interface where you'll notice lots of animated characters trying to convey what the course is about. There's a library tab where you'll find all the available courses. The app now offers a new tab called "Sleep," which is something new since my last visit. We'll explore it later in the guide. There are different categories like stress, illness (there's one for cancer patients), and relationships.
Insight Timer is more than just a community. There's a Today tab with new daily meditations for you. For some reason, Insight Timer thinks I need to know how many active users there are in the world before meditating. There's a handy timer to time your sessions. Finally, there's a self-explanatory Courses tab.
Both apps are based on Material Design. However, Headspace looks cleaner and makes you want to use it more often.
2. Courses and sessions
We install apps to help us follow the course and learn or improve meditation. Headspace comes with a 30-day beginner plan containing 10 sessions, each of which contains three parts called "Basics." Each part begins with an introduction and an animated video. Each session is approximately 3 minutes long.
Courses help you gauge what to expect. They're suitable for beginners who don't know where to start.
Insight Timer includes a short 7-day beginner's course. Additionally, you can choose from over 12000 meditations. Yes, I felt lost, too.
While Andy Puddicombe is the only voice you hear at Headspace, there are plenty of teachers at Insight Timer. If you don't like one, there's always another option—and the options are always good.
You can either choose a category or use search to find areas such as sleep, focus, andhealing Etc. The course opening will tell you the playing time, user reviews, and the tutor's name. It's a marketplace, and a thriving one at that. You can follow individual tutors, read reviews, send messages, connect with users, and set up referral sessions.
Where you get consistency in Headspace, you get variety and community in Insight Timer.
Andy has a very soothing voice, and there are pauses between his sessions so you can follow his instructions. Insight Timer has many courses, and not all are created equal. Different approaches and techniques, along with different teaching styles and accents, make it difficult to narrow down. For example, the 5-minute focus timer had a pause, while Robert Plotkin's Evening Productivity had no pause at all.
Headspace introduced Sleepcasts, a combination of guided exercises and ambient sounds to help you fall asleep better and faster. Headspace uses gamification, where you unlock achievements to achieve consistency. It works for some people, I think, but not for me.
Not to be left behind, Insight Timer has a Music section where you'll find hundreds of songs designed to soothe different moods, such as water, forest, and more. You can filter these sounds by length, category, and most-played. Insight Timer has a similar analogy system where you unlock key stages for harmonization.
You'll notice that some of these audio clips are around an hour long. These are better suited for meditation or simply relaxing rather than trying to fall asleep. However, some users claim to sleep better with ambient noise in the background.
3. Society and time
Insight Timer's strength comes from its active community. The app claims nearly 6 million meditators. Unfortunately, you can't add users who have left comments on a course or session as friends. You can only do this on the homepage, where the most recently active users are listed. What if they don't follow the same teacher or sessions?
I like the timer feature in Insight Timer. You can set a time limit before you start meditating, so you don't lose track of time. Choose the interval that will be signaled by a sound, and then choose the music. Say a 12-minute session will have 3 intervals where you'll hear a chime after every 4 minutes. This is a subtle way to track your sessions. I also use it during workouts to track my HIITs. Just save it as a preset. Or can you use it while cooking?
4. Pricing and Platform
The Headspace and Insight Timer apps are available on Android and iOS platforms. Both are targeted at mobile users, which makes sense given the short 5-minute meditation sessions. This means you can practice your new Zen habits wherever you are.
Headspace's free plan comes with 30 sessions over a one-month period. You can repeat these sessions as many times as you like. After that, it will cost $7.99 per month, billed annually, or you can upgrade to a lifetime membership for $399.99.
With over 12000 courses in its portfolio, there are only a handful of free courses available on Insight Timer. The app's full catalog, along with features like offline mode and dark mode, will cost you $60 per year.
calm chaos
Ironically, these apps expect us to focus while constantly listening to their voices and receiving notifications for updates. Isn't meditation about eliminating all distractions, including smartphones?
Headspace is well-designed and more focused. Fewer options mean you can get started right away. I think it's ideal for beginners. Insight Timer has more courses, free content, and a useful free timer, even for other activities. While Headspace has a lifetime plan, Insight Timer has a cheaper annual plan.
