Which Meditation App Is Better? Calm, Headspace or Meditopia

About this analysis: we first published it on the Pivony blog in 2022. It is based on app store reviews written up to early 2022; prices, plans and the apps themselves have changed since. Pivony has no partnership with any of these brands, and this is an independent reading of public reviews.

Why meditation apps

Stress is one of the main things that hurts well-being, and meditation became one of the most popular ways to deal with it. The number of people practising meditation tripled after 2012, and meditation apps have been downloaded more than 100 million times. Research also suggests that mindfulness apps can work as a medium for self-training.

So which app should you pick, and what can app teams learn from their users? We compared three apps:

• Headspace (founded 2010) and Calm (founded 2012), the two established players
• Meditopia (founded 2015), the newer challenger

Why app reviews

App reviews influence choices: 79% of people check ratings and reviews before downloading an app. They are also direct, unprompted feedback. Star ratings for all three apps looked almost perfect, so we read the reviews themselves, grouped by topic and sentiment.

The data

At the time, Headspace had about 65 million users, Calm about 100 million and Meditopia about 4.5 million. We analysed 7,217 Headspace reviews, 9,006 Calm reviews and 336 Meditopia reviews.

Plans and free trials

Meditopia was the cheapest of the three but had no student or family plan; Calm also sold a lifetime plan. All three offered a 7-day free trial, and the same complaint came up for all of them: people were not reminded before the trial ended, and some were charged the annual price instead of the monthly one.

Positive sentiment over time

• In February 2021, 8 in 10 Meditopia reviewers wrote positively about the app.
• Positive sentiment was mostly higher for Meditopia than for Calm and Headspace, except in April and June 2021.
• October 2021 was a turning point: until then Headspace reviewers were more positive than Calm reviewers; after it, satisfaction with Headspace dropped clearly.

Negative sentiment over time

• Headspace negative sentiment peaked in December, when free users lost access to much of the content they had used for free. Reviews about payment rose in step with negative sentiment; the topic we found was the "paywall".
• Meditopia negative sentiment rose in October because of subscription and login problems: some users could not log in, others were charged after cancelling the free trial.
• Calm negative sentiment peaked over cost.

What users talk about

Sleep

All three apps offer sleep stories, nature sounds and sleep meditations. The narrator's voice mattered a lot to reviewers.

• Calm: strong on sleep stories, including content for children ("I use it for babysitting and the kids love the sleep stories"), but users asked for more variety of voices.
• Headspace: users were the most satisfied with narrators and liked the variety of sleep content.
• Meditopia: users talked more about sleep meditations than sleep stories.

Breathing exercises

• Calm users said breathing exercises helped them through anxious moments.
• Headspace users mentioned using them throughout the day, from morning to bedtime. Headspace was better at fitting breathing exercises into daily routines.

Variety of content

• Calm and Headspace users both asked for more free content, partly because they found the price high.
• Meditopia reviewers who mentioned variety were all positive.

What app teams can learn

1. Free-trial reminders matter. Charging without a reminder was the most repeated complaint across all three apps.
2. Moving features behind a paywall shows up in reviews within weeks. Headspace's December peak is a clear example.
3. A challenger can win on price and on a niche. Meditopia was the cheapest, and its users used sleep meditations, not only sleep stories.
4. Basic features are the entry ticket. Guided meditations, progress tracking and reminders are expected; they don't differentiate.

Do this for your own app

• Free review report: paste your App Store or Google Play page into our free review root-cause report. You get the top complaint themes, their likely root causes and example reviews by email within one business day.
• Compare with competitors: Pivony Market Intelligence tracks competitor reviews and category trends from app stores, social and public data.
• Sentiment over time: see how sentiment analysis works in Pivony.