Honest comparison
Rise alternative: sleep debt, or last night?
Rise is about the sleep you owe. Tock is about the night you just had and the alarm that is about to go off. Both are useful ideas, and they are not the same idea.
In short
Choose Rise if planning your day around energy peaks and a running sleep debt is what actually changes your behaviour. Choose Tock if you want the alarm itself to be smarter, the night recorded from the phone, and a coach that can talk about what it heard.
- insight metrics
- 21insight metricsregularity, chronotype, debt, personal bests
- languages
- 33languagesthe coach speaks yours
- minute smart-wake window
- 30minute smart-wake windowbefore your set time, never after
What Rise does better
A sleep-debt and body-clock coach. It cares about how much sleep you owe and when your energy peaks, not about charting your stages.
- Sleep debt as an organising idea is genuinely clearer than a nightly score for a lot of people
- Energy-peak scheduling that helps you plan a day, not just review a night
- Its coaching content is more structured than a chat window
Runs on iPhone, Android. Tock is iPhone only, on iOS 26 and later.
Sleep debt is a better idea than a nightly score, for some people
Rise's framing is that what matters is the gap between the sleep you need and the sleep you got, carried forward. For a lot of people that lands harder than a number out of 100, because it explains a bad Thursday with a bad Monday.
It then puts energy peaks on a timeline so you can plan around them. Tock does not do that. It looks backwards at nights and forwards at one alarm.
Tock is the thing that actually wakes you
Built on AlarmKit, so it is a system alarm: silent mode, a Focus, app closed, native full-screen alert. It watches the last 30 minutes before your set time for a lighter moment and rings a little early when it finds one, with your set time as the fallback.
Nine wake-up missions stand between you and the off button, and there are 18 wake tones or your own audio behind them.
Where the numbers come from is the real difference
Rise leans on your history and your schedule. Tock leans on the phone: microphone, accelerometer, and whatever your wearable already wrote into Apple Health. That is why Tock can tell you that you snored for forty minutes and let you hear it, and Rise cannot.
Tock's own long view is 21 metrics in 7 groups, including a sleep regularity index, chronotype from the rMEQ questionnaire in onboarding, bedtime consistency and sleep debt of its own.
Sleep stages on phone-only nights are estimates in Tock. Nothing on a nightstand measures them.
Coaching in a chat window against coaching in a course
Tock's coach has its own tab and reads your recent nights. You can ask why you keep waking at 3am, have it play back what it heard, and it can change settings or navigate the app for you. It needs a network connection.
Rise's guidance is more structured than a chat. If you prefer being told what to do next in order, rather than asking questions, that structure is worth something.
| What we compared | Tock | Rise |
|---|---|---|
| Organising idea | Last night, and tomorrow's alarm (about the same) | Sleep debt and energy peaks (about the same) |
| Planning your day | Not what it does | Energy peaks on a timeline (stronger here) |
| Coaching format | Chat that reads your nights | Structured programme (stronger here) |
| Where it runs | iPhone only | iPhone and Android (stronger here) |
| Waking you up | AlarmKit alarm with missions (stronger here) | Generally not your alarm |
| What it hears | Snores, coughs, sleep talking (stronger here) | No room audio |
| Where the data comes from | Phone sensors and Apple Health (about the same) | Your history and schedule (about the same) |
Which one you should actually pick
Pick Tock if
Pick Tock if the wake-up is the problem and you want evidence from the room to explain the morning.
Pick Rise if
Pick Rise if you want your sleep translated into a plan for the day rather than a report on the night, or if you need it on Android. Sleep debt as a single organising number is genuinely clearer for a lot of people than anything Tock shows.
Run both if
They barely overlap. Running Rise for the daytime plan and Tock for the alarm is not a silly setup.
Questions people ask
Does Tock show sleep debt like Rise does?
It has a sleep debt metric among its 21 insights, but it is one number in a set rather than the spine of the whole app. If sleep debt is the concept you want to live inside, Rise is built around it and Tock is not.
Can Rise wake me up?
Rise is generally not your alarm, which is the main reason people run something else alongside it. Tock is an alarm first, built on AlarmKit.
Does Tock need a wearable to be useful?
No. A phone on the nightstand is enough for tracking, sound classification and the smart wake window. If you do own a wearable, Tock reads its data from Apple Health and the stage data gets better.
If Tock is not in the running
Plenty of people land here already choosing between two other apps. These go through those pairings without us in them.
Other comparisons
The same treatment, applied to the rest of the category.
- Tock vs Sleep CycleSwitch to Tock if you want the alarm itself to be different: a system alarm that rings on silent and through a Focus, moved up to 30 minutes earlier into a lighter moment, with a task before it stops. Stay with Sleep Cycle if you have years of history in it, or if someone in the house is on Android.
- Tock vs AutoSleepIf you wear an Apple Watch to bed and you already have an alarm you like, AutoSleep is hard to beat and you pay for it once. Tock makes sense if you do not want to sleep in a watch, or you want the alarm and the tracking to be the same app.
- Tock vs Apple Health SleepIf you wear an Apple Watch and you only want to see how long you slept, Apple Health already does it for free and does it better than any phone estimate. Tock adds the room: sound, snoring, a score, an alarm that can move earlier, and a coach that can explain what it found.
- Tock vs SleepScoreSleepScore is the better pick if you want breathing and movement read contactlessly by a method you can have explained to you, and you already have an alarm you trust. Tock is the pick if you want one app that both tracks the night and wakes you, with playable audio of what it heard.
Elsewhere on the site
A different corner of the same problem.
- Head to headAutoSleep vs Sleep CycleIf you already wear an Apple Watch to bed, AutoSleep reads a night that Sleep Cycle can only estimate from the room. If you don't own a Watch and don't want one, Sleep Cycle is the only one of the two that works, and it's your alarm as well.
- FeaturesApple HealthTock reads Apple Health for sleep, heart rate, resting heart rate, HRV, blood oxygen, respiratory rate and wrist temperature, and shows them on the night they belong to. It can also write its own nights back into Health, but that setting defaults to off.
- Sleep soundsStreamA small stream is mostly mid and high frequency water noise with very little below a couple of hundred hertz, so it sounds alive and close but has almost nothing to fight a passing truck with. It suits a quiet bedroom where you want an alternative to silence, not a room you are trying to defend.
- Tock for youLight sleepersYou wake at everything, and then you are awake for forty minutes at 3am doing arithmetic on how much is left. By morning you cannot say what woke you, only that something did, several times.
- RoundupsThe best free alarm apps for iPhoneThe best free alarm app for iPhone is the Clock app that came with it. It is free forever, it rings through silent mode and a Focus, and it has never failed. Alarmy is the best free option if you need an alarm that is hard to turn off. Tock is not free and is listed last for that reason.
- Wake timesWaking up at 7:00amBedtimes by sleep cycle for a 7:00am alarm.
The alarm is the part we actually rebuilt
Tock rings on silent and through a Focus because it is a system alarm, moves earlier when it finds a lighter moment, and asks for one small task before it stops.