Honest comparison
Tock vs SleepScore: sonar or a microphone
Two apps, two ways of sensing the same body from the same nightstand. SleepScore sends sound out and reads what comes back. Tock listens to the room and feels the bed.
In short
SleepScore 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.
- fall-asleep sounds
- 63fall-asleep soundsgenerated on device, sample by sample
- sounds with distance control
- 42sounds with distance controlFar, Near or Close
- insight metrics
- 21insight metricsacross 7 groups
What SleepScore does better
Contactless tracking that bounces inaudible sound off your body to measure movement and breathing, with no wearable and nothing on the bed.
- Its sonar approach reads breathing and movement without you wearing or touching anything
- A research-led presentation that appeals to people who want the method explained
- Cross-platform, so an Android household is not locked out
Runs on iPhone, Android. Tock is iPhone only, on iOS 26 and later.
Sonar and a microphone answer different questions
SleepScore uses inaudible sound bounced off your body to read movement and breathing, with nothing worn and nothing on the bed. It is a genuinely clever approach and it produces a kind of signal a passive microphone cannot.
Tock uses the microphone and the accelerometer instead. That trades the breathing signal for something else: it hears the room. Snores, coughs and sleep talking get classified on device with Apple SoundAnalysis, and the clips are kept so you can play them back.
Only one of them ends the night
SleepScore sits alongside an alarm. Tock is the alarm. It is built on AlarmKit, so it rings on silent, through a Focus, with the app closed, and it watches the 30 minutes before your set time for a lighter moment to ring early.
Then it asks for a mission before it stops. That is the part a tracker cannot do for you no matter how good its sensing is.
What you should expect from either on stages
Neither app puts a sensor on your body, so neither one is measuring stages. Tock calls its stages estimates and does not dress them up. If you want measured stages, that takes a wearable, and Tock will read those from Apple Health.
Where Tock spends its effort instead is on the 21 insight metrics built from many nights: sleep regularity, chronotype, bedtime consistency, sleep debt, tag correlations and a calendar heatmap.
No sleep app on a phone can diagnose anything. If your breathing at night worries you, that is a conversation for a doctor, not an app store.
| What we compared | Tock | SleepScore |
|---|---|---|
| How it senses you | Mic and accelerometer (about the same) | Inaudible sonar (about the same) |
| Breathing signal | Movement plus what it hears | Read without touching you (stronger here) |
| Where it runs | iPhone only | iPhone and Android (stronger here) |
| How the method is explained | Plain language, in the app | Research-led presentation (stronger here) |
| Does it wake you | It is your alarm (stronger here) | Sits next to your alarm |
| Audio you can replay | Snores and sleep talking, kept (stronger here) | Sonar, not recordings |
| The morning after | Score, check-in, estimated stages (about the same) | Score and advice (about the same) |
Which one you should actually pick
Pick Tock if
Pick Tock if you want the tracking and the alarm to be one app, and you want to hear the snore rather than read a line on a chart.
Pick SleepScore if
Pick SleepScore if the contactless breathing read is the reason you are here, or if you are on Android. Its method genuinely does something Tock's microphone does not.
Questions people ask
Can I export my SleepScore history into Tock?
Not directly. Whatever reached Apple Health is readable by Tock, and everything else stays in SleepScore. There is no migration tool between the two.
Does Tock use sonar too?
No. Tock listens with the microphone and reads movement from the accelerometer. That is why it can classify snores, coughs and sleep talking, and why it does not report breathing the way SleepScore does.
Is my audio sent anywhere?
The classifying runs on device with Apple SoundAnalysis. The AI sleep coach is the one part that needs a network connection, because it is a chat.
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 SnoreLabSnoreLab is better if snoring is the only thing you care about and you want a remedy-tracking loop and a score you can show someone. Tock is better if you want the snoring inside a full night, with the alarm, the estimated stages and the score in one app instead of two running overnight.
- Tock vs RiseChoose 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.
- Tock vs PillowStay with Pillow if you track on your wrist, because it runs on the Watch and Tock does not. Choose Tock if your phone is the only thing on the nightstand and you want the alarm to be the centre of the product rather than a feature of the tracker.
Elsewhere on the site
A different corner of the same problem.
- Wake timesWaking up at 4:30amBedtimes by sleep cycle for a 4:30am alarm.
- BedtimesGoing to bed at 9:30pmWhere to put the alarm after a 9:30pm lights-out.
- Sleep by ageHow much sleep teenagers needThe American Academy of Sleep Medicine recommends that teenagers aged 13 to 18 years sleep 8 to 10 hours per 24 hours on a regular basis. The obstacle is a genuine biological shift: the adolescent circadian rhythm runs later, so a teenager cannot reliably fall asleep at the time an early school start requires.
- NapsThe 90 minute napA 90 minute nap is approximately one full sleep cycle, which means it ends in a lighter stage rather than in slow wave sleep. That produces much less grogginess than a 30 or 60 minute nap, and it includes both the deep sleep and the REM that shorter naps miss.
- Wake tonesNature alarm soundsBirds, water and weather make calm wake tones and carry one specific failure: a natural sound is easy for a sleeping brain to fold into a dream rather than treat as an alarm. Tock counters that in two places, by scheduling the alarm through Apple's AlarmKit so it lands on the system full-screen alert, and by keeping it ringing until a wake-up mission is done.
- Head to headSleep Cycle vs SleepScoreIf you want one app that watches the night and also rings in the morning, Sleep Cycle. If you only want the measurement, and you want the method explained rather than asserted, SleepScore.
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.