Roundup
The best sleep trackers that don't need a watch
A watch is the obvious way to track sleep and the reason most people never start: it has to be charged, worn and remembered, every single night. Everything below works with the phone already sitting on your nightstand.
In short
Tock is the best sleep tracker without a watch. Leave the phone on the nightstand and it uses the microphone and accelerometer all night, classifies snores, coughs and sleep talking on device, and hands you a report plus the audio in the morning. SleepScore is the strongest alternative if you would rather nothing listened to the room.
What decided the order
- What a phone on a nightstand can genuinely sense, and what it has to infer from that.
- Whether the app is upfront that phone-only sleep stages are estimates rather than measurements.
- What you get in the morning besides a single score out of a hundred.
- Whether it needs anything else: a charger on the bed, a strip under the mattress, an account.
- Whether it replaces an app you already run at night, or adds a second one.
Tock
Best phone-only tracker
The phone goes on the nightstand and the microphone and accelerometer run all night. Snores, coughs and sleep talking get classified on device with Apple SoundAnalysis, and the clips are kept so you can play back what actually happened at 3am instead of guessing. In the morning you get the stretches you slept in, the room, breathing, a check-in and tags, and because Tock is also the alarm, none of this needs a second app.
The catchSleep stages from a phone are estimates, not measurements. Measured stages need a wearable, and Tock reads that through Apple Health rather than shipping a Watch app of its own.
More on TockSleepScore
Best contactless method
Instead of listening, it bounces inaudible sound off you and reads movement and breathing from the reflection. Nothing touches you, nothing goes on the bed, and the method is explained rather than hidden, which suits people who want to know how the number was produced before they trust it. It also runs on Android, so a household is not split.
The catchIt sits next to your alarm rather than replacing it, and it cannot tell you what the room sounded like, because it is not listening for that.
More on SleepScoreSleep Cycle
Best for years of history
The original phone-microphone tracker, with a wake window and a large library of sleep aids attached. If you have been running it since university, the value is the archive: a run of nights long enough that this month means something against last spring.
The catchIf you install it today, that archive is somebody else's advantage. Starting now, you get the same blank slate as everything else here.
More on Sleep CycleRise
Best if the number you care about is sleep debt
Rise skips the nightly chart and asks a blunter question: how much sleep do you owe, and when does your energy peak today. For a lot of people that framing is clearer than a hypnogram, because it points at a decision you can make this afternoon rather than a graph you look at once.
The catchIt will not chart your night in any detail, and it generally is not the thing that wakes you, so it lives alongside an alarm rather than replacing one.
More on RiseApple Health Sleep
Best free place to start
It is already on the phone, it costs nothing, and it is the system of record everything else reads from, Tock included. Set a schedule, let Sleep Focus dim the evening, and after two weeks you will know whether your bedtime is even consistent, which is the first thing worth knowing.
The catchWithout an Apple Watch it mostly records the schedule you set rather than the night you actually had.
More on Apple Health Sleep
What a nightstand can sense, and what it is guessing
A phone next to the bed has two useful senses. The accelerometer feels the bed move, which is a decent proxy for how still you are, and the microphone hears the room, which is how snoring, coughing and sleep talking get picked up at all. Both are real signals and both are recorded, not invented.
Everything past that is inference. Stage labels on a phone-only night are an estimate built from movement and sound, and any app claiming to have measured your deep sleep from a bedside table is overselling. Tock calls them estimates in the app for that reason. If you want measured stages you need something on your body, and then a phone app is the wrong purchase.
None of this is a medical assessment, and no app here is a diagnostic tool.
Set the phone up so the night is worth reading
Most bad first weeks are placement, not the app. Five minutes of setup changes what the data is worth.
- Flat on a bedside table, face down or up, screen unobstructed. Not under your pillow and not buried in bedding.
- Plugged in. A night of sensing costs battery, and a dead phone at 5am is a missed alarm as well as a missed night.
- Same side of the bed every night. Moving it changes what the accelerometer feels and makes the first week of comparisons meaningless.
- If you share the bed, expect your partner in the audio. Every microphone-based tracker has this problem and none of them have solved it.
One night tells you nothing
The first report you get will look alarming or flattering and it will be neither. Single nights swing on a late coffee, a warm room, a film that ran long. The pattern is the product, and the pattern needs about a week before it says anything you can act on.
Give any tracker seven nights before you judge it, and judge it on whether it changed a decision. If a week of data did not move your bedtime, your room or your wake time, the app is a scoreboard, and you can get one of those for free.
Questions people ask
Can a phone track sleep accurately without a watch?
It can track some things accurately and estimate the rest. Movement and sound are directly sensed, so restlessness, snoring and how long you were in bed are on solid ground. Sleep stages are estimated from those signals, and anyone telling you a bedside phone measured your REM is stretching it.
Where should I put my phone to track sleep?
Flat on the nightstand, plugged in, on the same side of the bed every night, with nothing on top of it. Under the pillow is the common mistake: it muffles the microphone and turns every pillow adjustment into a movement reading.
Does tracking sleep with the microphone drain the battery?
It uses meaningfully more than an idle night, which is why every app here expects the phone to be charging. Plug it in and this stops being a question.
Do I still need Apple Health if I use a sleep tracker?
You do not need to open it, but it is worth leaving connected. Health is the system of record other apps read from, so if you ever buy a wearable, your history is already in one place. Tock reads sleep, heart rate, HRV, blood oxygen, respiratory rate and wrist temperature from it, and only writes its own nights back if you turn that on.
Other roundups
Same treatment, different question.
- The best sleep apps for iPhone, sorted by what you're fixingFor iPhone, the best sleep app depends on the problem. Tock is the best all-round pick when the alarm and the morning are what is broken, Apple Health Sleep is the free place to start, Calm is for people who cannot fall asleep, AutoSleep is for Apple Watch owners, Rise is for sleep debt and SnoreLab is for snoring.
- The best smart alarm apps, and what smart should meanTock is the best smart alarm app on iPhone. It watches the 30 minutes before your alarm using two signals, movement and sound, rings early if it catches a lighter moment, and falls back to your set time no matter what. Sleep Cycle is the long-established alternative, and Pillow is the better pick if you already wear an Apple Watch to bed.
- The best snoring apps, ranked by what they're forSnoreLab is the best dedicated snoring app: recording and scoring your snoring is its only job, and its remedy tracking is more deliberate than anything else here. Tock is the better pick if you want snoring in context, inside a night that also carries your sleep, your alarm and playable audio of what the room actually sounded like.
- The best sleep apps for studentsFor most students the best answer is free: the iPhone Clock app, a wake time you keep at weekends, and Alarmy's free tier if you sleep through things. Tock is the paid pick worth the money once you have tried that and still miss 9am lectures.
Elsewhere on the site
A different corner of the same problem.
- BedtimesGoing to bed at 8:00pmWhere to put the alarm after a 8:00pm lights-out.
- Sleep by ageHow much sleep school-age children needThe American Academy of Sleep Medicine recommends that children aged 6 to 12 years sleep 9 to 12 hours per 24 hours on a regular basis. By this age sleep has consolidated into the night, so the figure is effectively a nightly one and the bedtime has to be counted backwards from the school run.
- NapsThe 60 minute napA 60 minute nap includes a substantial amount of slow wave sleep, which is useful for recovery and for some kinds of memory, and it usually ends before the cycle completes. That means the benefit is real and the wake-up is often groggy, so it suits situations where the hour afterwards is flexible.
- Wake tonesSunrise alarmA sunrise alarm clock is a bedside lamp that brightens over roughly 20 to 30 minutes before your set time, and the light is the part you are paying for. Tock is an iPhone app with no light hardware at all, so it takes the timing half instead: a soft wake tone rung at a lighter moment inside the last 30 minutes rather than at a fixed time.
- Head to headApple Health Sleep vs AutoSleepIf you wear your Apple Watch to bed and want to know how long you slept, Apple's own tracking is free and already doing it. AutoSleep is for the person who wants that night pulled apart into far more detail than Apple would ever ship.
- FeaturesSleep coachThe sleep coach is a chat tab inside Tock that reads your recent nights before it answers. It can quote your score, play back a clip Tock recorded, and navigate the app to change a setting on your behalf. It needs a network connection.
Every pick on this page has a catch listed, including ours
Tock is iPhone only, has no free tier and no Apple Watch app. What it does have is an alarm that rings on silent and waits for a lighter moment.