Roundup
The best white noise apps, and when a fan beats all of them
Noise works by covering other noise. That is the entire mechanism, which means the cheapest thing in your house that makes a steady sound is already most of the way to solving the problem.
In short
If you want one sound forever, a hardware noise machine or a cheap fan beats every app here and costs less over two years. If you want to change what you sleep to, layer sounds together and have the same app wake you up in the morning, Tock is the better pick.
What decided the order
- Whether the audio loops, and whether you can hear the loop once you know it is there.
- Whether you can layer sounds or are stuck with one track at a time.
- What it does to your battery and your storage, since this runs for eight hours a night.
- What it costs against a piece of hardware that does one thing and never bills you again.
- Whether it also has to be the thing that wakes you up.
A hardware noise machine or a box fan
Best if one sound is all you will ever want
Nothing to charge, nothing to subscribe to, no phone in the bedroom, and no loop, because the sound is being made rather than played. If you have used the same rain track for two years and never changed it, you are not an app customer, you are a hardware customer who has not bought the hardware yet. Try Tock's fan sound for a few nights first if you want to know what a fan does to a room before you spend anything.
The catchOne sound, one volume curve, and it does not fade out, wake you up or tell you anything. It also has to physically live in your bedroom.
More on A hardware noise machine or a box fanTock
Best for layering and for waking up in the same app
Sixty-three fall-asleep sounds, four layered at once and saved as a mix, so rain on a tent and a low fan can be one thing you fall asleep to. Most of them are generated on the device sample by sample rather than played from a file, so there is no loop point to notice and no two nights sound the same. Forty-two carry a distance control, which moves a sound from Far to Close and is the setting people end up using most. Since it is also your alarm, the phone is doing one job all night instead of two.
The catchThere is no free tier: a 3-day trial, then from $39.99 a year, and it only runs on iPhone. If sound is genuinely all you want, you are paying for a lot of app you will not open.
More on TockCalm
Best narrated library alongside the noise
The size and production quality of the narrated library here is in a class of its own, with named voices and licensed music a small team cannot match. If noise alone leaves your head too busy and you want a story to follow until you drop, this is the one built for that.
The catchIt will not wake you, track anything or tell you what happened. It is one half of a night and it is priced as a whole one.
More on CalmPzizz
Best for naps
Its nap module is the best-designed thing of its kind and Tock has no equivalent. The audio is assembled fresh each time from music, voiceover and effects, so a nap session is different every time you run it, and the whole thing is shaped around ending at a specific point rather than running all night.
The catchIt is audio only. It will not wake you reliably in the morning or report back on anything.
More on PzizzHeadspace Sleep
Best if you need a voice, not just noise
The teaching is good and the sleep content sits inside a course rather than a playlist, which suits people who want to be walked through winding down rather than handed a sound library. That guided approach is deliberately not something Tock does.
The catchNo alarm and no tracking, so it can only ever be part of your night, and it is a full subscription for that part.
More on Headspace Sleep
White, pink and brown are not the same sound
They get used interchangeably and they are genuinely different. Picking the right one matters more than picking the right app, and it takes about ten minutes to work out which is yours.
- White noise is flat across the whole range and covers the widest set of other sounds. It is also the harshest, and a fair number of people find it hissy after an hour. Tock has a page for it at /sounds/white-noise.
- Pink noise rolls the high end off, so it sounds softer and fuller. Most people who bounced off white noise land here: /sounds/pink-noise.
- Brown noise rolls it off further again and comes out deep, closer to heavy rain or a distant motorway. This is the one that has taken over the internet lately: /sounds/brown-noise.
- A fan is none of the above strictly speaking, but it is what most people actually mean, because it has a small amount of movement in it rather than being perfectly steady.
The loop is what you notice at 3am
Most sound apps ship recordings, and a recording has to end and start again. Ten minutes is a common length, and you will never hear the join until one night you do, and then you cannot stop hearing it. A bird, a gust, a click in the same place every ten minutes.
Two ways around it. Hardware makes a sound rather than playing one, so there is nothing to repeat. Generated audio does the same thing in software: Tock builds most of its sounds on the device sample by sample, so there is no file, nothing to download, and no loop point to find. Twenty-two of the sounds are real recordings and those are the ones that behave like recordings.
Try this before you pay for a sound library
Sound is the easiest thing in sleep to test for free, so there is no excuse for buying blind.
- Run a fan, or an air purifier, for three nights. If you sleep better, buy the fan and close the tab.
- If the fan works but the sound is wrong, that is a spectrum problem, not an app problem. Try pink and then brown before trying anything else.
- Set whatever you use to a volume where you can still hear a knock at the door. Loud enough to cover a room, not loud enough to be its own event.
- Give it a week at the same volume in the same place. Sound is the one change people fiddle with nightly, and fiddling makes the result unreadable.
If you share a bed, agree the sound before you commit to it. The most common reason a noise machine ends up in a cupboard is that only one person chose it.
Questions people ask
Is a white noise app as good as a noise machine?
For variety and convenience, yes, and it is better if you want to change sounds or layer them. For somebody who wants one steady sound every night for years, hardware wins on cost, on not having a phone in the bedroom, and on never having a loop point to notice.
Does white noise looping matter?
Only once you notice it, and then it matters a lot. A ten-minute recording repeats around forty times in a night, so any distinctive moment in it becomes a metronome. Generated audio and hardware both avoid this by making the sound rather than replaying it.
Should I use white, pink or brown noise?
Start with pink. It is the middle option and the one most people settle on. Go to brown if pink still sounds thin or hissy, and to white if you need to cover a genuinely loud environment like traffic or a shared wall.
Will playing sound all night drain my phone?
Enough that you should be charging it. Eight hours of audio plus a screen that stays on is not a small ask of a battery, and a flat phone at 6am is a missed alarm as well as a quiet night.
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 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.
- 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 trackers that don't need a watchTock 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.
Elsewhere on the site
A different corner of the same problem.
- Wake timesWaking up at 5:00amBedtimes by sleep cycle for a 5:00am alarm.
- BedtimesGoing to bed at 8:30pmWhere to put the alarm after a 8:30pm lights-out.
- Sleep by ageHow much sleep babies needThe American Academy of Sleep Medicine recommends that infants aged 4 to 12 months sleep 12 to 16 hours per 24 hours, including naps, on a regular basis. Sleep at this age is spread across the day rather than consolidated into one block, and the total is what the recommendation is about.
- NapsThe 30 minute napA 30 minute nap frequently ends inside slow wave sleep, which produces the strongest sleep inertia of any nap length. That is the heavy, disoriented feeling that can take twenty minutes or more to clear, and it is why 20 minutes or a full 90 minute cycle are both better choices.
- 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 headSleepScore vs SnoreLabIf snoring is the complaint and you want to find out whether the mouthguard made a difference, SnoreLab. If you want the whole night measured without wearing anything, SleepScore.
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.