Meditation apps deliver guided sessions, sleep content, and mindfulness courses through a phone. The category includes Calm, Headspace, Aura Health, Insight Timer, Waking Up, Ten Percent Happier, Loona, and Mindset Health. Some target broad stress relief, others a skeptical or philosophical audience, others a specific condition. Studying their ads shows how a purely digital, intangible product gets advertised: through emotion, calm visuals, creator voices, and tight app-install funnels. It is a strong category for learning subscription app creative.
Aura Health is a San Francisco wellness app founded in 2016 offering AI-personalized meditations, sleep stories, life coaching, and CBT tools. It adapts content recommendations to user mood and goals, competing with Calm and Headspace for the daily wellness habit. Also searched as Aura.
Calm is a San Francisco-based meditation and sleep app founded in 2012 by Alex Tew and Michael Acton Smith. It became the first mental wellness unicorn, reaching a $2B valuation in 2020. The app offers guided meditation, Sleep Stories narrated by celebrities, breathing exercises, and music. It runs one of the most aggressive DTC paid media programs in the wellness app category.
Core is a technology brand in the wellness and meditation hardware space, selling a handheld device paired with an app to guide breathing and meditation sessions. The company sells direct-to-consumer online. It advertises across Meta placements to reach wellness technology shoppers.
Headspace is the meditation and mindfulness app that helped legitimize the consumer mental wellness category. Co-founded by former Buddhist monk Andy Puddicombe in 2010, it uses distinctive illustrated characters and simple guided sessions to make meditation accessible. It merged with Ginger in 2021 to form Headspace Health.
Insight Timer is a meditation app offering a large library of free guided meditations, talks, and music alongside paid subscription content. The app is known for its large catalog contributed by many independent teachers, monetized through a freemium subscription model. It advertises across Meta placements to acquire new app users.
Loóna (loona.app) was founded in 2019 and is headquartered in Menlo Park with a team distributed across Europe. The app offers 'sleepscapes' — immersive episodes combining interactive coloring, music, and storytelling as a bedtime wind-down ritual. It operates a DTC subscription model on iOS and Android. Also searched as Loona.
Mindset Health is an Australian health tech company founded in 2018 by Melbourne brothers Chris and Alex Naoumidis (YC S19). Its flagship app Nerva delivers gut-directed hypnotherapy for IBS, developed with Dr Simone Peters at Monash University. Clinical trials show 81% of users achieve a clinically significant reduction in IBS symptoms. The company raised a $17.8M Series A and has helped over 300,000 users. Also searched as Mindset.
Ten Percent Happier is a meditation and mindfulness app that grew out of a book and podcast by journalist Dan Harris, offering guided courses aimed at meditation skeptics. The app uses a subscription model sold through app stores and its own site. It advertises across Meta placements to acquire subscribers.
Waking Up is a meditation and mindfulness app created by author and podcaster Sam Harris, offering guided meditation courses and philosophical content on consciousness. The app operates on a subscription model available through app stores and its website. It advertises across Meta placements to drive subscriptions.
Mood does the selling. Ads use calm colors, soft narration, and relatable moments like a restless night or a stressful commute. The hook usually names a feeling, then shows the app as a short, easy habit rather than a big lifestyle change. Brands separate by tone. Calm and Headspace speak to a wide audience seeking relief and sleep. Ten Percent Happier targets skeptics with a practical, no-nonsense voice. Waking Up appeals to people drawn to a secular, philosophical approach. Aura Health emphasizes personalization, and Mindset Health targets a specific health need with a clinical angle. Formats include screen-recorded app demos, creator and teacher clips, and testimonial video. Because the product is a subscription, the offer matters: trial framing, annual plans, and gentle urgency show up often, along with clear store-install calls to action.
First, read the promise. Is the ad about sleep, anxiety, focus, or a specific condition? Narrow promises tend to signal a sharper target, and broad ones usually come from brands with wide reach. Second, watch how the app is shown. Ads that reveal a real session, a teacher, or a sleep story in the first seconds answer the question of what you actually get. Compare these against pure mood footage. Third, study credibility devices: named teachers, authors, clinicians, or user stories. Each speaks to a different kind of doubt. Also note how brands handle health language, particularly when a condition is mentioned. Finally, check creative volume and variation. Apps in this space often test many hooks at once, so the ads that keep running show which feelings and formats earn their keep.
Calm, Headspace, Aura Health, Insight Timer, Waking Up, and Ten Percent Happier are common names in this space. Each pitches a different tone, from broad relaxation to practical or philosophical mindfulness. Search each brand in AdLibrary and sort by run date to see which versions keep running.
They pair calm visuals with relatable stress or sleep moments, then show the app in use. Teacher or creator clips, sleep story previews, and testimonials are common, ending with a clear install prompt. Open these brands in AdLibrary to compare hooks, formats, and offers side by side.
It speaks to skeptical adults who want practical meditation for stress, using a straightforward voice rather than a mystical one. Comparing its ads with Calm and Headspace shows how tone alone can separate similar apps. Saving their live Meta and TikTok ads in AdLibrary makes the patterns easy to compare.
Search and save ads from every brand above across Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and more.
See all ads on AdLibrary →