7 Abide Alternatives for 2026 (Free, Catholic & Sleep-First)
Last updated: August 2026
The short answer: the closest alternatives to Abide are Hallow if you’re Catholic, Lectio 365 if you want a free daily office, Dwell if you’d rather hear the Bible itself than a meditation about it, Glorify for daily devotionals, and Still if you want the whole day anchored in scripture — devotional, meditations by feeling, Bible audio, and a scripture alarm that actually wakes you up.
One disclosure up front: we make Still, the first app on this list. We’ve tried to be fair anyway, and you should read our entry knowing who wrote it.
Why people look for an Abide alternative
Abide is good. It has the deepest Christian meditation library in the category, it undercuts most rivals at $39.99 a year, and for a lot of people it’s simply the right answer. Five reasons come up anyway.
It’s evangelical, and you might not be. Abide is broadly Protestant in framing and evangelical in tone. If you arrived looking for the rosary, the examen, or the Liturgy of the Hours, you won’t find them, and no amount of library depth fixes that.
NIV only. If you read the ESV, the KJV, the Luther Bibel or a Catholic translation, every meditation arrives in a voice that isn’t the one in your head.
The free tier runs out fast. One daily meditation and a rotating handful of sleep stories stay free indefinitely, which is more generous than most. But it’s a sampler, and the library people actually come for sits behind the subscription.
It ends at bedtime. Abide gets you to sleep and then stops. It has no alarm, so your morning still belongs to whatever default tone your phone shipped with — which is an odd way to end a night you deliberately spent in scripture.
Sleep is a section, not the point. Abide’s Bible sleep stories are genuinely popular, but they sit inside a daytime meditation app. If the evening is when you actually reach for it, the app’s centre of gravity is in the wrong place.
The list
1. Still — best for scripture from bedtime to alarm
$59.99/yr, $12.99/mo. Large free tier. Ecumenical. iOS only.
Still covers the same ground as Abide and then keeps going in both directions.
The daytime library is real, not a token: an emotion-indexed set for when you’re anxious, afraid, lonely, angry, overwhelmed, ashamed, guilty, sad or down; one- to two-minute Still Shorts for grief, forgiveness, mercy, thankfulness; longer breath work including a 16-minute Be Still and Know and a 22-minute body scan; and a morning meditation player with a session timer and an optional closing bell — singing bowl, chime, or bell.
The night is where it’s built: Bible sleep stories, dated evening prayers, sleep meditations, travel stories, a kids’ story, and an ambient mixer that layers music and nature sound underneath the narration, with a sleep timer that can drop the voice at 15, 30, 45 or 60 minutes and let the ambient bed keep running.
Then the part nothing else here has: a real alarm. A circular 24-hour clock with separate bedtime and wake handles, a mixer that combines a music layer, a nature layer and a spoken Bible verse — Psalm 23:1, Isaiah 12:2, Matthew 6:33 among them — and a fade-in you can stretch to half an hour so you surface slowly rather than getting yanked out. It’s built on iOS AlarmKit, so it rings through Silent Mode like the system alarm does.
The free tier is unusually wide: the entire Bible audio library is free (all 66 books in German, Old and New Testament in English), along with roughly a third of the meditation catalogue, the Genesis-in-30 and Psalms-in-30 plans, every curated playlist, the daily devotional, the evening prayer, and the alarm itself. Pro adds the emotion library, most long-form sleep meditations, The Bible in a Year, extra alarm tracks and offline downloads.
Two honest limits: it’s iOS only — no Android, no web player — and the interface is dark-mode only. English, German and French, with German the deepest and the only one where the daily devotional and evening prayer currently run.
2. Hallow — best for Catholics
$69.99/yr. Freemium. Catholic.
The obvious move if the reason you’re leaving Abide is that Abide isn’t Catholic. Hallow is the most complete Catholic prayer app there is: rosary, Divine Mercy chaplet, examen, Liturgy of the Hours, saints, plus a large and growing sleep and meditation section.
It’s the most expensive app on this list, and it’s Catholic by design rather than by accident — Protestants often find the devotional furniture unfamiliar. But if you’re Catholic and Abide’s evangelical framing was the problem, this is the answer and the price is beside the point.
3. Lectio 365 — best free daily office
Free. No paywall. Evangelical.
Made by the 24-7 Prayer movement and free the whole way through — not freemium, not trial-then-pay. Morning, midday and night prayer on a fixed rhythm, in the Lectio Divina tradition.
What you give up is breadth. No sleep stories, no soundscapes, no library to browse, no personalisation. It’s a daily office in an app, and the discipline is the point. If your objection to Abide was the paywall rather than the theology, start here before you pay anyone anything.
4. Dwell — best for the Bible read aloud
$59.99/yr (solo plan). Free trial. Christian.
Dwell is an audio Bible rather than a meditation app. Multiple narrators, several translations, optional background music, and listening plans that move through actual books.
This is the right pick if what irritated you about Abide was the layer — the reflection, the guided voice, the interpretation sitting between you and the text. Dwell removes it.
Worth knowing before you subscribe: Still gives away chapter-level Bible audio for free, so if plain narrated scripture is the whole ask, check that first and see whether Dwell’s narrator range and translation choice are worth $59.99 to you on top.
5. Glorify — best for daily devotionals
Freemium; around $6.99/mo. Christian.
Glorify pairs a short daily devotional with scripture, reflection and worship music, and its free tier is one of the more usable ones. The shape of the day is the product: open it in the morning, get a reading and a reflection, move on.
Lighter on sleep than Abide, lighter on library depth too. Worth it if the daily-devotional habit is what you were using Abide for anyway.
6. Pray.com — best for bedtime Bible stories
Freemium; $99.99/yr for premium. Christian.
Pray.com leans hard into produced audio — dramatized Bible stories, bedtime narration, music, and a large catalogue of celebrity-narrated content. If Abide’s sleep stories were the thing you liked and you wanted more of them, this has the biggest pile.
It’s also the most expensive option here by a distance, and the production style divides people: dramatization with sound design and cast, rather than one voice reading. Try the free tier before committing.
7. Soultime — best for mood-based meditation
About $59.99/yr or $19.99/quarter. Freemium. Christian.
Soultime routes you by how you feel — anxious, grieving, grateful, overwhelmed — and serves a Christian meditation to match. It’s a clean, unintimidating app and the free tier is friendly.
The library is thinner than Abide’s, and at about $59.99 a year it costs half as much again. Still’s emotion library works the same way and is broader, but sits behind Pro, so if mood-routing is the one feature you want, Soultime is the cheaper way to test whether you’ll use it.
Quick comparison
| Still | Hallow | Lectio 365 | Dwell | Glorify | Pray.com | Soultime | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Tradition | Ecumenical | Catholic | Evangelical | Christian | Christian | Christian | Christian |
| Guided meditation | Yes | Yes | Prayer only | No | Light | Yes | Core |
| Meditation by feeling | Yes (Pro) | Some | No | No | No | Some | Core |
| Daily devotional | Yes | Yes | Core | No | Core | Yes | Some |
| Sleep content | Core | Medium | None | Medium | Light | Strong | Medium |
| Bible read aloud | Free, full | Yes | No | Core | No | Dramatized | No |
| Music & ambient sound | Yes | Yes | No | Background | Worship | Yes | Yes |
| Scripture alarm | Yes | No | No | No | No | No | No |
| German | Native | Translated | No | No | No | No | No |
| Platforms | iOS only | iOS, Android | iOS, Android | iOS, Android | iOS, Android | iOS, Android | iOS, Android |
| Free tier | Large | Yes | Complete | Trial | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Price/yr (US) | $59.99 | $69.99 | $0 | $59.99 | ~$6.99/mo | $99.99 | ~$59.99 |
Abide, for reference: $39.99/yr, $9.99/mo, 7-day trial, free daily meditation, iOS and Android. Prices last checked August 2026 and they change often.
Which alternative fits you?
If you want Christian music and calming sounds
Ambient sound isn’t a gimmick. The NHS lists “background sounds like rainfall, gentle music or white noise” among the things that make a bedroom easier to sleep in. What differs between these apps is what plays on top.
Still has a small set of sleep music and nature beds — forest night, ocean waves, lake waves — that can play alone or layer underneath narration on a shared volume slider, with most of them free. Pray.com has the largest catalogue of produced worship and narration. Glorify builds worship music into the daily devotional. Dwell offers music behind the Bible reading. Lectio 365 has none of this and doesn’t pretend to.
If you want a big standalone music library rather than beds to sleep under, none of these are really it — that’s a job for a music service.
If you want meditation and mindfulness as a Christian
Soultime and Still both route by feeling — pick the state you’re in, get a session for it. Soultime makes that the whole app; Still’s emotion library is broader but sits behind Pro. Hallow has the most rigorous contemplative tradition behind it if you’re open to Catholic practice, including the examen and Lectio Divina. Glorify is lighter and more devotional than meditative.
Worth naming the gap honestly: no Christian app teaches meditation as a skill the way Headspace does. These are devotional rather than instructional. Still comes closest on the mechanics — session timers, closing bells, breath work, body scans — but it’s still prayer with structure, not a curriculum.
If you want sleep aids with spiritual themes
Still puts the most weight here — Bible sleep stories, dated evening prayers, sleep meditations, an ambient mixer, and a sleep timer that can fade the voice out and leave the sound running. Pray.com has the biggest bedtime story library. Dwell works as a sleep app almost by accident: set a timer and let a narrator read Psalms until you’re gone. Lectio 365 has a night prayer but no sleep audio.
If you want to wake up to scripture, not a ringtone
Only Still does this, which is exactly the sort of claim you should be sceptical of on a page we wrote — so check the others yourself. As far as we know, none of the six alternatives here ship an alarm at all. Still’s combines a music bed, a nature layer and a spoken verse, with a fade-in up to thirty minutes, and it rings through Silent Mode.
If you’re Catholic
Hallow, without much argument. Abide’s evangelical framing is the thing you noticed, and Hallow is built from the other tradition entirely.
If you want something free
Lectio 365 is free the whole way through. Still’s free tier is the widest of the paid apps — the entire Bible audio library, about a third of the meditation catalogue, two 30-day plans, the daily devotional, the evening prayer and the alarm. And Abide’s own free tier, one meditation a day plus rotating sleep stories, is more generous than most. Check all three before you assume you need to pay anyone.
If you want German
Still is the only one written and narrated in German rather than translated into it, including all 66 Bible books and the daily devotional and evening prayer. Hallow offers German translations. The rest are English-only.
If you’re on Android
Abide, Hallow, Lectio 365, Dwell, Glorify, Pray.com and Soultime are all cross-platform. Still is iOS only, so it’s not an option for you yet.
When you should keep Abide
Honesty clause. Stay with Abide if raw library depth is what you’re paying for — it has more Christian meditation content than anything else on this list. Stay if $39.99 a year is near your ceiling; Still, Dwell, Hallow and Pray.com all cost more. Stay if you’re on Android, because Still isn’t there. And stay if the NIV is your translation and the evangelical tone is your home.
The reasons to leave Abide are specific ones. If none of them are yours, it’s a good app and you should keep it.
Frequently asked questions
What are some alternatives to Abide for Christian music and calming sounds? Still layers sleep music and nature beds — forest night, ocean waves, lake waves — under narration or plays them alone, and most are free. Pray.com has the largest catalogue of produced worship audio. Glorify builds worship music into its daily devotional. Lectio 365 is free but has no ambient audio at all.
Is there a free alternative to Abide? Lectio 365 is completely free with no paywall. Still’s free tier covers the entire Bible audio library, about a third of its meditations, two 30-day plans, the daily devotional, the evening prayer and the alarm. Glorify and Soultime have usable free tiers too. Abide’s own free tier gives you one daily meditation plus rotating sleep stories indefinitely, so compare against that rather than against nothing.
Is Abide Catholic? No. Abide is evangelical in tone and broadly Protestant in framing, with NIV-only audio. If you want a Catholic app, Hallow is the direct equivalent.
What’s the best Abide alternative for sleep? Still — Bible sleep stories, dated evening prayers, an ambient mixer, a sleep timer that fades the narration but keeps the sound, and a scripture alarm for the morning after. Pray.com if you want the biggest bedtime story library. Dwell if you’d rather fall asleep to the Bible read plainly.
Does Abide have an alarm? No. Abide handles the wind-down but not the wake-up. Still is the only app on this list with a built-in alarm — a music and nature mix with a spoken Bible verse over it, a fade-in up to thirty minutes, and it rings in Silent Mode.
Is anything cheaper than Abide?
Abide is already one of the cheaper paid options at $39.99/yr. Only Lectio 365 (free) and Glorify ($6.99/mo) come in under it. Still ($59.99), Dwell ($59.99), Soultime ($59.99), Hallow ($69.99) and Pray.com ($99.99) all cost more.
Abide is a trademark of its respective owner; Still is not affiliated with it. We make Still. See the full side-by-side comparison or try Still free on the App Store.