You want background sound for sleep or focus.

YouTube has ten-hour rain videos for free. Apps want a subscription. Your phone and laptop already ship sounds you’ve probably never found.

Here’s the honest version of which one you should use, and where the free options genuinely fall down.

How this list is sourced

Every developer name, star rating and rating count below was pulled from the US App Store on 11 August 2026. Behaviour descriptions come from the store listings and from the platform makers’ own documentation.

I’m not quoting subscription prices. Every app here is free to download and charges through in-app purchases that move with region and promotion. Where a price is genuinely load-bearing to the argument, I say so and show my source.

I also had to correct three things this page previously got wrong, and they’re marked below rather than quietly deleted.

The short answer

  • Sleeping? Use an app. YouTube’s failure modes all happen while you’re unconscious.
  • Working at a desk? YouTube or a browser tab is fine and free.
  • Just want something, now, for nothing? Your phone already has it. Skip to the built-in section.

Why YouTube breaks specifically at night

YouTube for background sound is genuinely fine during the day. For sleep it has four problems, and they compound.

  1. It stops when you lock the screen. On iOS, background playback with the screen off is a YouTube Premium feature. Without it you leave the screen on all night, which means light in your room and a hot phone on the nightstand.
  2. Ads. Without Premium an ad can fire mid-video at a completely different volume. That’s a wake-up, not background sound.
  3. The video ends. Even a ten-hour video ends, and then autoplay picks something for you. Silence or a random video at 4am both wake you.
  4. It needs a connection. Patchy wifi at 3am equals silence at 3am.

Dedicated apps fix all four in the same way: local audio files, seamless loops, a fade-out timer, a dark screen and no ad breaks. That’s the entire product category, and it’s why it exists despite free video being everywhere.

For focus at a desk, none of those four matter. The screen is on anyway, you’re awake for the ads, and you’re online. Use whatever’s already open.

Comparison

Ratings, developers and rating counts verified on the US App Store, 11 August 2026.

AppDeveloperRatingRatingsNotable
CalmCalm.com, Inc.4.81,972,567Sounds inside a full meditation app
Headspace: Sleep & MeditationHeadspace Inc.4.8973,897Same, different company
BetterSleep: Relax and SleepBetterSleep Health, LLC4.7390,591Large sound library, mixing
White Noise LiteTMSOFT4.8273,479Long-running, free tier
White Noise Deep Sleep SoundsSlumber Studios, LLC4.8206,490Sleep-focused
Bedtime Fan: White Noise BabySlumber Studios, LLC4.8200,022Fan sounds, infant-oriented
Rain Rain Sleep SoundsTim Gostony4.8136,313Rain, deeply
Endel: Focus & Sleep SoundsEndel Sound GmbH4.633,429Generative, never loops
Portal - Escape Into NaturePortal Labs Ltd4.810,135Real location recordings
Dark Noise: Ambient SoundsDark Noise LLC4.83,624Shortcuts, widgets, Watch
myNoise: Focus · Relax · SleepmyNoise BVBA4.7995Per-frequency control

If you want the most-trusted option

White Noise Lite (TMSOFT): 4.8 stars, 273,479 ratings

The elder statesman of this category and still updated, with its last listed release in July 2026. Free tier, sound mixing, timers.

BetterSleep (BetterSleep Health, LLC): 4.7 stars, 390,591 ratings

The largest rating count of any app here that is primarily about sounds rather than meditation. Big library, mixing, sleep-oriented.

Rain Rain Sleep Sounds (Tim Gostony): 4.8 stars, 136,313 ratings

If the answer is just “rain”, this is the one people keep. Note the last listed update was January 2025, which is older than most of this list.

If you want it to look and feel nice

Dark Noise (Dark Noise LLC): 4.8 stars, 3,624 ratings

Correction: this page previously listed Dark Noise as “$10 one-time”. As of 11 August 2026 the App Store listing is free to download, with paid unlocks. Check the listing for what the unlock currently costs.

The reason to pick it is integration rather than library size: Shortcuts support, widgets, an Apple Watch app, iCloud sync. If you want “Hey Siri, start rain for 45 minutes” to just work, this is the one built for that. Its last listed update was November 2025.

Portal - Escape Into Nature (Portal Labs Ltd): 4.8 stars, 10,135 ratings

Recordings made at real named places rather than synthesised loops. Worth knowing its last listed update was October 2024.

If loops drive you mad

Endel (Endel Sound GmbH): 4.6 stars, 33,429 ratings

Generates sound continuously instead of looping a file, so there’s no repeat point for your brain to latch onto. That’s a real fix for a real complaint. The trade-off is that it’s generative, so you can’t pick a specific track and get it back exactly.

myNoise (myNoise BVBA): 4.7 stars, 995 ratings

Gives you sliders for individual frequency bands, so you can tune a sound to mask the specific thing bothering you: traffic rumble, or a neighbour’s voice. Nothing else here does that.

Note the rating count. 995 is small, so the star average is a weaker signal than the numbers above it.

About Calm and Headspace

The old version of this page listed “Calm/Headspace” as one row at “$70/year”. They are two unrelated companies with separate pricing, so that row was wrong twice over.

  • Calm: Calm.com, Inc., 4.8 stars across 1,972,567 ratings. Free to download, subscription on top.
  • Headspace: Sleep & Meditation: Headspace Inc., 4.8 stars across 973,897 ratings. Free to download, subscription on top.

Both include sleep sounds and soundscapes alongside a large meditation library. Neither is worth subscribing to for the sounds. You’d be paying for a meditation product to get a feature a free app does. If you already subscribe to one, you already have this covered and don’t need anything on this page.

About Noisli

Correction: this page previously listed Noisli at “Free (Pro $12/year)”. That was wrong by about an order of magnitude.

Noisli’s own pricing page lists Pro at €8 per month billed yearly, with a Business tier above it. The free tier still exists.

There’s a second thing worth knowing. The Noisli iOS app is a separate paid listing from Noisli Labs UG, rated 4.2 across 255 ratings, and its last listed update was April 2017. The web version is the maintained product. If you want Noisli, use it in a browser.

The free options already on your devices

iPhone and iPad

Settings → Accessibility → Audio & Visual → Background Sounds.

Balanced, bright and dark noise, plus ocean, rain and stream. iOS 18 added night and fire to the set. It plays under other audio, keeps going with the screen off, and costs nothing. Genuinely the fastest thing on this page to try.

Mac

System Settings → Accessibility → Audio → Background Sounds, then Choose to pick a sound.

Correction: this page previously sent you to the speaker icon in the menu bar. That’s wrong. The setting lives under Accessibility. You can add a Hearing control to the menu bar or Control Centre afterwards to toggle it quickly, which is probably where that mistake came from.

Same sound set as iOS: balanced, bright and dark noise, ocean, rain, stream. There’s also an option to silence it automatically when the Mac sleeps or the screen locks.

Windows 11

Correction: this page previously listed “Settings → System → Focus → Focus sessions” as a source of ambient sound. Focus sessions is a timer in the Clock app that integrates Microsoft To Do and Spotify. It ships no sounds of its own. Any audio you hear is coming from Spotify, which means you need Spotify.

Windows has no equivalent of Apple’s Background Sounds. On Windows, use a browser tab or an app.

Feature comparison

FactorYouTubeA dedicated appBuilt-in (Apple)
CostFree with adsFree to download, paid tiersFree
Plays with screen offPremium onlyYesYes
Works offlineNoUsuallyYes
Sleep timerNoYesAuto-off on sleep/lock
Mix multiple soundsNoUsuallyNo
Ad interruptionsYes without PremiumNoNo
VarietyEffectively unlimitedTens to hundredsSix sounds

Is white noise safe? The part most articles skip

For adults at a sensible volume, this is a non-issue. Keep it at or below the level of a normal conversation and you’re fine.

For babies, it is not a non-issue, and it’s worth being specific. A 2014 study in Pediatrics measured 14 infant sleep machines at maximum volume. At 30 cm, all of them exceeded 50 A-weighted decibels, the limit recommended for hospital nurseries. Three exceeded 85 dBA, a level that risks noise-induced hearing loss if sustained across a long night.

The practical guidance that follows from it: put the machine or phone as far from the cot as you reasonably can, keep the volume low rather than “whatever masks the noise”, and don’t run it at maximum all night. The device being marketed for babies does not mean its top volume is safe for babies.

That applies to a phone app exactly as much as a plastic machine. It’s the sound pressure at the child’s ear that matters, not the enclosure it came out of.

FAQ

Is white noise good for sleep? For a lot of people, yes, and the mechanism is unremarkable: it masks the intermittent sounds that would otherwise wake you. It’s not a sedative. If what’s keeping you awake is your own thoughts rather than the street outside, this is the wrong tool.

Pink noise or white noise? Pink has more energy at low frequencies, so most people find it softer and less hissy. There’s no reason not to try both, since every app here has both, and so does your phone. More on the differences in white vs brown vs pink noise.

Do I have to pay for a white noise app? No. Your iPhone and Mac ship six sounds for free, and every app listed above is free to download with a usable free tier. Pay only once you know you use it nightly.

Can white noise damage my hearing? At conversation-level volume for an adult, no. For infants it needs real care. See the section above, and the Pediatrics study in the sources.

Are baby white noise apps different? The sounds are the same. What differs is the marketing and, in the better ones, a volume cap. The safety issue is distance and volume, not which app you chose.

Why does my sound loop so obviously? Short source files. Longer recordings and generative apps like Endel avoid it. If a loop point is bothering you, that’s a reason to switch app, not to give up on the idea.

Can I just use Spotify? Yes, and unlike YouTube it plays with the screen locked on the free tier, though with ads. It has no sleep timer on all platforms and it isn’t built for seamless looping, so it sits between YouTube and a real app.

Related reads:

Disclosure: DreamNoise is mine

I build iOS apps, and DreamNoise is one of them.

I’ve kept it out of the comparison tables, out of every recommendation section and out of the FAQ answers above, because scoring my own product against apps I compete with isn’t a fair test. It is free to download. It is new and has very few App Store ratings so far, so there is not much of a crowd verdict to lean on either. Try it and judge for yourself.

Sources

This article is general information, not medical advice. Talk to a qualified professional about anything affecting your health.

— Dolce