Headspace
Meditation and everyday mental health app with Ebb, an empathetic AI companion, plus coaching and therapy.
About
Headspace is the mainstream meditation app, offering more than a thousand guided meditations for stress, sleep, anxiety, and focus, plus sleep sounds, breathing exercises, and mindful movement. In 2021 it merged with the on-demand mental health company Ginger to form Headspace Health, adding coaching, therapy, and psychiatry alongside the consumer app. Over 4,000 organizations offer Headspace as an employee benefit.
The app now includes Ebb, an empathetic AI companion that does emotional check-ins and points users to the right meditation or exercise for their mood. Subscriptions run $12.99 a month or $69.99 a year in the US, with HSA and FSA eligibility. Headspace cites published research on meditation and stress reduction, though its specific efficacy claims are marketing statements rather than regulatory findings.
What it can do
- 1,000+ guided meditations
- Ebb AI companion check-ins
- Sleep sounds and bedtime meditations
- Breathing exercises
- Mental health coaching
- Online therapy and psychiatry
- Employer and EAP programs
- Mindful movement sessions
Setup
Download the app or sign up on the web; free trial before subscribing.
Prerequisites
None; account required for full access.
Use cases
Works with
Trust score — 8/10
Scored 8/10 (TIER verified, metrics-v1). Evidence: the official site confirms the Ebb AI companion, the 1,000+ meditation library, coaching and therapy offerings, and the 4,000-organization employer base; the 2021 Ginger merger is widely documented. Strengths: category-defining scale, full care spectrum from meditation to therapy, active AI development. Docked for: (1) closed proprietary platform with no public outcome benchmarks; (2) some health claims are marketing-level rather than clinically validated. License: proprietary.
How the trust score is built
Full methodology →- Adoption · stars/downloads, log-scaled vs peers
- 9.0/10
- Maintenance · recency, releases, issue load
- 9.0/10
- Openness · license + docs
- 4.0/10
- Manual review · sanity read + red-flag check
- 8.0/10
- · Merged with Ginger in 2021 forming Headspace Health; Ebb AI companion launched
- · 4,000+ organizations offer it; $12.99/mo or $69.99/yr US pricing
- · Stress-reduction claims are marketing-level, not regulatory findings
Sources
Every fact above was checked against these sources. Where a claim comes from the provider and couldn't be independently verified, the text says so.