Everyone deserves health and wellness in their lives, but many wellness apps and programs are quite expensive. Luckily, if you want to take care of your physical and mental well-being without spending a lot of money, there are plenty of free wellness apps available on the market.
While many wellness apps offer free trials or basic content, we’ve tried to collect apps that offer the most functionality for free.
Some of these apps might not seem like wellness apps at first, but they actually have amazing benefits for your overall health.
With all that in mind, here are 11 free apps that can improve your mental, emotional, and physical wellness.
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Apple Fitness
Tracking your overall activity is key to staying on top of your physical health. If you have an iPhone or an Apple Watch (or both), you already have an excellent tool for this — the Apple Fitness app.
To be clear, we’re talking about the built-in Fitness and Activity tracking features, not Apple’s paid subscription service Fitness+.
While you get the most personal experience using an Apple Watch, you can also use the Fitness app to track your daily activity, set a move goal, see your progress, and see your movement trends over time without an Apple Watch.
- With an Apple Watch, the Fitness app tracks three activity rings using the watch’s sensors: Move (red), Exercise (green), and Stand (blue).
- When you wear your watch, it uses motion and heart rate sensors to track your activity and estimate your active calories burned.
- When you wear your watch, it uses motion and heart rate sensors to track your activity and estimate your active calories burned.
- With an iPhone (requires iOS 16 and above), the Fitness app tracks one activity ring using the iPhone’s motion sensor: Move (red).
- When you carry your iPhone with you, motion sensors track your steps, distance, and flights climbed to estimate active calories burned.
- When you carry your iPhone with you, motion sensors track your steps, distance, and flights climbed to estimate active calories burned.
With Apple’s Fitness app, you can track all your activities and active calories using Apple’s own apps and third-party apps that you connect and sync to Apple’s Health app. Any workouts you complete in those compatible third-party apps also contribute to the progress shown on your rings.
Although the Apple Fitness and Activity apps won’t necessarily give you a workout to follow, they can help you track your calories burned and physical activity over time.
This lets you measure your progress, stay motivated, and maintain your habits. For the ultimate free experience, use your Apple Watch’s tracking features with free workout classes on YouTube.
Mindfulness
As with the free Apple Fitness and Activity features on the Apple Watch, the Cupertino company’s wearables also come with baked-in mindfulness features.
The Mindfulness app on watchOS is barebones, but it’s enough to bring a bit more meditation into your life without costing you a subscription fee.
The Breathe feature allows you to practice a simple breath mindfulness meditation, while the Mindfulness feature lets you practice mindful reflections.
Since the most profound benefits of meditation come with time and consistent practice, the daily reminders and Mindful Minute tracking features are powerful tools, too.
Aloe Bud
One aspect of wellness that seems simple but carries powerful benefits is self-care. Whether it’s staying hydrated, checking in with your friends and family, or taking a warm bath after work, self-care practices are a key part of maintaining your overall wellness. Enter the Aloe Bud app.
This simple app lets you track these self-care exercises over time.
The app can let you keep tabs on your hydration, remind you to text someone you love, and give you a bit of encouragement through the app. The design is charming — and the app is well-loved by thousands of people on the App Store.
You can download it here.
Gratitude
Gratitude, when done intentionally, can have amazing effects on your overall wellness. Expressing gratitude can improve a range of mental and physical aspects of your health — including everything from your immunity to your ability to deal with everyday stressors.
It’s the closest thing to a magic pill that we have, and it’s free to practice.
You don’t even need an app to bring gratitude into your life, but if you’re looking for a platform to help you get started, it’s hard to go wrong with the Gratitude app.
This carefully designed platform is free to use, lets you track gratitude journaling over time, and even comes with other features like vision boarding and affirmations.
You can download it here.
Insight Timer
Insight Timer is an amazing platform for meditation, music, mindfulness, yoga, and more.
It’s a global app with a wealth of features available for free, including one of the largest libraries of guided meditations that you don’t have to spend a single cent to access.
There are other unique features on Insight Timer, too. Experienced meditators can take advantage of a daily mood-tracking feature and a barebones timer to track meditations.
You can also find free live stream yoga classes from instructors around the world — including yours truly.
You can download it here.
Yoga Studio
Yoga is a powerful practice that can improve your physical health, mental performance, and emotional well-being.
Practicing yoga, however, can be expensive if you opt for the studio or subscription app route. That’s why an app like Yoga Studio offers a great alternative.
The app has a subscription option but offers enough content to kickstart your yoga journey — especially if you are a beginner.
There are yoga classes specific to flexibility, balance, and strength alongside options that combine all three. The video demonstrations and vocal cues are clear and concise, and the overall vibe of the app is relaxing, too.
You can download it here.
AllTrails
You may not consider AllTrails a true “wellness app,” but you should. Research shows that spending time in nature is one of the most powerful ways to boost your emotional, physical, and mental well-being.
While you could just explore your local park, a free app like AllTrails lets you mix wellness with adventure.
The app lets you search for nearby hiking trails, local parks, and other natural areas. Each trail page contains information on difficulty, length, and more, as well as photos and reviews from other hikers.
You can also track your hikes, sync that workout data to Apple Health, and navigate each trail with a built-in map feature.
You can download it here.
Stoic
Many meditation and mindfulness apps are inspired by Eastern practices like yoga and Zen Buddhism, but Stoic is unique because it’s grounded in the Western philosophy of stoicism.
It’s also unique because it offers a range of wellness practices in a single app.
You’ll find quotes, affirmations, daily journaling options, breathing practices, and Zen-inspired walking meditations here.
Like Insight Timer, Stoic also has a simple mood-tracking feature so you can keep tabs on your mental wellness over time.
You can download it here.
Elevate Training
While it’s easy to think of brain training apps as tools for overachieving workaholics, they can also be a boon for those that want to slow down and practice wellness.
In addition to sharpening your mental and cognitive performance, brain training apps like Elevate can be fun and relaxing.
Elevate is one of the most feature-rich brain training apps available for free.
While there’s a premium option, you can practice more than 40 games that improve everything from your self-confidence to your ability to learn.
There’s even an Apple Watch app with quick games to train your brain right from your wrist.
You can download it here.
Lungy
Lungy is a unique breathing app that brings an element of interactivity into online breathwork practice.
Unlike apps like Apple’s Breathe, Lungy uses the microphone on your iPhone to detect your breath. It uses that feature to provide cool experiences that bring an element of agency and power to your breathing.
For example, one experience could see your breath actually causing cartoon dandelions to blow in the wind.
We recently wrote an entire review and overview of the Lungy app, which you can read here. Put simply, it is unique and interactive enough to keep you coming back for calming breathing practices.
You can download it here.
Duolingo
Again, you might not consider Duolingo a wellness app since it’s educational in nature. But consider this: learning a new language can boost your cognitive performance, fight depression, delay dementia, and even increase your sense of empathy. Those all sound like wellness benefits to me.
The best part about Duolingo is that it’s incredibly feature-packed for a free app.
Although it offers a subscription, you can truly learn the basics of a new language without paying for the premium upsell. As with most other wellness practices, the trick is consistency.
You can download it here.
Wellness doesn’t have to be expensive to be effective!
We often associate wellness with expensive retreats, fancy tools, and costly subscriptions. However, it doesn’t have to be this way.
There are plenty of Apple Watch and iPhone apps out there that are free to use but provide great features to support your wellness journey. You just need to know where to look!
What are some apps that you feel have improved your well-being? Let us know in the comments below!
