Slowrise vs Alarmy: two opposite answers to oversleeping
We make one of these, so read this knowing that. They are built on opposite ideas about why people oversleep, and which one is right depends on you.
Disclosure
Slowrise is ours. Alarmy is a well-made app that has got a great many people out of bed, and for some of them it is the right answer. We’ve tried to say clearly who those people are.
What is the difference between Slowrise and Alarmy?
Alarmy makes the alarm hard to turn off: it won’t stop until you complete a task, like solving maths problems or photographing your sink. Slowrise makes turning an alarm off safe: it plans a series of alarms across a window you choose, ending at a hard deadline, so snoozing has a limit and dismissing one alarm never ends the morning. Alarmy fights snoozing; Slowrise plans for it.
Two different theories of oversleeping
Alarmy’s theory: you oversleep because turning the alarm off is too easy. Make it hard enough, and by the time you can, you’re awake.
Slowrise’s theory: you oversleep because the morning has no plan. You’re going to snooze, as most people do, but nothing says when the snoozing ends, so it ends whenever a half-asleep decision goes wrong. Give it an end you chose the night before, and snoozing stops being dangerous.
Both theories are true of some people. The question is which one is true of you.
Side by side
| Alarmy | Slowrise | |
|---|---|---|
| Core idea | A mission you must complete to dismiss | A planned series of alarms with a hard deadline |
| Snoozing | Discouraged | Planned for, with an end |
| What you set up | An alarm time and a mission | A first alarm and a time you must be up |
| Sounds | Loud by design | Gentle first, firmer toward the deadline |
| If you dismiss it half-asleep | You can’t, until the mission is done | The next alarm is already scheduled |
| Platforms | iPhone and Android | iPhone, iOS 26 and later |
| Price | Free, with a paid Premium tier | Free |
Choose Alarmy if…
- You genuinely will not get up unless something physically makes you.
- You need to be out of bed at one exact time, with no lie-in at all.
- You don’t mind an adversarial relationship with your alarm.
- You’re on Android.
Choose Slowrise if…
- You already set several alarms and snooze through them.
- The problem isn’t that you snooze, it’s the panic of not knowing whether you’ve overslept.
- You’ve learned to do Alarmy’s missions without fully waking up.
- Loud, sudden alarms leave you rattled for the rest of the morning.
What the research says about each approach
The case for Alarmy’s approach is intuitive: if you’re up, you’re up. The case against it is that the decision to get up is made during sleep inertia, when reaction time and judgement are measurably impaired. Friction makes a bad decision more expensive; it doesn’t make it a good one.
The case for planned snoozing comes from a controlled study of a designed 30-minute snooze window, which found it cost about six minutes of sleep with no harm to cognition, cortisol or mood. What does seem to make mornings worse is repeated forced awakenings without a plan. More on what the evidence says.
Can you use both?
You can, though they pull in opposite directions. If you want a hard backstop, a simpler pairing is a Slowrise window for the gentle part of the morning, with an Alarmy mission set a few minutes after your deadline as insurance. Most people find they need one approach or the other.
If neither sounds right, here are the other alternatives to Alarmy. If Slowrise does, it’s free on the App Store.
Sources
- Alarmy on the App Store — mission-based dismissal.
- Apple Developer — AlarmKit (iOS 26).
- Sundelin, T., Landry, S., & Axelsson, J. (2024). Is snoozing losing? Journal of Sleep Research, 33(3), e14054.
- Ogawa, K., et al. (2022). Effects of using a snooze alarm on sleep inertia after morning awakening. Journal of Physiological Anthropology, 41, 43.
- Mattingly, S. M., et al. (2022). Snoozing: an examination of a common method of waking. Sleep, 45(10), zsac184.
We link the study rather than a news write-up of it wherever one exists, and we say when the evidence disagrees with itself — which, on this subject, it often does. This is not medical advice. If you are exhausted every morning regardless of your alarm, that is worth raising with a doctor rather than an app.