Alarmy alternatives: the honest list

The right Alarmy alternative depends entirely on why you are leaving. If you want the missions without the ads, the upsells and the "please disable silent mode" support articles, Risly is the closest thing on iOS. If you want sleep tracking and a gentle wake-up, Sleep Cycle is a better app than either of us. If you want to spend nothing, the built-in Clock app is far better than the internet gives it credit for.

We make Risly, so read this with the suspicion it deserves. That is exactly why the sections below say out loud where Alarmy beats us, and it beats us in several places.

What Alarmy gets right, and it is a lot

Alarmy is made by Delight Room, a Seoul studio that has been shipping it since 2014. The company reports more than 120 million downloads, and the app has spent most of the last decade at or near the top of the paid alarm charts in dozens of countries. That is not a fluke, and pretending otherwise would waste your time.

Its mission library is genuinely deeper than ours: photos, barcode scans, math, memory cards, typing, shake, squats and QR codes. It has sleep tracking, sleep sounds, a "wake-up check" that fires a second alarm if you go back to bed, gradual volume ramps, and it runs on Android as well as iPhone. Ten years of edge cases have been sanded off it. A new app cannot claim that.

So why do people go looking for an alternative?

• The free tier carries ads, and the paid tier is a subscription that has been repriced more than once.
• The app has grown a lot of surface area. If all you want is an alarm you cannot dismiss, you are also carrying a sleep tracker, a sound library and a store.
• Missions can be brute-forced. People screenshot the photo target, or leave a printout of the barcode on the nightstand.
• And the big one: its own support documentation asks you to turn off silent mode, turn off Do Not Disturb, and disable battery optimisation so the alarm can fire.

That last point is not incompetence. Until 2025, a third-party alarm on iPhone was not really an alarm. It was a local notification plus a background audio trick, and iOS was free to mute it, delay it or kill the app outright. Every alarm app on the store fought the same fight, and every one of them lost some of the time.

iOS 26 changed that. Apple shipped AlarmKit, a system framework that lets an app schedule a real alarm — the same kind the Clock app uses. It rings through silent mode, through Focus, through Do Not Disturb, and it rings even if you force-quit the app the night before. Risly is built on it. That is the entire technical argument, and you can read the longer version on our anti-snooze page.

The five alternatives, sorted by who you actually are

1. Risly — if you want a mission you cannot dodge

There is no snooze button anywhere in Risly. Not hidden in settings, not behind a long-press. The alarm stops when you finish a mission: scan an object you registered (the coffee machine, the bathroom mirror), solve chained math problems, shake the phone, or do push-ups counted by the front camera. Camera missions run entirely on-device; nothing is uploaded. Streaks unlock seven Sun-Ninja grades, which sounds silly until day nine, when you would rather get up than lose it.

Where we lose: Risly needs iOS 26 or later, and there is no Android version. We do not track your sleep. We do not play rain sounds. There is a three-day free trial and then an annual subscription. If any of that is a dealbreaker, one of the four below will serve you better.

2. Sleep Cycle — if your problem is grogginess, not lateness

Sleep Cycle listens to your breathing and movement and wakes you inside a 30-minute window, at the lightest point of sleep it can find. It has been doing this since 2009 and the sleep-tracking side is excellent. It has a snooze button, on purpose, and its whole design is about being woken kindly. If you already get up on time and just hate how you feel afterwards, buy Sleep Cycle and stop reading listicles like this one.

3. The built-in Clock app — if you have never actually tried turning snooze off

This is the option most comparison articles skip, and it is dishonest to skip it. The iPhone Clock alarm is free, it rings through silent mode and Focus, and you can switch Snooze off per alarm with a single toggle in the alarm editor. If you have not tried that, try it before you pay anyone anything.

Its weakness is the obvious one: nothing stands between you and the "Stop" button. You slide, it is quiet, you are asleep. There is no task, no friction, no record. For a lot of people that is enough. For the people who search "I keep sleeping through my alarm" at 9:40am from the bus, it clearly is not.

4. Alarm Clock Xtreme — if you are on Android

Worth naming because half the "Alarmy alternative" lists put it in front of iPhone users: Alarm Clock Xtreme is Android-only. On Android it is a solid free mission alarm with math problems and a strong widget. On iPhone it is not an option at all.

5. Staying on Alarmy

Stay if you are on Android, if you actually use the sleep tracking, or if you want the widest mission library that exists. Those are real reasons and no amount of copywriting from us makes them go away.

The comparison that actually matters

Every alarm app on this list can make a noise. The question is whether it makes a noise on the morning it matters — the morning your phone was on silent because you were in the cinema, or in a Sleep Focus you set up in 2023 and forgot about, or because you swiped the app away from the app switcher on Sunday night. Alarmy and Sleep Cycle both ask you to configure your phone around them. A system alarm does not ask. That is the difference AlarmKit bought, and it is the only feature on this page you cannot recreate with willpower.