Prices and free-tier limits checked July 2026 against official sites and App Store listings. Tell us if something changed: [email protected].
How to read this
Four of these are subscriptions and three are not, which is the first fork in the road. If you want a sound machine you buy once and keep, the field narrows to Foyer, myNoise and A Soft Murmur, plus Dark Noise if you take its lifetime option. If you want a large streaming library with guided content on top, Calm and Endel are built for that and Foyer is not.
What Foyer does that none of them do
The mixer is a canvas rather than a column of sliders. Each sound is a point of light you drag around yourself: distance sets volume, angle sets direction, and the mix is rendered binaurally, so with headphones the fire actually sits to your left. Rooms remember their layouts, and the whole thing lives in the Mac menu bar. Every app in the table above mixes by slider.
What they do better
Reach, mostly. Noisli, Endel, Calm and A Soft Murmur run on Windows and Android; Foyer is Mac and iPhone only, and there is a waitlist rather than an app. myNoise has hundreds of soundscapes and a per-frequency mixer no one else matches. Endel generates sound that reacts to your heart rate. Dark Noise has iPad and Vision Pro. Each page below says where the competitor wins in its own words.
Hear the sounds first
Five of the library's sounds play free in the browser, no install and no account:
Foyer, by a wide margin: $9.99 once against roughly €288 for Noisli, $210 for Calm or $72 for Dark Noise on the yearly plan. The free web mixers (myNoise, A Soft Murmur) cost nothing at all if a browser tab is enough for you.
Is there a free ambient sound app with no account?
Yes. Foyer's free tier is the full library with up to three simultaneous sounds, no time cap and no sign-up. A Soft Murmur and myNoise also need no account, and they run in any browser.
Which one should I pick for focus at work?
If you want to set a soundscape once and forget it, any of them will mask an open-plan office. Pick on price model and platform. If you work in headphones all day, placement is the thing worth trying: sound coming from a direction is easier to stop noticing than sound centred in your head.