Snore Timeline vs SnoreLab: Privacy, Price and Recording

At a glance

Price

Snore Timeline is free. No subscription, no in-app purchases, no premium tier. What you download on night one is what you keep.

SnoreLab is a free download with a real free tier. According to its FAQ, the free version lets you record your night, check charts and stats in the morning, listen to captured audio, and tag remedies and factors. Things change after your first 5 sessions. From then on, the free version can’t run on 2 consecutive days.

Premium removes that limit and, per the FAQ, adds a long list of extras: BreathFlow and the Breathing Disturbance Index, full session history, full night recording, trends, audio backup, export, a rest rating, and Soundscapes.

On the App Store there are ten Premium purchase options, from $5.99 to $59.99, covering monthly, three-month and yearly plans plus a one-time purchase at $7.99. Which price a new user sees, the listing doesn’t say.

The free tier is fine for a week of testing. Record every night and you’ll need Premium. Snoring apps with no subscription takes a wider look at paywalls.

Privacy

Every App Store listing has a privacy label. The developer fills it in, and Apple sorts the answers into three tiers: data used to track you, data linked to you, and data not linked to you.

On 1 November 2026, the two apps declared the following.

• Snore Timeline declares Data Not Collected. I didn’t build an account system, a server or an analytics SDK into it, so recordings stay on your phone.
• SnoreLab declares data in all three tiers, and the table below lists each item with the purpose SnoreLab gives for it.

Audio Data on a label means the developer declared that it collects audio. On its own, it doesn’t tell you that every night uploads. SnoreLab’s FAQ fills in the rest: recordings are saved on your device and “are not uploaded to a server without your permission.” Turn on Audio Backup, a Premium feature, and SnoreLab stores your audio on its server, encrypted with a key unique to you. Snore detection runs on the device with no internet connection, the FAQ says, though uploading sessions to a SnoreLab account needs one.

Of the 14 apps I checked, four declare Data Not Collected, and Snore Timeline is the one among those four with no purchases of any kind. 14 snoring app privacy labels compared has the full list.

Privacy labels, side by side

Both labels, as they looked on 27 September 2026.

A label is a self-declaration. Apple’s developer guidance tells developers to keep their answers accurate and up to date, and I re-check labels on the date shown at the top of this page.

What each app records

Snore Timeline

Snore Timeline records the whole night through the phone microphone, or through AirPods and other Bluetooth mics, and analyzes every sound as it happens with no periodic sampling. Snores, gasps, coughs, sleep talking and breathing each get a label. For sounds the classifier can’t name, such as whispers, there’s a Loud Sound Detection option. How detection works covers each label. You can tag any night with remedies and other factors, from 23 built-in ones such as Mouth Guard, Nasal Strips or Slept on Side to ones you create, and after at least 3 tagged and 3 untagged nights, the app compares them and ranks what helped. The test a remedy guide walks through it.

SnoreLab

SnoreLab listens all night and detects snoring. By default it saves 20 audio samples per night, its site says, and Full Night Recording, which keeps every captured sound, is a Premium feature. You can add notes and tag remedies and factors, and when the preset list falls short you can create your own. SnoreLab says it has monitored more than 170 million nights of sleep. That’s a big base for its Snore Score benchmarks.

Neither SnoreLab’s site nor its App Store listing names sleep talking as a detected sound. If you want to catch what you say at night, my sleep talking recorder guide has more on that.

Two scores, two timelines

Both apps sum up a night in one number and draw it as a chart. The numbers don’t measure the same thing.

Snore Timeline’s sleep score

Snore Timeline gives each night a sleep score from 0 to 100. Duration carries the most weight, and 7 hours or more counts as ideal. After that it weighs your Deep and REM share, time to fall asleep, continuity (time awake after falling asleep plus the number of awakenings) and bedtime regularity. Snoring and breathing disruptions pull it down. Snoring costs points by how often it happens per hour, while breathing disruptions cost more, with a bigger hit the more of them there are.

Each score gets a label, from Fully Rested at 95 and up to Sleep Deficit below 50, and with a wearable the label also reflects your recovery score. The full list of bands is on the Sleep Score page. Tap the score badge to see, factor by factor, what helped and what hurt. Sleep score & weekly insights goes through each factor.

If you have a wearable that writes to Apple Health, you also get a separate recovery score, which reads HRV, resting heart rate, respiratory rate, blood oxygen and wrist temperature against your own baseline, plus time asleep. It can move the sleep score up or down by as much as 15 points. The Weekly Summary sets this week against last for Sleep Score, Snore Time, Signals Per Hour, efficiency, sleep deficit and more.

SnoreLab’s Snore Score

SnoreLab’s FAQ describes the Snore Score as its own measure of snoring intensity, worked out from the average volume and total duration of suspected snoring episodes in a night. Higher means louder or more frequent snoring. It has no units. According to SnoreLab, someone who snores loud for a short stretch can score close to someone who snores quiet all night.

SnoreLab sorts snoring into Light, Loud and Epic, and as a rough guide it treats loud as 50 to 60 dB and epic as 60 dB and up. A typical new user scores around 25. Hit 100 or more and you’re in the highest 15% of SnoreLab users. The score is there to compare nights and test remedies. That pairing is SnoreLab’s core strength.

Snore Timeline’s timeline and episodes

Snore Timeline draws the night as a waveform you can drag and zoom, from 1-second bars all the way out to 1-hour ticks. Each sound type has its color (dusty rose for snoring, cream for sleep talking, pale purple for breathing disruptions, gray for silence). Tap anywhere to hear that moment. The colors and zoom levels are explained in Timeline & playback. On the nightly summary, the snoring chart switches between loudness and snores per minute, and a band of your sleep stages runs underneath it, so you can see whether your snoring clusters in light, deep or REM sleep. Tap a moment on the hypnogram and the snoring chart marks the same time.

Snores close together form an episode. A 30-second silence closes it, and the next snore starts a new one. For each episode you see its duration, snore count, peak and average dB, a rhythm class and a plain-English summary. Episodes & events has the rules.

Testing a remedy works through tags. Pick any of 23 built-in sleep factors, such as CPAP, Mouth Guard, Nasal Strips or Slept on Side, or make a custom one. Once you have 5 recorded nights, the app compares tagged nights against untagged ones and ranks what helped. Each factor gets a result after 3 recorded nights with it and 3 without. The test a remedy guide goes step by step.

What differs

SnoreLab’s Snore Score measures snoring intensity. Snore Timeline’s sleep score rates the whole night, with snoring as one factor, and snoring on its own shows up in Snore Time and Signals Per Hour. Sleep stages work differently too. Snore Timeline estimates them from the audio on your phone, with no watch on your wrist, while SnoreLab’s FAQ describes its sleep phases coming from an Apple Watch through Apple Health.

Breathing pauses

Both apps listen to breathing through a microphone. They do not diagnose sleep apnea, and both say so.

SnoreLab has two Premium metrics. BreathFlow is its own measure of how stable your breathing is during sleep, based on acoustic patterns, and a night above 90% reads as Stable. The Breathing Disturbance Index estimates breathing disturbances per hour, with anything above 12 events per hour marked Elevated. According to SnoreLab, BreathFlow was trained on close to 400 nights of sleep lab data and checked against Apple Watch data from thousands of home nights. Its site says both BreathFlow and the BDI are not medical devices and are not intended to diagnose, treat or prevent obstructive sleep apnea.

Snore Timeline uses a fixed rule you can read: it waits for at least 1 minute of audible breathing, then looks for 10 or more seconds of silence ended by a recovery sound such as a loud snore, gasp or breath. Each match goes on the timeline for playback. It hasn’t been clinically validated, and it’s not a medical device. Breathing disruptions explains the rule and its limits.

NIH’s MedlinePlus notes that snoring can be a sign of sleep apnea, and it advises seeing a provider if you wake up gasping or feel tired during the day. Whatever either app shows you, bring it to that appointment. My guide to apps that flag breathing pauses covers what audio can and can’t catch.

Watch, Android, export

Apple Watch

An Apple Watch app comes bundled with Snore Timeline on iPhone. From your wrist you can stop a recording, get a Snore Nudge tap when you snore, and see heart rate, HRV, respiratory rate, blood oxygen and wrist temperature next to your snoring. Recordings start on the iPhone, though. The wrist taps also work on Garmin, Fitbit, Huawei and other watches that show iPhone notifications. Sleep and biometric data from Apple Watch, Oura, Whoop, Garmin and Ultrahuman comes in through Apple Health, feeds the sleep score and recovery score, and adds the wearable’s stages to the hypnogram. None of it is required for sleep stages, which Snore Timeline estimates from the recording. Details are in Apple Watch & biometrics.

On an iPhone paired with an Apple Watch, SnoreLab’s FAQ says you can sync it with Apple Health to show sleep phases in the session chart. There’s no Watch app. The App Store listing names iPhone, iPad and Apple Vision under compatibility.

Android

Both apps run on Android. On Android, Snore Timeline brings the timeline, episodes, breathing flags, sleep stages and exports, and reads your watch or ring through Health Connect, but its Watch app is iOS only. SnoreLab bills itself as a snoring management app for iOS and Android.

Export

Snore Timeline exports a ZIP of CSV files (nightly summary, sleep stages, detected events, watch biometrics) plus episode clips or the full-night recording, and saves it to the Files app. Every column is listed in Export & sharing.

In SnoreLab, export is a Premium feature. You can email a session report with the audio and chart attached, or export all sessions as a spreadsheet of numbers with no audio. On Android, the FAQ says, you can move audio to an SD card.

Which one to pick

Pick SnoreLab if

• You’d like your snoring compared with other people’s. The Snore Score is benchmarked against the more than 170 million nights SnoreLab says it has monitored, while Snore Timeline compares each night with your own.
• You put weight on a long track record of user reviews, and SnoreLab has 58,000 ratings at 4.7 on the App Store.

Pick Snore Timeline if

• You want no subscription, no in-app purchases and an App Store label that reads Data Not Collected.
• You want to replay any moment of the night, and export CSV files and the full-night audio, at no cost. On SnoreLab, full-night recording and export are both Premium.
• You want sleep stages without wearing a watch. Snore Timeline estimates them from the recording and draws them under your snoring on the same chart, while SnoreLab’s sleep phases come from an Apple Watch through Apple Health.
• You want the app to nudge you when you snore, with a sound or a silent vibration from the phone, a tap on your wrist, or any mix of them. SnoreLab has no snore alarm [9].
• You want to wake up in light sleep. Snore Timeline’s Smart Wake Up Alarm picks the moment within a window you set. SnoreLab has no smart alarm. Its sleep phases come from an Apple Watch [2], and its alarm clock rings at the time you set [3].
• You wear an Apple Watch and want an app on it, with live heart rate and HRV, wrist taps when you snore and for the alarm, and a stop button. SnoreLab has no Watch app.
• You fall asleep with AirPods in and want them to record. SnoreLab’s FAQ says it isn’t compatible with headphones and to disconnect Bluetooth audio devices [2].
• You fall asleep to music, a podcast or a meditation app. Snore Timeline keeps recording while it plays. SnoreLab’s FAQ says music can interfere with its audio processing and suggests starting the session after your audio stops [2], and several App Store reviewers say SnoreLab cut off their sleep stories or podcasts [5].
• You use VoiceOver. Snore Timeline reads every screen, and you can move through the night on the timeline by swiping. SnoreLab’s App Store listing names no accessibility features [5], and two reviewers who use VoiceOver called it inaccessible. Accessibility in Snore Timeline covers how it works.
• You want sleep talking picked out on the timeline. SnoreLab’s FAQ sorts sounds into snoring levels and a gray noise category.

Or run both on the same night. The FAQ below has the setup, and SnoreLab alternatives lists more options.

Frequently asked questions