I tried two of the most popular meditation apps, Headspace and Calm, for a week. One app was the clear winner for starting my workday with focus and mindfulness.

It included three steps: a short breathing exercise, the morning video of the day, and a meditation.

This is Headspace's daily bite-sized video series.

I've listened to several of Headspace's daily meditations since this one, and overall I found them kind of disappointing.

Headspace meditations offered much less to keep your attention, so I found my mind frequently wandering off. For example, Headspace's daily meditations don't tend to have things like anecdotes, quotes, or action steps, unlike what Calm offers. (More on that later.)

Because there is less variety across the daily meditations, they started to feel very repetitive and monotonous. I started to feel that if I'd done one, I'd done them all.

I didn't like one teacher over another, but having the option could be useful for those who find they do respond better to one particular teacher's style.

I expected the duration of the meditation would be exactly three, five, 10, 15, or 20 minutes, depending on what I chose. In the time I've used Headspace so far, though, I've found that the time a meditation actually takes almost never matches the duration you choose. For example, if you select three minutes, the meditation can really end up being nearly five minutes, which is the next duration option.

This discrepancy never affected me, but it might affect a Headspace user on a really tight schedule.

Even my cursory scroll through the "Beginning meditation" section gave me some valuable information about the different techniques common in many meditations, for example. Throughout the week, I increasingly found that one bright spot of using Headspace is that it's very beginner-friendly.

I liked that you can filter your search based on emotions or areas of your life that you'd like to work on; I also appreciated the fact that Headspace has courses for such a wide variety of topics.

Headspace's visuals are clean, colorful, and fairly minimalist.

Besides courses, the Focus at Work section also includes single meditations, music designed to promote focus, and animations showing techniques at work for Headspace's cute characters. There's also a small subsection here that's designed to help students.

I found that very little of the session was actually specific to productivity and, if you took out those few minutes, you could have easily believed the session was about any number of other topics.

To Headspace's credit, I did feel slightly more focused after the session, and I only tried out one of the 10, so I certainly couldn't have expected a miracle from that alone. Also, Headspace often says one of the ways you can improve your meditation is to simply do it over and over again, so repetition is part of the process.

Regardless, I found the first lesson nearly indistinguishable from many of the other Headspace courses I went on to try later.

However, a quick lookover of the tab shows a variety of options, including wind-down exercises, stories, sleep music tracks, and even soundscapes of things like forests and flowing water.

The dark mode was also a nice touch to help prepare your eyes for rest.

At this point, the meditations I'd tried thus far were pretty stationary; you were meant to be sitting still while you followed them. On this day, however, I turned to the "Move" tab on the app to see if something a little more active would help me start my workday better.

Unsurprisingly, this class gave me a bigger burst of energy for the day than did any of the stationary meditations from my previous two days on Headspace.

There was also peaceful ambient music in the background that really added to the atmosphere of the video, which somehow succeeded in being both calming and energizing.

I decided to try some of the music intended to promote focus.

I should note here that these offerings, as well as some others on different tabs, have since changed in the app. Many of the listings are still there, just under different categories.

I ended up breezing through the playlist and working the full 85 minutes uninterrupted. I was shocked to see that all that time had passed once the music stopped, and I definitely didn't feel as though I'd been working for as long as I had. Since then, I've come back to this playlist and a few others from the list several times, always to great effect.

While the session was, again, quite repetitive of other meditations I'd previously done on Headspace, it was moderately effective for me in keeping distractions at bay.

Overall, my experience with Headspace was decent. My biggest gripe with the app is that too many of its meditations were too similar. This sameness gave me little to look forward to when I opened the app each morning, and it definitely didn't help with keeping my mind on task.

Ironically, my favorite parts of the meditation app were the ones that weren't meditation at all; I really enjoyed the active movement sessions and the focus music playlists.

Despite its flaws, Headspace is a good place to start for those interested in meditation.

When you first open Calm, it asks what goals you'd like to focus on while using the app. I ticked off all of the goals to get a fuller picture of everything the app has to offer.

I liked that the app asked this question, so it can make recommendations with your experience level in mind.

The first thing that struck me was the sound in the background. By default, the app plays flowing water sounds while you're in it, though you can turn off the sounds in the settings. I found the sounds to be a really nice, calming addition that helped me start my experience with Calm on the right foot.

Visually, I also really liked Calm's deep blue hue compared to Headspace's stark white color.

It seemed to me that there were longer silences in some of the Calm meditations than the Headspace ones, and I found that the water sounds helped me stay focused on the meditation during these silences rather than having my mind wander.

I also liked that this meditation included an anecdote and a quote to illustrate a few points. Simple additions like these made Calm's meditations seem tailored to their themes, and they would have gone a long way in creating more variety among meditations on Headspace.

This installment focused on a message that Headspace and Calm often stress: When you're faced with distractions, it can sometimes be helpful to simply notice they're there, rather than engage or fixate on them.

The first lesson was called Productivity, just like the series I started on Day 2 of my Headspace week.

As with Headspace, a lot of the lesson was spent in silence, focusing on deep breathing and paying attention to what you're feeling one moment at a time. But in the few minutes that the instructor talked about productivity at work, I think Calm won out. Calm's insights seemed to be more specific and more relatable, sending you away with more practicable takeaways for your workday.

This is one arena where Headspace seems to have Calm beat — Headspace had a far greater variety of sessions focused on getting active.

Again, Headspace seemed to edge out Calm in this department. In the Headspace yoga session I did, the instructor did the stretches alongside you. In this Calm session, there was no video component; the instructor verbally walked you through the stretches.

It included things like master classes, breathing exercises, music playlists, and soundscapes, as well as bite-sized conversations through a series called The Spark.

I felt just as focused listening to Calm's playlists as I did listening to Headspace's music. However, Calm has a bigger selection of music and a longer roster of big-name artists. Besides focus music, Calm's Sleep Remix series, for example, includes deconstructed, slowed versions of songs from musicians like Ariana Grande, Post Malone, Shawn Mendes, and Kacey Musgraves.

Calm had more variety across all of its offerings, as well as more relatable and actionable insights in its meditations.

Even for the sessions I didn't test on either app, Calm seemed to take the cake. For sleep, for example, Calm has stories read by names like Regé-Jean Page, Matthew McConaughey, Laura Dern, and Harry Styles.

Headspace was not without its perks, though. Its flexibility in allowing you to pick your teacher and your meditation duration, for example, was a plus. But when it really comes down to it, I'd go with Calm every time.