In one sentence: Brain.fm is a paid music app with timers and published research on its modulated music; Nova Focus is a free timer with generated background sound and playlists from Nova Sounds, a Stockholm focus-music label, and no claims about your brain.
We make Nova Focus, so read this as a vendor comparison. Brain.fm facts come from its own website and App Store listing, checked on 2026-09-30.
Side by side
| Category | Nova Focus | Brain.fm |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | A focus timer with background sound and music | A focus music app with timers |
| Price | Free, no ads | $14.99/month or $99.99/year (pricing) |
| Paid tier | Nova Focus Plus planned; not available, no price announced | The only tier |
| Trial | Not needed | 14 days (App Store) or 30 days (web landing page) |
| Discounts | Not applicable | 20% for students and team pricing, on request (Brain.fm FAQ) |
| Sign-up | None | Required before listening |
| Music | Nova Sounds playlists on Spotify: ambient, classical, lo-fi, jazz, electronic, noise (full tracks need a Spotify login) | Brain.fm’s own catalogue by activity |
| Sound control | Rain, café and brown noise under the timer, each with its own volume; pink and white noise on the Music page | “Neural effect” levels, genre choices |
| Timer | Pomodoro 25/5, 50/10, 52/17, 90-minute blocks, Flowtime, Animedoro, 1 minute to 3 hours, any length up to 24 hours | Count-up, countdown, interval |
| Classroom / projector | Classroom mode and fullscreen on single timers | Team accounts “for companies, classrooms, and more” |
| Sleep, relax, meditate | No | Yes |
| Platforms | Any modern browser | Web, iOS, Android, desktop app |
| Offline | No | App downloads |
| Research | None claimed | Peer-reviewed paper (Woods et al. 2024), Brain.fm-affiliated authors disclosed |
Price
Brain.fm is a subscription: $14.99 a month, or $99.99 a year, which works out to about $8.33 a month. Its web button after the free trial reads “Then $99.99 billed annually”, so read the plan before you start. Nova Focus costs nothing and asks for nothing. Nova Focus Plus is planned to play the Nova Sounds catalogue inside the timer, with mixes that end when your session does; it has no price yet, and the free timer and sounds stay free.
Music and sound
Brain.fm chooses the music for you based on the activity and plays an endless stream, with an intensity control on its modulation. You never pick a track.
Nova Focus leaves the choice to you. For deep work we suggest brown noise or the Nova Ambient playlist; for reading, Classical; for lighter tasks, Lo-Fi or Electronic. We flag what not to use: the Covers playlist has vocals, and a meta-analysis of reading studies found intelligible speech and lyrics the most distracting kind of background sound (Vasilev et al. 2018).
Brain.fm vs Spotify, briefly: a Spotify focus playlist is closer to what Nova offers than to Brain.fm. Nova’s playlists live on Spotify; the difference is that Nova Focus puts them next to a timer and tells you which ones suit which task.
Timers
Both have them. Brain.fm’s timers sit inside a music player: count up, count down, or an interval you set. Nova Focus is built the other way round. Each method has its own page explaining where it comes from and what the evidence does and does not show, and single countdowns cover anything from a one-minute speaking drill to a three-hour mock exam, with big digits for a classroom.
Evidence
Brain.fm publishes research. Its 2024 paper in Communications Biology tested music with and without added amplitude modulation and discloses that authors work or worked for Brain.fm. We have no comparable research and make no claims about attention or brain activity. What we can point to is the wider literature on ordinary background music: a 2022 review of 154 experiments by Cheah and colleagues found mostly no effect on performance, with harm more likely on memory and language tasks and with lyrics. That is why Nova Focus recommends lyric-free music at low volume, or silence for your hardest work.
Who each is for
Brain.fm is the better choice if you want someone else to choose the music, you use sleep or meditation modes, you listen mostly on your phone or offline, or its research is the reason you want focus music at all.
Nova Focus is the better choice if you think in timed sessions, want to try different methods, teach or study in a shared room, or want calm sound without a subscription.
Some people use both: the Nova Focus timer on screen and Brain.fm in their headphones. That works fine.
Try Nova Focus
Open the 50/10 timer, choose brown noise or the Nova Ambient playlist, and press Space. Looking for more free options? See free Brain.fm alternatives.