Abide and Devout get grouped together because both are quiet, but they are built for different hours of the day and different problems.
What Abide is
Abide is Christian meditation and sleep. Guided audio, mostly voice, built to settle anxiety and to help you fall asleep — bedtime stories for adults, in the best sense, with Scripture woven through them.
What it does better
If what you need is to stop your mind at eleven at night, Abide is built for exactly that and Devout is no use to you at all. Guided meditation is a real discipline with a real Christian history, its sleep content works for a great many people, and audio is the right medium when your eyes are already closed. We do not have any of it and are not planning to.
Where Devout is different
Devout is a morning practice, and it is read. One page: a passage of Scripture, a reflection shaped to your tradition, a voice from the Christian past, and a question to answer in a private journal.
It also gives you the whole Bible rather than passages inside a meditation — twelve English translations with their histories, five of them free to read end to end, and reading plans laid out in full if you would rather walk through Scripture in order.
The tradition-shaping is the piece that has no equivalent. You say where you stand when you sign up, from eleven traditions, and the daily reflection, the calendar, and the writers all follow from it.
Which suits you
Honestly, these two are not really rivals, and some people use both. If your difficulty is sleep or anxiety, Abide is the better answer. If what you want is a settled morning practice with Scripture at the centre and somewhere to write, that is Devout.
Side by side
| Devout | Abide | |
|---|---|---|
| What it is for | A morning practice | Calm, and getting to sleep |
| How it reaches you | On the page | Through headphones |
| Tradition | Eleven, chosen by you | Broadly Christian |
| Scripture | The whole Bible, twelve translations | Passages within the meditations |
| Writing of your own | A private journal | Not the focus |
Seeing for yourself
The whole of Devout is open for seven days, with no card taken and nothing to cancel if you decide against it. That is long enough to know — a daily practice announces itself quickly, and so does a bad fit.