Pray.com and Devout both sit in the same category and share almost nothing else. If you are looking to move between them, it is usually because you want a great deal less going on.
What Pray.com is
Pray.com is audio and community. Bible stories, prayers, sleep content, and a feed — a large catalogue you move through, with other people visible in it.
What it does better
The catalogue is genuinely large, and the production on the audio is good. If you like listening — in the car, cooking, falling asleep — that is a real and legitimate way to keep a practice, and a page cannot follow you into any of those. If the sense of praying alongside other people matters to you, Devout has nothing to offer there at all.
Where Devout is different
There is no feed. There is nothing to scroll, nothing recommended to you, nothing that measures how long you stayed or tries to extend it. One page each morning, and then you leave — that is the whole design, and being short is a feature we are paid for rather than a limitation we are working around.
It is also read rather than heard, and shaped to your tradition. You choose from eleven when you sign up, and it changes the reflection, the calendar, and the writers you are given. A private journal sits on the same page, with a question drawn from that day's passage, and it exports whenever you ask.
Nobody else can see any of it. There is no community layer, because for this particular thing we think solitude is the point rather than a gap.
Which suits you
If you want stories and audio to fill a commute, or you want other people around while you pray, Pray.com is built for that and we are not. If you want ten quiet minutes, one page, and no one watching, that is Devout.
Side by side
| Devout | Pray.com | |
|---|---|---|
| What a session is | A page you read | Audio you listen to |
| A feed | None | Central |
| Other people | None. Your journal is yours | Community is part of it |
| Tradition | Eleven, chosen by you | Broadly Christian |
| Sleep and stories | None | A large part of it |
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.