Context: Woebot Health retired its consumer chatbot on June 30, 2025 after roughly eight years of operation. The shutdown reflects the well-documented regulatory and business-model pressure on standalone mental-health chatbots, not failure of the core CBT approach. Clinical studies from the Woebot team remain in the research record. Users who relied on Woebot's structured CBT conversations now need a new home.
The pattern, stated plainly: Youper — the app we recommended at #3 on this list — is now shutting down too, on September 30, 2026. That's two AI-therapy apps with real published research closing within fourteen months of each other. Both were good products; neither died of being bad. If you migrated from Woebot to Youper on this page's advice, we're sorry, and the honest lesson is to weigh a vendor's ability to stay in business alongside its feature list, and to export your data periodically wherever you land. We've marked Youper's entry rather than deleting it, so the recommendation we made stays visible.
We evaluated each alternative across five dimensions that matched what Woebot did well: conversation style (does it feel like a chat, not a form?), CBT fidelity (does it actually deliver evidence-based cognitive techniques?), availability (free tier, subscription, insurance/B2B), personality and tone (does it challenge or only validate?), and platform coverage (iOS, Android, web).
Scoring: each app tested for at least 14 days against five seeded scenarios Woebot handled well — mood check-ins, cognitive distortion identification, behavioral activation planning, sleep hygiene coaching, and relationship friction. Per-app sections call out where each one replicates, improves on, or under-delivers vs. what Woebot used to do.
Honest disclosure: this list is published by ILTY. We've positioned ourselves at #1 for the 'conversational replacement with a tough-love option' scenario. We have NOT positioned ourselves at #1 for every category — Wysa wins on free-tier CBT, MindShift CBT on free structured skills, 7 Cups on free peer support, and we say so. Youper held the mood-analytics slot on this list until it announced its own shutdown; we've left the entry in place and marked it rather than quietly deleting a recommendation we made.
Disclosure
ILTY is the publisher of this roundup. ILTY is one of the apps reviewed and is positioned at the top for conversational Woebot replacement with a tough-love personality option. Pricing, features, and platform availability are accurate as of April 19, 2026, drawn from each app's public marketing pages and our detailed per-app reviews at /compare/. Woebot Health shutdown date (June 30, 2025) verified via their FAQ page. Youper's shutdown (September 30, 2026, data deleted October 1) verified 2026-08-13 against the App Store, Google Play, and youper.ai's own shutdown notice. We update this roundup quarterly. Update, August 13, 2026: every app on this list was re-verified against its live App Store listing, Google Play listing, and vendor site. This pass checked COMMERCIAL FACTS only — whether the app still exists, pricing, platforms, and store ratings. It did NOT re-run the hands-on testing protocol described above; rankings and hands-on impressions still date from the original testing round. We are saying that plainly rather than letting a fresh date imply a fresh test. What the pass found across the site: Sanvello's consumer app is discontinued (delisted from both stores; sanvello.com no longer resolves), Youper is shutting down September 30, 2026 (already delisted, data purged October 1), and GG OCD was renamed to OCD.app. Per-vendor records now live in src/data/appFacts.ts with the source checked and the date checked.