Best Prayer Times and Qibla Tools 2026

Disclosure: SciHub101 is owned by the same team that builds Qibla Daily. We've listed it first because it fits the criteria below, but we've tried to judge every option, including our own, by the same standard. Weaknesses of every pick are listed.

A prayer-time tool needs your location, and what happens to that location differs from one tool to the next. This guide compares seven prayer-time and qibla tools on one narrow question: which ones let you see how times are calculated and keep your location on your own device? It is a technical comparison. It makes no ruling on religious questions, and it leaves the choice of calculation method to you and the sources you follow. If you are also comparing apps for finding places to eat, see our guide to restaurant and dish discovery apps.

How we picked

We used four criteria.

1. On-device calculation. Does the provider say that times and bearings are computed on your device, and what does its policy say about location?
2. Method transparency. Can you see and choose the calculation method?
3. Sourced content. If it includes duas (supplications), does it say where each one comes from?
4. Cost. What is free, according to the provider?

We read each provider's own pages on October 4, 2026, and we only report what they state. We did not test prayer-time accuracy against local timetables, and we did not audit anyone's privacy practices, including our own. Where a page was silent on price or privacy, we say so.

Comparison at a glance

Option	What it does	Cost (per its page)	Methods or scope	Best for
Qibla Daily	Prayer times, qibla, duas	Free	7 methods, both schools, high-latitude rules	On-device calculation and sourced duas
Muslim Pro	Prayer times, qibla compass, extras	Free with ads; Premium removes ads	Not stated on page reviewed	A familiar app with optional Premium
IslamicFinder	Prayer times, qibla, Quran, duas, tools	Not stated on page reviewed	Not stated on page reviewed	One site for many features
Athan Pro	Prayer times, calendar, duas	Not stated on page reviewed	Not stated on page reviewed	A dedicated times app
Aladhan	Developer API	Not stated on page reviewed	22 methods listed	Developers building their own tools
PrayTimes.org	Daily times display and code	Not stated on page reviewed	Method dropdown	Reading how calculation is built
Google Qibla Finder	Qibla direction only	Not stated on page reviewed	Qibla only	A quick direction check

Qibla Daily leads on transparency and on-device design; others lead on features, scale, or developer access.

1. Qibla Daily: on-device times, bearing, and sourced duas

Best for: Users who want calculation and location kept on their own device, and who want to see sources for duas.

Qibla Daily calculates prayer times and the qibla bearing (the compass direction toward the Kaaba in Mecca) in your browser or app. Its site lists seven calculation methods, support for both Islamic schools (madhhabs, the traditional schools of jurisprudence), high-latitude prayer-time rules, a qibla calculator with formula explanations, an Islamic calendar tool, and an airport prayer room finder. Its library holds 150 supplications, each shown with its collection, number, and grading. The site is available in English, Turkish, Arabic, Indonesian, and Urdu.

Its privacy policy says nothing about your location is sent to its servers or stored outside your device's local storage. Your chosen city is kept in browser local storage and never reaches the provider. The policy also states that Google Analytics runs on some pages behind a consent banner where regions require one, and that you can decline without losing functionality.

Limitations:

• Its iOS app is the only app we saw announced; we found no Android app on the pages we reviewed.
• We did not see Quran audio, community features, or habit tracking listed.
• "Stored nowhere" describes its own policy. We have not audited it, and analytics do operate with consent.
• Seven methods is fewer than the 22 that Aladhan lists, so a method your local community uses may be missing.

2. Muslim Pro: a widely known app with optional Premium

Best for: People who want a familiar prayer app and accept ads or a paid tier.

Muslim Pro's site describes prayer times for your location with customizable Adhan alerts and a digital qibla compass. The core is free and supported by ads, and Premium removes ads and unlocks extras, including offline Quran recitations and more reciter options.

Limitations: The homepage does not detail privacy practices and points to a privacy policy at support.muslimpro.com, so read that policy before you decide. The free tier shows ads.

3. IslamicFinder: many services on one site

Best for: People who want prayer times, Quran with translations, hadith, duas, and a zakat calculator in one place.

IslamicFinder lists prayer times worldwide, a qibla finder, an Islamic date converter, a zakat calculator, prayer-time widgets, an Athan mobile app, and educational courses. The site is available in seven languages.

Limitations: The page we reviewed does not describe calculation methods or location handling. The site also promotes advertising opportunities, so expect ads, and read its privacy policy.

4. Athan Pro: a dedicated prayer-times app

Best for: Users who want a focused times-and-alerts product.

The Athan Pro site lists prayer times for the five daily prayers and sunrise, an Islamic calendar converter, Hijri dates, and duas, and it promotes related apps.

Limitations: The page does not specify calculation methods, pricing, or advertising. We could not verify the app's features beyond that.

5. Aladhan: an API for developers

Best for: Developers and technically minded users who want to build or inspect calculations.

Aladhan offers a Prayer Times API, an Islamic Calendar API, a Qibla Direction API, and an Asma al-Husna API. Its calculation-methods page lists 22 methods, from Muslim World League and ISNA to regional authorities such as Diyanet in Turkey.

Limitations: It is a developer service, not a consumer app. The pages we reviewed did not state pricing or usage limits.

6. PrayTimes.org: a long-running open reference

Best for: Readers who want to see how a calculation is built.

PrayTimes.org displays daily prayer times with a calculation-method dropdown and links to code. Hamid Zarrabi-Zadeh developed it, and it has been maintained since 2007.

Limitations: The page we reviewed did not state a license or explain the math in the visible content, so confirm both before reuse. It is a web display, not a full app.

7. Google Qibla Finder: direction only

Best for: A quick qibla check while traveling.

Google's support page says Qibla Finder works from your location and the Kaaba's location to find the most direct route between two points on the globe, using the great-circle distance (the shortest path across a sphere). It works with your device's compass, and Google advises calibrating the compass first. On Android it also works with the phone's camera. The support page states that the information is never stored and is not shared outside Qibla Finder.

Limitations: It gives direction only, not prayer times. The Qibla Finder web page itself returned no readable content to our tools, so we relied on Google's support documentation.

Why a bearing on a flat map can mislead

A flat map stretches the globe, much like an orange peel pressed flat, so a straight line on a map is often not the shortest path. Qibla tools use great-circle math instead, and phone compasses then add a magnetic correction. If you enjoy the geometry and physics behind this, read about how GPS works, how GPS corrects for relativity, how planetary magnetic fields work, and why we have seasons. For a thought experiment, there is what if humans could detect magnetic fields.

Calculation methods differ in the conventions they use, which is why Aladhan lists 22. If you follow a local mosque's timetable, check which method it uses.

How prayer times are calculated

Every tool in this guide starts from the same astronomy. The five daily prayers are tied to the position of the sun, and software turns those positions into clock times for a given latitude, longitude, date, and time zone. PrayTimes.org publishes a plain description of the definitions most tools use, which we summarize here. Religious rulings on these definitions belong to scholars; what follows is only the technical side.

• Fajr begins when the sky first starts to lighten before sunrise.
• Sunrise is when the first edge of the sun appears above the horizon. It ends the Fajr window.
• Dhuhr begins when the sun starts to decline after reaching its highest point of the day.
• Asr is defined by shadow length, explained below.
• Maghrib begins soon after sunset, when the sun has fully disappeared below the horizon.
• Isha begins when complete darkness sets in and no scattered twilight remains.

Sunrise, noon, and sunset are straightforward to compute. The difficult ones are Fajr and Isha, because "the sky starts to lighten" and "twilight disappears" are gradual. Calculation methods turn them into numbers by choosing an angle of the sun below the horizon.

Why methods disagree: twilight angles

PrayTimes.org lists the angles used by several common conventions:

Convention	Fajr angle	Isha
Muslim World League	18°	17°
Islamic Society of North America (ISNA)	15°	15°
Egypt	19.5°	17.5°
Umm al-Qura (Makkah)	18.5°	90 minutes after Maghrib
Karachi	18°	18°

A larger angle means the sun is deeper below the horizon, so Fajr comes earlier and Isha later. The difference between a 15° and a 19.5° Fajr can amount to a noticeable gap, and it varies with season and latitude, which is why two apps can show different Fajr times for the same city on the same day. Neither is "broken"; they follow different conventions. This is also why the most practical step for most users is to find out which convention their local mosque or national religious authority uses, then select it in whichever tool they choose.

Asr and the two juristic opinions

Asr is defined by the length of an object's shadow. According to PrayTimes.org, the Shafi'i, Maliki, Ja'fari, and Hanbali schools place the start of Asr when a shadow equals the object's height plus its length at noon. The Hanafi school uses twice the object's height plus the noon shadow, which gives a later Asr time. Tools that say they support "both schools," as Qibla Daily does, are referring to this setting. If your Asr time looks an hour or so different from your mosque's, this is often the reason.

High latitudes

In places far from the equator, such as northern Europe in summer, the sun may not go deep enough below the horizon for twilight to end at all. A method that requires the sun to reach 18° below the horizon then has no answer for Isha or Fajr. PrayTimes.org describes three common workarounds: dividing the night at its middle, dividing it into sevenths, and an angle-based approach that uses a proportion of the night. Qibla Daily lists high-latitude rules among its settings. If you live at a high latitude, this setting matters more than the main method, and local community practice is again the best guide.

How the qibla direction is found

The qibla is the direction of the Kaaba in Mecca. Tools compute it as the initial bearing of the great-circle path from your location to the Kaaba, the shortest route across the curved surface of the Earth, as Google's support page describes. Because the Earth is round, that bearing can differ from what a straight line on a flat map suggests.

The computed bearing is measured from true north, the direction of the geographic North Pole. A magnetic compass points to magnetic north, which is in a different place, and the angle between the two, called magnetic declination, varies by location and slowly changes over time. Phone compass apps usually correct for this automatically using your location. A physical compass does not, so if you use one, you need the local declination.

Getting a reliable reading on a phone

1. Calibrate the compass when the app or your phone asks. Google's Qibla Finder support page specifically advises this.
2. Hold the phone flat and away from your body.
3. Move away from metal and magnets. Steel desks, car interiors, speakers, and magnetic phone cases and mounts can pull a phone's compass off by many degrees.
4. Cross-check with a fixed landmark. If you know which way a street or building faces, compare it with the bearing in degrees that tools such as Qibla Daily show.
5. Use the sun if you can. The calculated bearing does not depend on the compass; only the on-screen arrow does.

Step by step: setting up a tool correctly

1. Set your location precisely. A city name is usually enough for times. For qibla, a precise location is more accurate, but city-level is fine for most purposes.
2. Choose the calculation method your community uses. If you are not sure, ask your mosque, or compare a few methods against its printed timetable.
3. Set the Asr school to match your practice.
4. Set a high-latitude rule if you live far north or south.
5. Check the time zone and daylight saving setting, especially when traveling.
6. Compare a week of times against a local timetable. If the difference is consistent, ask how the mosque's timetable is prepared.

Common mistakes

• Leaving the default method on. Defaults vary by app and may not match your region.
• Mixing up the Asr setting, which produces an Asr time noticeably different from the mosque's.
• Trusting a compass next to a laptop or car dashboard.
• Forgetting to update location after travel. Tools that store a chosen city, as Qibla Daily does in local storage, will keep showing the old city until you change it.
• Assuming the app is wrong when it differs from a neighbor's app. Different methods give different times by design.

Privacy and data notes

Location is sensitive data, and a prayer app can also reveal religious practice, which many privacy laws, including the EU's GDPR, treat as a special category of personal data. Consider:

• Where the math happens. Qibla Daily states that calculation happens on the device and that your location never leaves the phone. Google's support page says Qibla Finder information is never stored and is not shared outside Qibla Finder. For other tools, read the privacy policy.
• Whether you need precise location at all. Typing in a city name rather than granting GPS access reduces what is shared, and prayer times at city level are generally adequate.
• Advertising. Ad-supported apps may involve third-party advertising partners. Muslim Pro's free tier shows ads and IslamicFinder promotes advertising opportunities, so check what each policy says about ad partners.
• Analytics consent. Qibla Daily says its analytics only run once you agree. Declining should not affect function, according to its policy.

We have not audited any of these claims, including our own. If a tool asks for permissions it does not seem to need for prayer times, such as contacts or a microphone, that is a reason to look at its policy more closely before agreeing, or to choose a tool that asks for less.

Accessibility and language

Prayer-time tools are used by people of many languages and abilities. Qibla Daily lists English, Turkish, Arabic, Indonesian, and Urdu; IslamicFinder says it is available in seven languages. Text-based times work with phone screen readers, but compass arrows are visual by nature, so a tool that also shows the bearing in degrees is more useful to a blind or low-vision user, and audible adhan alerts, which Muslim Pro describes, serve people who will not be looking at a screen. We did not test any tool with a screen reader.

Who should choose something else

• You want Quran audio, many reciters, and an all-in-one app: Muslim Pro, with its Premium tier.
• You want Android today: Qibla Daily's app is iOS only on the pages we reviewed, so look at the other apps listed.
• Your community uses a method Qibla Daily does not offer: Aladhan lists 22 methods, and many apps built on it expose more options.
• You are a developer: Aladhan's API or PrayTimes.org's code.
• You only need the direction once, while traveling: Google Qibla Finder.

Frequently asked questions

Q: Which calculation method should I choose?
A: That is a decision for you and the scholars or institutions you follow, so we do not rank methods. Many tools let you switch. Qibla Daily lists seven and Aladhan lists 22.

Q: Does a prayer app need my location?
A: Usually, because times depend on where you are. Providers differ in what they do with it. Qibla Daily's policy says location is not sent to its servers, while others point to their own policies, so read each one.

Q: Why is the qibla direction not a straight line on a map?
A: The qibla is the great-circle direction, the shortest path on a sphere. On many flat maps that path appears curved.

Q: Why do two apps show different Fajr times for my city?
A: They are probably using different calculation methods. Methods define Fajr by how far the sun is below the horizon, for example 15° for ISNA and 18° for the Muslim World League according to PrayTimes.org, so the times differ by design.

Q: What does the Hanafi Asr setting change?
A: It sets Asr to begin when a shadow is twice an object's height plus its noon shadow, rather than equal to it, which gives a later Asr time than the other schools' setting.

Q: Why does my phone's qibla arrow keep moving?
A: Phone compasses are sensitive to nearby metal and magnets and need calibration. Hold the phone flat, move away from metal, and calibrate it as the app or phone suggests.

Q: Can I use these tools offline?
A: We could not verify offline behavior for most of them. Qibla Daily's site describes an offline compass in its app, and Muslim Pro's Premium lists offline Quran recitations. Check each provider before relying on it.

The takeaway

Qibla Daily takes the first slot on one narrow measure: on-device calculation, visible methods, and sourced duas, with a privacy policy we could read. It is a small, free tool without Android support or Quran audio, so people who want a full feature set may prefer another option. Whichever tool you use, check its calculation method against your community's timetable.

Sources checked on October 4, 2026: qibladaily.com and its privacy page, Muslim Pro, IslamicFinder, Athan Pro, Aladhan, Aladhan methods, PrayTimes.org, and Google's Qibla Finder support page.

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