Portal User Reviews

Customer Experience

Positive experience85.4% of reviews
Neutral5.8% of reviews
Negative experience8.8% of reviews

~ Based on 582 written reviews from the US App Store.

What users say

Is Portal Safe?

Portal - Escape Into Nature appears safe based on user ratings. AppsHunter Safety Score for Portal is 96/100.

This assessment is based on 10,130 user ratings, with an App Store average of 4.8/5.

Safety Analysis

94.9% of ratings point to a safe experience
2.8% of ratings suggest some concerns
2.3% of ratings point to a risky experience

~ Based on 10,130 App Store ratings for Portal.

Is Portal Legit?

Portal - Escape Into Nature appears to be a legitimate app. AppsHunter Legitimacy Score for Portal is 83/100.

Based on 83 of 100 points across 7 verification signals from App Store and developer data.

Top reviews

En anglais seulement

Très ennuyeux que ce soit en anglais seulement, je n’achète pas

Love it!!

I use Portal for everything they give. Focus, sleep, and escape. The sounds suit me, but I want a ocean sound. The “pay once use forever” should be more affordable. But other than that love it!

An app that wants to go at your pace

This is one of those apps that inserts itself into your life in such a way that you want to support. I love the mission here and I love your approach to accessibility. If you allow yourself to really immerse, the backgrounds fade into a gentle white noise and helps you focus. As soon as I am able, I will purchase lifetime access. Great job all around and thank you!
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So pumped!!

I cannot tell you how thrilled I was to get the news that not only were they lowering the subscription cost, but that they have also come out with a lifetime purchase option. Hallelujah!!!!
Have always loved this app and the high quality sound and visuals they have provided. I immediately signed up once I saw the change. Thank you all for listening to your customers. Here’s to many more years of better focus, better sleep, and more relaxation.
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Obsessed!!

I have been looking for this for so long! I used to use calm, and then YouTube “ambience” but all they are is AI slop with cartoonish elements… this is amazing with the actual real video clip with the natural audio. Cannot rave about this enough!

Good

Hi this app is good and I recommend it.But if the graphics are better, it will be more complete, and please increase the features of the free version.

Fantastic for the workday and home life

My family and I love this app!

It’s a great focus aid during work, and I especially love the moving desktop option on Mac (it’s a productivity feature I used via other apps more than 10y ago and never thought I’d find it again!)

Portal has also been a great rest / sleep aid for both the kids and adults in our family, too. A great all around app.
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$99 For Lifetime is a great value

I’ll be honest, the original $300 price was a little steep for me. But at $99 this is one of the best soundscape apps you can get. And lifetime access means one less subscription. This app and Odysound have the highest quality soundscapes I’ve tried on any app.

Great meditation app

One of the best app for relaxing and enjoying an afternoon meditation. Use it at nights to fall asleep. The Interactive interface is sooo beautiful. Thank you Portal you guys are the best

Awesome App No real complaints

This app is perfect! Especially when I can play music of my choice. This app made go buy Apple AirPods in 2023 so I could listen to dynamic sounds

Amazing!!

This app is absolutely amazing! There are NO ads, and every single “portal” takes you into a whole new world. What I love is that you can go off the app and the music still plays! You can also mix it with the other apps audio. Definitely download this if you are a nature lover like me!!! ❤️

I purchased the lifetime version after using it for just 30 minutes, and I hope you can add Chinese

I really love this app. I bought the lifetime license just 30 minutes after trying it, and all the friends I recommended it to also purchased the lifetime version. Could you please add Chinese language support? It would be much friendlier for Chinese users.

Both the UI and white noise experience are excellent. I’ve noticed this is the only app your team has released, which suggests you’re a small team, yet I didn’t hesitate to grab the lifetime license. I hope this app will keep receiving long-term updates and development. Judging by its reviews and ratings, it’s well-liked by many users. I suggest your team focus on polishing and expanding this single app. I’m looking forward to better features and experiences in future updates. Please do add Chinese localization as well as multi-language support down the line.
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Use it every day

This app is essential. I use it every night to help me drift off to sleep and every day to help me focus. The developers are exceptionally polite, quick to respond and very helpful too!

Thank you to the Team

To be honest, when I was looking for my first ambient app (because I love nature and greenery but I live in a desert environment in Saudi and wanted an escape), right when I saw they reduced their pricing significantly to make it more accessible for us customers and the high quality in recording, I immediately bought the lifetime subscription and wow the variety and quality in the sound is amazing

And the fact that they actually fly out and record their sounds instead of stock looped sounds


I truly appreciate the team for their hard work, thank you for your service ❤️
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amazing to work and relax

Perfect to help me stay focused and work. every now and then i will look at the visuals and they help me be less tense. it's such a perfect app. Love that i can have this on my tv also. helps me feel connected to nature and relaxed.

Actually Good Free Tier!!

I’ve tried a number of other live wallpaper apps for Mac before and none of their free tiers were as polished and enjoyable to use as this. It made me consider buying the lifetime access. Although I do wish there were more free wallpapers, that’s only because the ones that are available are so good :)
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A Beautiful Experience with Huge Potential

I’m enjoying Portal a lot. It’s relaxing, immersive, and very useful while working, reading, or unwinding.

As someone who enjoys photography and uses a Nikon Z7 II, I also appreciate how difficult it would be to capture scenes like this myself. You would need the right location, timing, composition, high-resolution video, natural sound, stabilization, and careful editing. Portal brings that whole atmosphere instantly to the Mac.

That said, I think the next big step would be adding more depth and true 3D environments. After some time, it becomes clear that some scenes are repeated video loops. A more dynamic environment, with subtle 3D movement and non-repeating details, would make it feel much more alive.

I’d also love to see an iPad version. Many heavy Mac users — developers, designers, and professionals — also use iPads or MacBooks. Imagine Portal extending one continuous scene across multiple Apple screens, creating a panoramic workspace environment. That would be a fantastic use of the Apple ecosystem.

Overall, this is already an excellent app, and I’m excited to see where it goes next. Five stars.
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Simply a Great App!

I have the Portal app on all the time, rotating scenes automatically every hour. The scenery is beautiful and the sounds immersive and calming. I even have one desktop space set up with no apps in it so I can go there, hide my menu bar and dock with a single shortcut, and simply enjoy the sights and sounds – it becomes a window to nature.

I suppose one can put together screensavers with sounds or YouTube videos to produce a similar effect for one location. But I don't think it would be nearly as easy to manage all of the locations and switch from one to the other with the ease Portal provides. It has a beautiful interface with lots of options. And then there's the settings panel with even more customization available.

Given the subscription fee (or the one-time lifetime membership cost), I think this is one of the best additions to my Mac, and I recommend it to all of my friends. And if you have any questions, Portal’s support team is quick to respond and provides very personal and thorough assistance.

An enthusiastic thumbs-up for the app and the company!
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Glad The Devs Woke Up

I love this app and have been using it for years. I don’t think I’ve ever found any other app with comparable audio quality and ofc the visuals are second to none. Youtube does offer mixes of similar quality, but those are prepackaged and often repeated ad nauseum until you’re sick of the same ‘crashing waves asmr’ sound. These mixes help me sleep, help me work and help me feel better broadly. I’ve spent MANY a busy work shift with these playing in my ear and without it I’m sure I’d only be half as useful to my team lol.

With all that said, only in the last month have I actually paid for a subscription. Previously the full app was like, 300 dollars for a lifetime account and the annual was 100-200 dollars or some other ludicrous number. Even the monthly was 50-90 dollars or something, and for all the love I had from this app I could never in good faith pay for that. I was tempted on multiple occasions to pay the whatever the hell and be done, but it actually felt sacrilegious to give 3 digits to a asmr machine when Youtube was (terrible) free. It seems the Dev team has come to see reason and changed their price with the new subscription price being 100 for a lifetime account and 30 for an annual subscription. If they’d caught me even a week earlier with my new paycheck sitting in my account, I’d have gotten the lifetime account. They didn’t so I only have the annual account for now (a safe choice, if I decide to suddenly stop using it almost 8 years in lol) but I love getting to listen to more then 4 mixes. It’s honestly been a bit overwhelming hahaha.

Anyway, I love the app! Only thing keeping me from giving a full 5 stars is just that the selection is a bit repetitive (each perfect, but repetitive) and I’d like a bit of variety in the sounds offered (underwater mix, crowd mix, farm mix, horses on a road etc etc). I hope the team can travel and take in more locations and countries, I’d personally request one that’s on the outskirts of a city or something, hearing the life of the people in whatever little European village but not actually drenched in noise. But, digressing. If you read all this, get the app.
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Good

I like the app so much, I bought lifetime. But…. It’s been at least a year since any update. I’d like to see more environments done. I know this takes time, but an additional few places would be great!!