Blanked vs Peak

Peak and Blanked are both brain-training apps, but they answer two very different questions. Peak asks: how can we train your brain across as many cognitive areas as possible? Blanked asks: how can we make your visual memory genuinely sharper in two minutes a day?

If you have used Peak before you know the rhythm: a daily workout of three or four mini-games drawn from a rotating pool of forty plus, covering memory, attention, language, problem solving, and emotional control. It is engaging, gamified, and well-designed. It is also a buffet, and you cannot get really good at any one thing on a buffet diet.

Blanked is the opposite. One core mechanic, six modes, 400 plus levels of focused visual-memory training. The whole session is two minutes. There is nothing else to distract you. This page lays out how the two apps actually compare, where each one wins, and which one fits which kind of player.

About Peak

Peak is a well-established brain-training app with 40+ games across memory, attention, language, and problem solving. It has been on the App Store since 2014 and is owned by Popcap / EA. Peak partners with researchers from Cambridge and Yale, who help design some of the games and contribute the cognitive framing for Peak Pro.

Head-to-head

The science behind each app

Peak collaborates with academic researchers, most notably the team behind Cambridge Brain Sciences (Adrian Owen and colleagues). Owen led the well-known 2010 Nature paper "Putting brain training to the test", which found that while participants improved on the games they trained, those gains did not transfer to broader untrained cognitive abilities. Peak has published less in-house research than Lumosity, but it benefits from this academic association.

The wider research consensus, summarised in Simons and colleagues (2016) for Psychological Science in the Public Interest, is consistent: short cognitive games reliably improve performance on the games themselves and on very closely related tasks, but the evidence for "broad transfer" to general intelligence or everyday function is weak. This applies to Peak, to Blanked, and to every app in this category.

Where Blanked is honest: we do not promise general cognitive improvement. We promise that focused visual-memory practice will sharpen visual memory, which is what the focused-training literature supports (Engle and Kane, 2004; Klingberg, 2010). If you train visual recall every day, your visual recall gets sharper. That is the narrow but real benefit.

Peak is genuinely well-designed and the academic partnership is a real plus for credibility. Just calibrate expectations: it will sharpen the specific skills its games train, not your overall brainpower.

The bottom line

Peak is the right choice if you want a daily cognitive workout that touches lots of different skills, you enjoy a slightly longer session, and you are happy with a subscription model. The Cambridge / Yale academic association is a real point in its favor.

Blanked is the right choice if you actually want to get noticeably sharper at one specific skill, you want a two-minute daily habit instead of a fifteen-minute one, and you want the full game free. The narrow focus is the feature, not a limitation.

You can absolutely use both. Peak in the morning for a varied workout, Blanked on the bus when you have two minutes spare. They do not really compete with each other if you treat them as different tools.

Looking for a free Peak alternative specifically? See the free Peak alternative page, which covers the replacement-intent angle rather than the side-by-side.

Want the longer read? Our blog post, Blanked vs Peak: the long-form comparison, goes deeper into the side-by-side detail.

Want to compare for yourself? Visit Peak's site.

Frequently asked questions

Other comparisons