Guide
Barometric pressure apps for headaches, compared honestly
Short answer
There is no single best app; it depends on what you want to track. Migraine Buddy is the most complete migraine diary, with detailed attack records, doctor exports, a 7-day weather forecast and a large community. Migraine Tracker: Pressure Pal puts your entries on a pressure chart, has a 7-day pressure forecast and an Apple Watch app. WeatherX Forecast is a free 5-day pressure forecast with alerts, made to go with WeatherX earplugs. Barometric Pressure Tracker, ours, is narrower: current pressure and a 24-hour chart (48 with Pro), a quick log for eight symptom types that stays on your device, and a pattern card that compares your entries with how often big changes happen anyway. It has a shorter forecast than the others and no Apple Watch app.
At a glance
Based on each app's US App Store listing, checked on 8 October 2026. A dash means the listing does not describe the feature, not necessarily that the app lacks it; features change, so check the current listing before you decide.
| Migraine Buddy | Pressure Pal | WeatherX Forecast | Barometric Pressure Tracker | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Main focus | Migraine diary and community | Migraine log on a pressure chart | Pressure forecast for earplug users | Pressure plus a quick symptom log |
| Pressure forecast | 7-day weather forecast with pressure and temperature | 24-hour chart and 7-day forecast | 5-day forecast and 5-day history | 24-hour hourly chart; 48 hours with Pro |
| What you log | Attacks with symptoms, medications, relief methods and suspected factors; sleep recording | Migraines, headaches and symptoms; medication doses | — | 8 symptom types, 1–10 severity, a medication yes/no switch and a note |
| Links entries to pressure | — | Entries placed on the pressure curve; analysis after three months | — | Pressure stored with each entry; pattern card compares with your local baseline (Pro) |
| Reports for a doctor | Diary export and structured report | — | — | PDF and CSV export (Pro) |
| Alerts | — | — | Push notifications with a custom threshold | Big-change alerts and a morning briefing (Pro) |
| Apple Watch | — | Yes | — | No |
| Price model | Free, with a premium subscription | Free, with subscriptions | Free | Free, with Pro weekly, yearly or lifetime |
Migraine Buddy
Made by Voluntis, Migraine Buddy is a full migraine diary. You can customise what you record for each attack, including symptoms, medications, relief methods and what you suspect contributed, and its listing describes exports for doctors in two formats: a diary export and a structured report for neurologists. It records sleep automatically, can connect to the Health app, shows a 7-day weather forecast including pressure, and has an active community where users share experiences. A premium plan adds personalised insights and coaching programmes.
Good fit if migraine is your main concern and you want the richest possible record of each attack, or you value talking to other people with migraine. Pressure is one input among many rather than the centre of the app.
Migraine Tracker: Pressure Pal
Pressure Pal's listing describes logging a migraine, headache or pain spike in two taps and placing it on the pressure curve at the hour it happened. It shows the current pressure, a 24-hour chart and a 7-day forecast, logs medication doses, and after about three months of entries reports how many migraines followed a pressure drop and how large a drop was involved. It also has an Apple Watch app with complications and Home Screen widgets.
Good fit if you want a longer pressure forecast than our app offers, or you want pressure on your wrist. It is aimed at the same question as our app: whether your symptoms line up with pressure changes.
WeatherX Forecast
WeatherX Forecast comes from Cirrus Healthcare Products, the maker of WeatherX earplugs, and is meant to be used with them: the listing suggests putting the earplugs in before a pressure shift, as flagged by a notification, or when symptoms start. The app itself is free and offers a 5-day pressure forecast, a 5-day pressure history, notifications for approaching weather systems, an adjustable threshold and a changeable location.
Good fit if you already use WeatherX earplugs, or you want a simple free pressure forecast with alerts and do not need a symptom log.
Barometric Pressure Tracker
Our app shows sea-level pressure from Apple Weather with a rising, falling or steady trend, an hourly chart for the next 24 hours (48 with Pro) and, with Pro, a Pressure Windows timeline of stable, rising, falling and rapid-change stretches. The log covers eight symptom types (headache, migraine, sinus pressure, ear pressure, joint pain, fatigue, dizziness or vertigo, and other) with a severity from 1 to 10, a medication switch, a note and back-dating. Past Pressure shows the hourly line around any entry back to October 2022.
The pattern card (Pro) is the part we would point to. It counts how many of your entries came within 24 hours of a change of 6 hPa or more within 6 hours, and sets that against how often such changes happen anyway where you log, because a big share of entries near pressure changes means little if those changes are common. Your log stays in a local database on your device; only preferences sync through iCloud.
What it does not do: the forecast is shorter than any of the other three; there is no Apple Watch app; the medication field is a yes/no switch, not names and doses; there is no community, sleep tracking or coaching. Alerts, the pattern card, full history and exports need Pro.
How to choose, whichever app you pick
- Decide what you want to learn. A detailed record for your neurologist, an early warning for big pressure changes, or an answer to whether the weather affects you at all? Different apps lead with different answers.
- Check where your data lives. A headache diary is health information. Read the privacy policy: is it stored on your phone, in an account, or on the developer's servers?
- Check you can get it out. If you will show it to a doctor, make sure the app exports something readable.
- Look at how “pressure change” is defined. Over how many hours, and how many hPa? Without a stated definition, it is hard to know what an alert or a pattern means.
- Be wary of certainty. A German study of 100 people with migraine found that, even in those who were weather-sensitive, weather data could not tell in advance when the next attack would come. Treat any app that promises more than timing information with caution.
You can also combine apps: a detailed migraine diary for your neurologist and a pressure app for planning. If you do, log in one place only, so you never wonder which record is complete. Our diary guide covers what a useful record contains.