Verke Editorial · Last verified: 2026-04-19

Verke vs. Sanvello: AI coaching as the product vs. an established CBT library inside a health benefit

Two honest design centres: insurance-distributed self-help vs. direct-to-consumer AI coaching.

Sanvello is a longstanding self-help app — CBT lessons, mood tracking, guided meditations, and a peer community — owned by UnitedHealth's Optum since 2020 and frequently distributed for free through employer benefits and health plans. Verke is an AI coaching app with five specialist coaches — Anna (PDT), Judith (CBT), Marie (EFT/NVC for couples), Amanda (ACT/CFT), and Mikkel (executive) — phone-call-style voice coaching, end-to-end encryption, and an ongoing 3-arm randomized controlled trial at Stockholm University. The two products sit in different design centres: Sanvello is a library you work through with optional human coaching layered on; Verke is a coach you have a conversation with, who remembers what you worked on last week and connects it to what's coming up this week.

Verke is an AI coaching app with five specialist coaches trained on evidence-based therapeutic methods (CBT, PDT, ACT, EFT, CFT, NVC). Chat in text or switch to voice for a phone-call-style session; pick up again days later with memory that survives across weeks and months. Conversations are end-to-end encrypted, signup is anonymous, and the product is available on iOS, Android, and Web in 55 languages.

The five coaches are differentiated on purpose. Anna works in a psychodynamic register — slower, pattern-first, interested in why the same kind of situation keeps returning. Judith is CBT — small experiments, thought records, gradual exposure. Marie supports couples through Emotionally Focused Therapy and Nonviolent Communication; Amanda blends Acceptance and Commitment Therapy with Compassion-Focused Therapy for overwhelm and self-criticism; Mikkel is an executive coach for decision fatigue and leadership load. Users pick who fits the concern, rather than asking one bot to cover everything. The experience is built around dialogue — telling the coach what's actually going on and getting a response shaped to your situation, rather than picking a worksheet from a menu. In the ongoing Stockholm University study, two themes that recurred across participants were the value of being able to talk something through in the moment and of a coach beginning to surface patterns across weeks of conversation.

Sanvello is an established self-help app at sanvello.com built around CBT lessons, daily mood and feeling tracking, guided meditations, and a peer community feed. It has been on the market for years — formerly known as Pacifica — and was acquired by UnitedHealth's Optum in 2020, which is how many of its users get it: bundled for free through an employer benefit or health plan. Self-care is offered direct at $8.99/month (or annually), with paid coaching by humans and, in some plans, therapy add-ons at additional cost. AI exists on Sanvello as light personalization — content recommendations, mood-trend insights — rather than as a coach you converse with.

Sanvello is the right pick if your employer or health plan already covers it — that turns it into a free, well-staffed CBT and mood-tracking program with optional human coaching. It's also the better fit if you specifically want a structured lesson library to work through at your own pace, daily mood check-ins as a core ritual, and a peer community to read and post in. If your concern sits squarely in CBT territory and you value an established product with a conservative clinical posture inside a healthcare-grade compliance model, Sanvello is mature in exactly that lane. Verke uses the “coach” label and AI as the coach itself — see our research page for why we draw that line.

Verke is built for people who want an AI coach to actually talk to, matched to a specific concern, in a method that suits the situation. The shape of the experience is dialogue — you describe what's actually going on and the coach responds to that, rather than you selecting a lesson and working through it. If structured CBT skills are what you're after, Judith (CBT) works the same evidence-based protocols Sanvello's lessons are drawn from, but as a conversation rather than a course. For old relational patterns there's Anna; for couples work, Marie; for acceptance and self-compassion, Amanda; for high-pressure leadership, Mikkel. Picking the right specialist for the concern matters: a CBT register and a psychodynamic register are genuinely different conversations, and so is couples work or executive coaching. Voice coaching in a phone-call format is core to the product, end-to-end encryption is built in rather than marketed, and Verke is the subject of an ongoing Stockholm University trial supervised by Professor Per Carlbring. Read the method explainer for Cognitive Behavioral Therapy — the comparison with Sanvello's lesson approach is a good way to see the difference between coursework and conversation.

Two practical differences are worth calling out. First, pattern recognition over time: Verke uses a three-tier memory system so the coach remembers what you've been working on weeks later and can connect a situation today to a recurring loop you flagged a month ago — Sanvello's mood log is a chart you read, not a coach who notices. Second, voice as a coaching modality: Verke's voice sessions run up to twenty minutes for the moments when typing feels like too much, and a written summary posts back into the chat so you can pick up in text the next day. Both matter if you want a coach you actually return to, rather than a library you sometimes open.