Looking for a Co–Star alternative?

What Co–Star does well

Co–Star delivers astrology without being asked for it. By its own description the horoscopes are personalised from your birth chart and delivered in real time, so the product comes to you rather than waiting to be opened. Nothing has to be looked up and no question has to be formed, which suits a different habit from sitting down with a chart.

It is also a native iOS app, which brings store search, a familiar install and the phone’s own notification system. OrbHeaven is currently web-based rather than a native iOS app.

How OrbHeaven approaches astrology

The whole product rests on one distinction: the difference between what was calculated and what was written.

Where your planets were at the moment you were born is arithmetic. It has a right answer, it is reproducible, and anybody with the same ephemeris should get the same numbers. OrbHeaven computes that locally with an open astronomical engine, and then prints on the chart which engine, which version, which house system, which node convention and what exact universal time it used. Birth times are converted with the historical time zone rules for that place and date, a detail that changes the Ascendant when it is got wrong. Clock times are converted using the international time zone database. Historical timezone records are strongest from 1970 onward; earlier records can be less certain, particularly where local clocks differed from a region’s recorded standard.

What a placement means is not arithmetic. It is interpretation, and a language model writes it. That part is labelled as interpretation and framed as something to think with rather than a forecast of what will happen. The model is never asked where a planet was; it is handed the numbers and asked to read them.

One consequence is worth stating: if you do not know your birth time, OrbHeaven will not invent an Ascendant. Without a birth time, the chart is worked out across the whole birth date: each planet shows the degrees it covered that day, or both signs if it changed sign. The angles and the houses are withheld, and the page says so. Half a chart honestly labelled is more use than a whole one quietly guessed.

The differences that actually matter

A feed, or a record

Co–Star’s own framing is real-time horoscopes: something that keeps arriving. OrbHeaven is built the other way round. It flags a stretch ahead with real dates, and when that stretch has passed it comes back and asks how it went, keeps your answer, and uses it in what it says next. Over months that becomes a record of your own that the product reads back to you. If you have ever wanted to know whether the thing an app told you in March turned out to mean anything, that is the gap this is built for.

Whether you can check the working

We could not find Co–Star’s calculation method published on its site, so we cannot tell you what it uses and we are not going to guess. What we can say is what OrbHeaven does: the engine, its version, the house system, the node convention and the exact universal time appear on every chart, so a working astrologer can see immediately whether our conventions match theirs, and disagree with the output on specific grounds rather than general suspicion.

Where it lives

Co–Star is an iOS app. OrbHeaven is a web app you can install to a home screen but cannot download from a store. Which of those is better depends entirely on you: one gives native notifications and store discovery, the other opens from a link on any device with nothing to install and no store account.

What it costs to look

OrbHeaven’s full chart is free, needs no account and stores nothing, so you can see the whole thing before deciding anything. Its paid tier is $12 a month or $99 a year, and the free tier is not a trial — it keeps working. Co–Star does not publish a price on its website.

Neither of these is the better product in the abstract. They are answers to different questions, and plenty of people reasonably use something like Co–Star for the daily habit and something like OrbHeaven when a real decision turns up.

What are the alternatives to Co–Star?

Someone leaving Co–Star usually wants something particular instead. These products offer different things, so they are listed by what you might want rather than ranked. We make the last one, so weigh that entry accordingly.

For the wider field, organised the same way, there is a round-up of astrology apps and platforms, and every comparison we have written is collected in one place.

Questions people ask