A.A., SMART Recovery and the Other Options in New York State

Last reviewed: July 2026

People arrive at this question from two directions. Some went to an A.A. meeting, hit the word God in the Third Step, and started looking for something without it. Others never went at all because they assumed what the meeting would be like and would rather not find out.

Either way the question is reasonable and A.A. has no institutional stake in the answer. The Third Tradition sets one requirement for membership, a desire to stop drinking, and there is no mechanism anywhere in the structure for discouraging anyone from trying something else. What follows is a plain description of the main options and how findable each one is in this state, which turns out to matter as much as the philosophy.

Alcoholics Anonymous

Meetings are run by members rather than professionals, and the program is the Twelve Steps, worked in most cases with a sponsor who has worked them already. Meetings tend toward a sequence of people speaking in turn without being interrupted or advised, which some people find restful and others find frustrating. There are no dues, no registration and no attendance record.

The higher power question is the one that stops most newcomers. In practice A.A. leaves the definition to the member, and long-time atheist and agnostic members are common enough that many cities have meetings specifically for them. Whether that flexibility is real or a workaround is a thing people argue about honestly. Worth knowing that the argument exists inside the fellowship too, not only outside it.

What A.A. has that nothing else does is coverage. There is a meeting in almost every town in New York, most days, often several. That is the practical fact underneath everything else on this page.

SMART Recovery

SMART is secular and built on cognitive behavioral methods rather than steps. The framework is four points: building motivation, coping with urges, managing thoughts and feelings, and living a balanced life. Meetings work through tools and worksheets, and members discuss each other's situations directly, which is the sharpest difference from an A.A. meeting.

Facilitators are trained for the role and are not required to be in recovery themselves. There is no sponsor relationship and no lifetime membership concept. Some members treat SMART as something to use for a period and then finish, which is close to the opposite of how A.A. thinks about itself.

SMART also does not insist on lifetime abstinence as the only acceptable goal, though most members choose it. If you are trying to work out whether you want to stop entirely or cut back, this is the more comfortable room to ask that question in.

LifeRing Secular Recovery

LifeRing is secular, has no steps and no formal program to work through. It is organized around the idea of a sober self and an addict self, and the meetings are conversational, focused on what people did during the week rather than on doctrine. Members build what LifeRing calls a personal recovery plan, which is exactly as individual as it sounds.

It is small. In New York that means online meetings for most people outside the city.

Recovery Dharma and Refuge Recovery

Both are Buddhist in approach, using meditation and the Four Noble Truths applied to addiction. Meetings usually open with a sitting period, which by itself makes them feel different from anything else on this list. Recovery Dharma split off from Refuge Recovery in 2019 over governance, and both still operate, so you may find either name locally.

These draw people who want a spiritual framework but not a Western monotheistic one. Availability in New York is decent in the city and thin upstate, with online meetings filling the gap.

Women for Sobriety

Founded in 1975 and built around thirteen affirmations rather than steps, with an emphasis on self-worth and on the specific ways addiction and recovery play out for women. Meetings are for women only. Coverage in New York is limited, and the organization runs online meetings and a forum that carry most of the load.

What the research actually shows

The comparison people want is which one works better, and the honest answer is that the differences between programs look smaller than the difference between attending something and attending nothing.

A study led by Sarah Zemore at the Alcohol Research Group compared members of SMART Recovery, LifeRing and Women for Sobriety against A.A. members and found broadly similar outcomes across the groups. What predicted how people did was involvement, meaning how much they participated rather than which room they participated in.

Separately, the research on A.A. specifically is stronger than its reputation among people who have not looked at it lately. A 2020 Cochrane review found Twelve Step Facilitation performed as well as or better than other established treatments for abstinence outcomes. That review says nothing about the alternatives, since there was not enough evidence on them to review, which is a limitation of the evidence rather than a verdict on the programs.

Availability is the deciding factor more often than philosophy

Most comparisons leave this out. A Harvard Health piece put it in numbers: within a forty-five minute drive of downtown Boston there are roughly 1,800 A.A. meetings a week against about 30 SMART meetings. Nobody has run the same count for New York, but anyone who has looked for a SMART meeting in Herkimer County can confirm the shape of it.

In New York City and to a lesser extent in Albany, Buffalo and Rochester, you have real choice among all of these. Outside those places, choice mostly means A.A. in person or something else online. That is not an argument for either. It is the constraint you are actually choosing under, and pretending otherwise wastes time you may not have.

Online meetings have flattened this considerably since 2020. A SMART meeting on a Tuesday evening is now as reachable from Malone as from Manhattan, provided the internet holds.

You are allowed to use more than one

People treat this as a loyalty question and it is not. Plenty of members go to A.A. meetings and SMART meetings both, taking the steps from one and the urge-management tools from the other. Nobody checks. A.A. has no membership list to be struck off, and the other programs are not organized to police it either.

A reasonable approach is to try six meetings of something before deciding, and to try more than one group of whatever you pick. Groups vary enormously within every one of these programs. A single bad room says more about that room than about the program printed on the schedule.

Finding meetings

For A.A. anywhere in New York, the schedule links on this site cover every area and intergroup in the state. For the others, each organization runs its own meeting finder, and all of them list online options alongside the in-person ones.

If you are not sure where to start and want to talk to a person rather than read a directory, the intergroup phone lines for your county are answered by volunteers who will tell you what is nearby, including things that are not A.A.