We prove that under the Gaussian measure, half-spaces are uniquely the most noise stable sets. We also prove a quantitative version of uniqueness, showing that a set which is almost optimally noise stable must be close to a half-space. This extends a theorem of Borell, who proved the same result but without uniqueness, and it also answers a question of Ledoux, who asked whether it was possible to prove Borell’s theorem using a direct semigroup argument. Our quantitative uniqueness result has various applications in diverse fields.