One of the biggest trends to emerge from the world of fitness gadgets is the smart ring. There are dozens of reasons why folks might prefer wearing a ring to track their health over a smartwatch, such as its low-key design and longer battery life, and I’ve wanted to find out why for myself. So when Oura reached out and asked if I wanted to review the new Oura Ring Generation 3, I happily said yes.
After all that time, I’ve gotten to know the Oura Ring and its many tricks. I’ve also done my best to understand why everyone — from celebrities to fitness influencers to everyday people — swears by it and calls it their favorite fitness tracker. I’ll be honest, though: Compared to my Apple Watch and Whoop band, the Oura Ring doesn’t do much for me. But I can totally see the appeal, despite its many downsides.
Should you spend $300-plus on an Oura Ring to keep tabs on your health? Let’s find out.
If you like the idea of a fitness tracker that goes around your finger rather than your wrist — and can live without the more robust functionality of a smartwatch — the unique Oura Ring is worth checking out.
What we liked about it
The most stylish fitness tracker around
When I wear my Apple Watch, no one pays attention to it because they’ve seen it a thousand times before. But the second I started wearing the Oura Ring, I immediately had folks curious about the device on my pointer finger, and they were surprised when I showed them all the tech built into the inner side of the ring.
It’s an eye-catching gadget with a simplistic design that can blend in with any outfit you’re wearing. For the review, I asked Oura to send over the Horizon version of the ring, which comes with a perfectly cylindrical design, while the standard Heritage version has a flatter edge on the top to store the battery. The Horizon is about $50 more expensive, but I can confidently say that it’s worth it since you’ll get a more normal-looking ring to wear — and you can tell everyone it has a curved battery, which is one of the coolest feats of engineering I’ve ever heard of.
The ring comes in a variety of colors, including black, gold, rose gold, brushed titanium and a cool matte black called Stealth. I opted for the silver to keep things simple, and I love it. The glossy finish looks fantastic, and after more than six months of use, it only shows a few minor scratches (which I’ll get to later).
Oura decided to use titanium for the ring’s construction, and I can tell you that the brand made the right call. It’s practically weightless and feels like there’s nothing on your finger.
It also comes with a 10 ATM water-resistance rating, which means it’s safe up to 100 meters underwater. That makes it perfectly capable of surviving under the faucet when you wash your hands or do the dishes, so you never really have to take it off. Of course, any activities where you fear it’ll get caught on something and tug your finger are worth slipping it off during, but for everyday activities, you’ll be perfectly fine.
Easy to get the right size
Of course, there’s no one-size-fits-all option for the Oura Ring, so before you order your ring, Oura sends you a test kit that comes with a variety of plastic rings in different sizes. The company recommends trying on a size and wearing it for a day to see if it fits snugly on your finger and is easy to remove (the latter part is especially important, as some folks have reported theirs getting stuck on their fingers).
This can hold up the process of ordering your Oura Ring, but trust me, it’s worth taking your time to lock down the right size for you. It took me about a week to decide which size to get, and I’m glad I waited so I could ensure I wasn’t making a mistake.
Impressive tech for tracking your health, with an easy-to-understand app
Like any other fitness tracker, the Oura Ring has all the tech you need to keep tabs on your health. There’s a heart rate tracker, a blood oxygen sensor, a skin temperature sensor and an accelerometer, all somehow crammed into the tiny stubs on the inside of the ring. Oura recommends wearing the ring on your pointer finger for the most accurate results, as well as cleaning the sensors regularly in case any gunk starts to build up.
Follow those rules and you’ll get a lot of valuable data in the beautiful Oura companion app. The biggest draw to the ring is sleep tracking, which is by far my favorite feature. This is the most comfortable sleep tracker I’ve ever worn, and you get a lot of valuable information on how you slept, how long you slept and the stages of sleep that you slipped into. Each chart is easy to understand, and Oura even gives you little explainers to contextualize the data for you, making it easier to track your progress. Over the course of three months, it reads other information about your body to determine whether you’re a night owl or an early bird, which is neat. While the experience is similar to an Apple Watch or other smartwatches, it’s far more insightful.
The Oura Ring can also measure your stress levels throughout the day and alert you when it thinks you might be feeling anxious. The app will then recommend a quick deep-breathing or meditation session with one of the many available exercises. If you’re the kind of person who values meditating throughout the day to ease your stress, you’ll love this feature.
Blood oxygen monitoring is new to the third-generation Oura Ring, and it works just as well as other blood oxygen monitoring features on competing fitness wearables. It can keep tabs on your oxygen saturation (SpO2) throughout the day, and even look out for breathing disturbances while you sleep. It’s important to note that the Oura Ring isn’t a medical device, so any readings you get from the blood oxygen feature should be taken with a grain of salt. That being said, my readings were regularly 97% or 98%, which is considered healthy.
The sensors also power a period tracking feature. Fellow reviewers I trust have shared that it works very well, with the only somewhat major downside being its incompatibility with tracking periods of people who take birth control.
Using your sleep data, your heart rate variability (HRV), your recovery index (how long it takes your heart to relax and stabilize at night) and your stress levels, Oura can calculate how well you’ve recovered from a workout and the state your body is in to tackle new challenges when you wake up. All this data, which is collected periodically every time you put the Oura Ring on, is poured into what the brand calls a Readiness score. It’s a number on a scale from 0 to 100 letting you know how well your body has rested and whether you should take it easy that day or go for the gold. Generally, you want the score to be 85 or above, which would indicate you’ve had a great recovery.
I’ll be honest: This score isn’t always accurate, as you’d expect. Some mornings, it’ll tell me that I shouldn’t do anything excessive that day and to take a nap in the early afternoon. Meanwhile, I feel energized and ready to challenge myself at the gym. Then, other days, it’ll give me scores of 80 to 90 and say I need to push myself to the limit, when in reality I’m feeling sluggish and relying solely on coffee to get through the day.
The score isn’t meant to be taken super seriously. Instead, it’s more of a guide to tell you how well it thinks you recovered from the previous day, and that’s how I’ve used it. It’s good at identifying poor sleep patterns, stressful days and overreaching to remind you when it’s time to take a break or when you should push yourself a bit. It’s especially helpful when my score is low and I feel like I had a terrible night’s sleep — then I know I’m not just being lazy.
As far as accuracy goes, the Oura Ring is just as accurate as any other fitness tracker, give or take a few variations. Compared with my Apple Watch Series 8 and Whoop 4.0 band, the ring didn’t record wildly different results for things like heart rate, stress levels, blood oxygen or sleep. In fact, I almost felt the Oura Ring could be more accurate for sleep tracking than my Apple Watch; the sleep stages it said I entered, from light to REM, made more sense to me than what I’d get from the Apple Watch. It’s also, of course, way more comfortable to wear. It continues to impress me that you can get so much information about your body from just your finger.
Oh, and just to harp on it a little more, the Oura Ring’s companion app is fantastic. Anything you want to find — sleep tracking data, meditations, stress levels, heart rate information, activity tracking — is no more than two or three taps away. Everything is laid out perfectly, making it easy to learn even if you’re a novice when it comes to tracking your health. Oura did a great job making your health data not just easy to find but easy to consume.
Surprisingly long battery life
Without a screen or a battery-draining processor, the Oura Ring could be expected to last a few days on a single charge, but the size of this thing tells a different tale. If I didn’t know anything about the ring, I’d bet it could last a day — maybe two — on a charge before conking out simply because the battery has to be microscopic.
And it is. Depending on the ring size you select, the Oura Ring comes with a 15mAh to 22mAh battery, which is less than two-hundredths of what modern flagship phones come with. Despite that, the ring can easily last five to seven days on a full charge, even with blood oxygen monitoring and nightly sleep tracking. When it’s time to recharge, the ring comes with a dock that juices it back up over the course of about two hours.
Not having to charge the Oura Ring that often is easily one of its biggest perks. It’s one fewer gadget to have to worry about every day, and it means you can even go on weekend trips without having to pack its charger.
What we didn’t like about it
It’s bulkier than you think
It took me a while to get used to wearing the Oura Ring. Not because of the weight or the fact that I never wear rings but because of its bulkiness. This is a much chunkier ring than photos let on, and you feel that the second you slip it on your finger.
I did eventually get used to it, but it can still get in the way. Grab anything with a firm grip and it’ll cause the ring to dig into your finger more than you think. Even trying to slip your hand into the pocket of your skinny jeans to get your phone can snag the ring and tug on your finger uncomfortably. It’s far from the most natural-feeling ring to wear, but you do eventually get used to its unorthodox size.
Workout tracking is very limited, especially for lifting
Part of me was hoping I could rely on the Oura Ring for tracking most of my workout routine, but I was severely let down.
There are a total of five different workouts you can track using the Oura Ring: Outdoor Running, Indoor Running, Outdoor Cycling, Indoor Cycling and Walking. This is because the only sensor the ring has to track fitness progress is the heart rate sensor, and you need more than that if you want to record activities like Pilates or free weights.
Speaking of which, the Oura Ring is the least ideal fitness tracker if you regularly lift weights. In fact, Oura tells you before lifting that you should take the ring off to avoid any damage or discomfort. Naturally, because I’m a man of the people, I kept the ring on for a lifting session — and, yes, it was a bad decision. My finger was constantly uncomfortable from gripping the weights, and I did wind up scratching the underside of it a bit. It’s nothing serious, but you can definitely see the scratches in the right lighting.
Oura didn’t design the ring to be the perfect lifting companion, and that’s fine. But for anyone who does more than just cardio, you’ll need alternative fitness trackers to keep tabs on all your gains.
It can’t be your main fitness tracker
That brings me to my other quibble with the Oura Ring: Despite its $300-plus asking price, the ring can’t be your main fitness tracker. If anything, it’s meant to complement other fitness trackers like the Apple Watch or Galaxy Watch, which offer far more complex workout options and fitness tracking software, and pick up some of their slack when it comes to sleep and recovery.
Compared to those devices, I prefer the sleep tracking abilities of the Oura Ring, especially given all the contextualized data you get in the app. I also enjoy checking my Readiness score in the morning, something neither Apple nor Samsung has brought to its watches. And while you can get similar features from the Oura Ring on watches like the Pixel Watch 2 or Fitbit Charge 6, the ring will easily outlast them with its impressive battery life and stylish, minimal design.
But is that worth $300 or more? I’m not quite sure. It gets even harder to justify an Oura Ring when you consider the required $6-per-month subscription that gives you access to all the data I just talked about. Without it, you’ll only get access to three daily Oura scores, battery levels, basic profile information, app settings and the Explore tab. You won’t get to see your fitness history, any health trends taking place or other valuable information that could help inform your health decisions in the future.
If you buy a smartwatch and an Oura Ring, you could wind up spending $700 or more just to track your health, which is a huge commitment for most people. At that point, it’s a choice between one or the other, and if you want the most value for your money, a smartwatch is ultimately the way to go.
Bottom line
The Oura Ring is an interesting device in the world of health tracking, one that you need to commit to using before purchasing. If you like wearing rings over wrist-based fitness trackers, you only care about tracking sleep and recovery, you don’t mind the fact that you can’t track any workouts outside of basic cardio and you have $300, plus another $6 every month, to spare, then sure, buy the Oura Ring. I think you’ll dig it.
But for everyone else, there are many more capable fitness trackers out there. The Apple Watch Series 9, Galaxy Watch 6, Pixel Watch 2, Fitbit Charge 6 and Whoop 4.0 are all excellent trackers with far more robust capabilities. They’re all objects you strap to your wrist, of course, but if you can live with that, you’ll get far more bang for your buck than what the Oura Ring affords you.
I’ll admit, the Oura Ring is a very cool gadget, with one of the most striking fitness tracker designs I’ve ever seen. And if you’re the kind of person who can live with its feature set and heavy focus on sleep, you’ll love it. But for everyone else, it’ll probably be left on a nightstand and forgotten about.
