I've tested dozens of fitness trackers and I think the Oura Ring 4 is the top smart ring for most people

Business Insider

22-07-2025

Over the last five months, I tested four fitness rings head-to-head. Pretty much all are comfortable to wear and reliable at tracking your biometrics accurately (though some are better than others).
But the Oura Ring 4 reigns supreme as the best smart ring for most people, thanks to its long battery life, highly accurate tracking, and intuitive and easy-to-understand app for reporting your health data.
Why I've been wearing it for 4 months
I am not a data-head and don't love the bulk of a wearable, but I do like to know I'm being as healthy and fit as possible. I aim to hit 10,000+ steps a day, like to know the cumulative load from my daily workouts, and prefer to have a read on how recovered or taxed my body is from stress, travel, fluctuating sleep quality, and activity.
The Oura Ring 4 nails this: It tracks both basic and advanced health data more accurately than other smart rings, thanks to upgraded sensors and better signal stability.
Most impressively, the Oura app delivers this data as clear, easy-to-digest insights — like "readiness" or body recovery, sleep quality, and daily activity goals — right up front, with deeper data just a tap away. The app's recent revamp makes it far more intuitive than other smart ring interfaces I tested.
The Oura Ring 4 felt bulky at first, but within a week I barely noticed it. It stacks decently with other rings, stays secure during sweaty workouts, and doesn't interfere with grip — except during tight-grip lifts like deadlifts, where it can chafe.
Oura Ring 3 vs. Oura Ring 4
If you're thinking of saving a few bucks and just getting a previous generation of the Oura Ring — don't. The Oura Ring 4 is a significant improvement over the Oura Ring 3, and each upgrade is worth every penny. Compared to the Oura Ring 3, the Oura Ring 4:
Has a sleeker design
Is more comfortable to wear
Is now made entirely out of titanium on both the interior and exterior
Has a new dynamic "smart sensing" technology that uses more sensors and pathways (18 vs. the previous 8) to drop the signal less, giving you more continuous tracking
Has longer battery life at eight days vs. seven
These features make Oura Ring 4, in my opinion, the best smart ring, and they're well worth the $50 price difference between a Gen 3 ring and a Gen 4 ring.
The health metrics that matter
In the smart ring category, each brand offers different data and insights. I tested smart rings alongside some of the best fitness trackers and was impressed to find the sleep quality, step count, and readiness insights to be highly accurate on the Oura 4. What's more, I found that Oura's app kept the metrics streamlined to the info I wanted most on a daily basis, most notably:
Sleep accuracy and insights: Oura gives you an at-a-glance sleep score, with your total sleep time front and center. Click in and it offers more detailed insights, like sleep efficiency, total restfulness, and how long it took to fall asleep.
Sleeping heart rate: The ring measures when your heart rate hits its lowest during the night, which can give insight into how recovered (or not) your body is. I found it very interesting to see how alcohol and staying up unusually late affected this.
Skin temperature: Pretty standard on wearables these days. Changes in your skin temperature can signal you're about to get sick. There were a handful of days I woke up with an alert in elevated skin temperature, heeded the Oura advisor's advice to rest rather than push, and potentially avoided getting more sick over the next few days.
Readiness: Arguably the most helpful metric for active people, this recovery score pulls from 20+ signals — skin temp, heart rate, sleep, and more — to tell you whether to push or rest. Sure, you could just listen to your body, but I found it genuinely helpful to get a concrete reflection that rest was smarter. More than once, I woke at 6:30 a.m. for my morning workout, only to see my skin temp was up or sleep was off — and Oura told me to take it easy instead.
Women's health: One of Oura's standout features for women is how it combines its advanced skin temperature tracking with its AI module to learn your menstrual cycle and offer detailed insights into your phases, variability, and when to expect your period. It functions pretty much like a basal body temp tracker (though not "officially") and can even pinpoint your ovulation period and fertile window. If you're pregnant, it tracks your progress, highlights key physiological changes, and shares helpful educational content along the way.
Biohacking insights: More recently, Oura has started tracking longer-term measurements to predict things like your cardiovascular age and your cardio capacity (VO2 max). This is meant to give you insight into longevity, as well as your overall "resilience," which is essentially how efficiently your body is bouncing back from stress time and time again.
Auto activity detection: The Oura Ring is very good at detecting activity and movement. What's more, it has you verify what that mild spike in heart rate was at 11 a.m. (housework? walking?), and then learns from this to better identify your activities over time. This may sound basic, but other smart rings I've tested do not pick up on Zone 2 walks (I'd have to remember my start and finish time and then manually enter it), let alone the small calorie burners that count toward daily movement like housework. That said, if you live at altitude like I do, the Oura Ring does think every activity is skiing until you train it otherwise.
Other features I love in the Oura Ring 4
The Oura Ring 4 has a few other features that make it a very worthy investment:
The app interface is super streamlined. New in 2025, Oura revamped its app so it only has three tabs: Today, Vitals, and My Health. The data is well-organized and presented in a very clear and visually distinct format that I found to be easy to interpret at a glance. It was by far the most streamlined and intuitive app to read my health data among the four smart rings I tested. And considering this is a device that has no display itself, the app is half the product you're buying.
I only have to charge it once a week. One of the biggest advantages of Oura over its competitors is the ring's eight-day battery life. I felt like every other model I tested needed to be charged every few days, but eight days of power really does feel like less of an inconvenience.
It automatically adapts my goals when my biometrics indicate I need more rest and recovery. When my readiness score is 44/100, it adjusts my daily movement goal to be 4,500 steps instead of 12,000. And you have the ability to put the Oura app into "rest mode" if you're sick, wherein it turns off all targets and goals and just tracks your biometrics. I found these adjustments went a long way in helping me feel like I'm taking care of myself in a holistic way, resting when needed, rather than prompting me to get out for a walk when I was sick in bed with COVID like other smart rings did.
Its AI insights are actually helpful. Oura leans heavily on predictive technology to give you insight on when your biomarkers are indicating that you might get sick or your fertility window. Earlier this year, the brand also launched Oura Advisor, an AI-powered guidance tool where you can ask it questions on your menstrual cycle, heart health, and other personalized data results (e.g., "I'm traveling for work and noticed my readiness score has gone down a lot. What can I do to get it back up?").
Where it falls short
Insights could be more actionable. While the Oura Ring does a great job at tracking your data, it doesn't provide a ton of actionable fixes behind it. Days where my readiness was low, it would tell me, "To help recharge your energy levels, take it easy today!" without much specificity on what I could do to bring my numbers back up. Of course, I could then take another step and ask the Oura AI Advisor this question, but it'd be nice to have this already integrated.
It requires a monthly subscription. In addition to the $350 to $500 ring itself (the price depends on which finish you choose), you do have to pay a $6 per month subscription fee to use the majority of the features of your Oura Ring. (Technically, you can use the app for free and get readings on basic metrics — readiness, sleep, and activity — but most people will want the upgrade.)
It may not offer enough information for athletes. While the Oura Ring does cover most insights that a health and basic fitness tracker will give you — resting heart rate, daily calorie burn, sleep quality, recovery — it won't track your running mileage or pace, overall exertion during a strength session, or other, deeper training insights. Serious runners or athletes will still want a more robust fitness tracker.
Final call: Who this ring is (and isn't) for
In my opinion, the Oura Ring is the best smart ring for most people, whether you're looking to improve your basic health, stay more active throughout the day, or have one device that gives you insight into every aspect of your health, from heart to menstrual.
It is highly accurate at tracking steps, activity, sleep quality, and overall physiological rest and recovery.
When considering smart rings vs. a health or fitness watch, the advantage of a smart ring is that it offers deeper health insights in a much more discreet design, with no sounds or vibration notification prompts on your hand.
If you're more of a biohacker health type, you'll probably prefer the Ultrahuman Ring AIR. And if you want one wearable that offers more comprehensive fitness tracking, you'll be happier with a fitness watch like one of our picks in our best Garmin guide.
But compared to other smart rings I've tested, the Oura Ring 4 is the best value with its long battery life, copious number of sensors for continuous tracking, and streamlined presentation of your health data.