Oura Ring review

We wore the Oura Ring continuously over a two-week period, apart from when the ring was being charged. The ring tracked our sleep, day-to-day activity, and exercise where it allowed. We were able to test accuracy and consistency of the data the ring captures, as well as assess battery life. 

Alongside the Oura Ring, we wore a Withings ScanWatch to provide a baseline for comparison across metrics such as daily activity, calorie-burn estimates, heart-rate tracking, and more.  

Finally, we regularly made use of the Oura app to see how well the data synced, how clearly it is presented, and what other information and insights are provided by the app.  

Because you need a snug fit on your finger, before ordering your ring you’ll need a sizing kit from Oura. This comes with some plastic moulds to make sure you choose the most comfortable size that won’t slide around on your finger and isn’t too tight. Oura recommends you wear it for 24 hours to make sure it’s the right size.  

There’s not much in the box: your chosen ring, plus the charger and a USB-C charging cable, a quick-start guide and a warranty booklet. It’s a lovely, minimalist package, all in white, with the ring sitting prominently on display as you open the box. It’s the sort of premium packaging you’d hope for given the price of the device.

To set up the Oura ring, start by downloading the Oura app [iOS|Android]. Place the ring on the charger and open the app. From here, follow the instructions on the app to pair the ring and link it to your account. It’s an incredibly simple process.

As we highlighted earlier, the Oura ring, and smart rings in general, look and feel hugely different to conventional fitness trackers. At first glance, it looks like a perfectly ordinary piece of jewellery – a simple, elegant titanium band, available in a variety of colours, including silver, black, ‘stealth’ grey, gold, rose gold, and a new brushed titanium. All these colour choices are available on the slightly more expensive “Horizon” style ring, which is a perfectly round shape.  

Silver, black, stealth and gold are your options if you select the slightly cheaper “Heritage” design, which comes with a flattened top edge, and will be the part that’s visible on the top of your finger. 

Despite being full of tech, the ring is incredibly light, weighing between 4-6g, depending on the size of ring you need. While slightly thicker than a normal ring might be, it’s extremely smooth and comfortable to wear. Given you’ll most likely be wearing it constantly, this is exactly what you’d hope for. We were impressed by how quickly we stopped noticing that we were wearing it.  

There is a small notch on the outside of the ring to show you which part should be facing the palm-side of your finger. On the inside of this part of the ring are the sensors for detecting your heart rate, respiratory rate, and body temperature. 

It’s a brilliantly designed piece of technology – it looks great and feels high quality. 

The Oura Ring isn’t stacked with features when compared with some smartwatches and fitness trackers. But it still offers most of what we would consider the crucial metrics: 

You get the sort of sleep tracking you’d expect to find on most fitness trackers, plus a few more insights than other devices tend to offer. As well as offering details such as the duration and depth of sleep you’ve had, you’ll also get a sleep score, which is based on how much time you spent in each stage of sleep (light, deep or REM), your body temperature trends, and your heart rate during the night. 

Additionally, the ring can measure your blood oxygen levels, to help identify any potential breathing disturbances that could be interfering with your sleep. Finally, you also get bedtime guidance, where the ring will give you an optimal window for when you should try to fall asleep, and suggest when you should start winding down to help you fall asleep faster.

One feature that isn’t as common on other devices is early illness detection. By checking your body temperature and heart-rate variability, the Oura Ring can spot potential signs of illness before you start to feel symptoms. This may then enable you to take extra precautions, such as reducing the intensity of your exercise, or even making sure you have a well-stocked medicine cabinet.

Your ring can track daily activity, and counts steps and your heart rate as you exercise. The ring can then provide you with an activity goal, telling you how much activity to aim for each day, to ensure you are active enough, while also allowing you time to recover. 

You can also get a Readiness Score which uses metrics such as your sleep, heart rate and body temperature, to tell you whether your body is ready for some intense exercise, or if instead, it might be time for something a little more restorative.  

Heart rate tracking is used in a variety of features on the Oura Ring, and it plays a major part in activity and recovery tracking. By tracking your heart rate, the ring can, over time, learn how your body responds to exercise, eating, your day-to-day environment, and stress. It can then use these insights to alert you to times when you may be feeling particularly stressed, getting sick, or if your body might need a break from intense exercise, to allow it to recover properly.

A very recent update allows the Oura Ring to track your daytime stress levels, and help you spot stress patterns. To support this, Oura also offers access to guided meditations and breathing exercises via the Oura app. 

Overall, it’s a solid set of health tracking features, with a few notable omissions. Activity tracking is relatively limited, as the ring only supports specific tracking for five different workout types – walking, indoor running and cycling, and outdoor running and cycling. You can still add details of many other workouts to the app, but you’ll need an alternative fitness tracker to accurately track these. It does mean that if you do lots of other activities, the Oura Ring will feel slightly limited in this respect. It’s also not something you’d want to wear if you are lifting weights. 

Unsurprisingly, the Oura Ring doesn’t have built-in GPS, and relies on a connection to your phone to track your speed and distance when out walking or running. Nor will it alert you to incoming calls and texts. Depending on your point of view, this might be a good thing.

The Oura Ring tracks fewer metrics than some more traditional fitness trackers. But we felt that it concentrated on doing a few things well, rather than trying to do too much. Crucially, the longer you wear it, the more accurate the data is likely to be as the ring learns your habits. Data tracking was reliable, and we didn’t notice it struggling to record data at any point. 

Heart rate monitoring felt accurate in general day-to-day wear, consistently where we’d expect it to be as we went about our usual activities. We couldn’t test it using some of our normal exercise routines, but during walks and runs, it was very much in line with the data we’ve received from other devices, such as the Apple Watch Series 9. 

As we mentioned previously, the Oura Ring is quite limited in terms of the activities it can track. When we tested it for walks and runs, we found that it was consistently measuring the distance of our routes ever so slightly shorter than the Withings ScanWatch we were comparing to. Our usual 5.6km (3.5 miles) route was repeatedly measured at 5.5km (3.4 miles). It’s a relatively small difference, but if you go for longer runs, walks or rides, then this could grow. 

There were also differences in total step counts. This is perhaps inevitable, as the ring will potentially detect more hand movements due to being on your finger, rather than on your wrist. The Oura Ring consistently counted more steps than the ScanWatch, with differences ranging from around 10%, to as much as 100% higher step counts.  

In terms of calorie burn estimates, the Oura Ring consistently estimated a higher calorie burn than the ScanWatch overall – on some days being as much as 1000kcal higher than the ScanWatch. But we felt the numbers were likely to be more accurate with the Oura Ring, as the ScanWatch was occasionally giving us figures that would be less than our basal metabolic rate (the energy your body uses to keep you alive).  

While we can’t be certain of its accuracy, it certainly felt as though the Oura Ring was in the right ballpark. And arguably the raw numbers themselves are less important than trends you see over time. The likelihood is that the Oura Ring is accurate with itself – in other words, if it says you took more steps on one day than another, that is likely to reflect increased activity levels, even if the specific number isn’t perfect. 

We’re sceptical of the accuracy of sleep tracking in general, as studies have shown that fitness trackers aren’t especially accurate in this respect. And even though Oura claims that its ring is highly accurate in this regard, we can’t be certain without comparing it with an in-lab test. 

When we compared it to the Withings ScanWatch, we found that there were some big differences between the two devices. The ScanWatch consistently measured much higher amounts of deep sleep, (sometimes three times more), and more sleep in total.  

There was little consistency between the two devices, and it’s hard for us to be certain about the accuracy of either of them. But we can say that the Oura Ring presents its findings very clearly, and we felt that it was better at detecting when we had woken up in the middle of the night than the ScanWatch. It seemed especially good at knowing when we were in bed but not asleep, which many fitness trackers struggle to do. The movement graph displayed on the app lets you see exactly when you were restless during the night. 

Of the two, we suspect that the Oura Ring is the more accurate device, and it certainly offers added details that may help optimise your sleep, such as latency (how long it takes to fall asleep), efficiency (what percentage of time was spent asleep, versus awake in bed) and restfulness, which can influence the quality of your sleep. It’s arguably the most detailed sleep-tracking we’ve seen on any device. 

Given the absence of a screen, you’ll need to use the Oura app to see any of your data. And happily, the app is excellent. 

When you open it, your home screen presents you with an overview of your metrics such as your activity goal (how many calories the ring wants you to burn by being active), your heart rate, your daytime stress levels and your Daily Readiness score. Over time, the Oura Ring will establish baseline metrics, and will more easily detect any variations from this. 

The Oura app is a simple and clean dashboard that presents data clearly. Tapping on specific metrics allows you to explore each of them in more depth, and there are handy explanations available if you want to learn more about something. And there are loads of extra insights you can access by delving into the details. Tapping on the tabs at the bottom of the screen will give you more details around sleep, activity and readiness, highlighting anything that it feels require a bit more attention.  

Because the ring doesn’t track as many metrics as some other devices, the app suffers from the same limitations in terms of breadth of insights. But what it does give you is easy to understand, and the app works very well. We didn’t experience any issues with data synchronising, or losing connection with the Oura Ring itself.  

It’s important to note that all Oura users get a month to try the full app experience. If you choose not to pay for an ongoing membership, you lose access to several metrics and features on the app. You’ll still have access to basic sleep, readiness and activity scores, plus educational content. But everything else requires a membership of $5.99 (£4.90) a month.

Battery life is very respectable, especially when you consider how small the device is. Oura states that you can get up to seven days between charges, and this was in-line with our experience. Typically, the battery dropped by around 10% a day, depending on how active we were. A one-hour walk using connected GPS drained the battery by around 2%. 

Charging is simple using the supplied USB-C compatible mount. A full charge will take somewhere between 20 to 80 minutes, and we found that a quick ten-minute charge was easily enough to keep the ring going for another 24 hours.

The Oura Ring is very different to most fitness trackers in terms of how it works, and it packs a lot in to its very sleek form. But that innovative approach does come at a cost, and the starting RRP of $299 (£245) puts this firmly in smartwatch territory, with all the extra features that those devices provide. In this respect, it does feel quite expensive. 

On the other hand, it’s a far more subtle device than a smartwatch, and in theory, will be a lot more accurate at tracking heart rate and blood oxygen, for example. We love the uncomplicated design, we appreciate the fact that it doesn’t try to keep you constantly connected to notifications, and the singular focus on health and fitness. 

Overall, though, you are getting fewer features than you find on many budget fitness trackers, so it’s difficult to describe this as good value. 

Then you must factor the ongoing cost of a subscription if you want access to all your metrics. We had a similar issue with Fitbit Premium, and generally, we aren’t fans of having to pay more on top of buying the device in the first place. While Oura is trying to add new features over time, if you kept your Oura Ring for, say, five years with a membership, you could be effectively doubling the cost of the ring. And that starts to feel expensive. 

The Oura Ring may not be perfect for everyone, so here are a couple of alternatives that are worth considering: 

In many ways, the Charge 5 is perhaps the closest device to the Oura Ring in terms of what it tracks, plus the added support it offers via the Fitbit app. With an RRP of £129.99 (and often available for under £100) it’s considerably cheaper, while offering a screen on the device, plus notifications for calls and text messages. It also tracks a much wider range of activity types. 

The Fitbit app is excellent and offers plenty of other insights. There’s also the option of paying for Fitbit Premium, which, not unlike the Oura app, then offers access to meditations and mindfulness, plus workouts and recipes. 

If you’re an iPhone user, and you want the full smartwatch experience, then the Apple Watch Series 9 is the best smartwatch you can buy. It’s slightly more expensive than the basic Oura Ring (with an RRP starting from £399) but gives you an awful lot more in terms of features and functionality. 

It’s a beautiful looking device that works superbly well with the iPhone, and it also offers excellent health and fitness related tracking. Built-in GPS means it is more accurate at following your running route as well, for example. While an excellent package, its biggest weakness is battery life, as it will typically need charging daily. 

The Oura Ring is an innovative way to track your health and fitness without feeling compelled to replace your traditional watch. Its sleek and comfortable design meant that we often forgot we were wearing it, and it’s easily one of the most subtle fitness trackers we’ve tested. Allowing for the difficulties in measuring accuracy, the Oura Ring felt like it was consistently in the right ballpark for most of the metrics it was measuring. Finally, the app is excellent, simple to navigate and easy to understand. There’s a lot to like.  

On the downside, the price is high given the limited features available on the Oura Ring, and you’ll have to accept an ongoing monthly cost if you want access to everything. That means that over time this becomes very costly and comparable in expense to premium smartwatches, for fewer features. 

It also tracks a very limited range of exercise types. If you’re a dedicated fitness enthusiast, the Oura Ring may be a little too limited for you to make this the best choice. Instead, a sports-focused device such as running watch or fitness tracker may be more appropriate.  

But, if you’re looking for a passive health tracking device which also offers a few fitness metrics, this is well worth considering. It does the job it sets out to do as well as, or better than, almost anything else on the market. 

• You want a device that doesn’t need to go on your wrist 
• Your priority is basic health, recovery and sleep monitoring, rather than exercise tracking  
• You want a simple and easy-to-use app 

• You’re on a tight budget. The Oura Ring is expensive to buy, before adding a subscription on top. 
• Fitness tracking is your priority 
• You want a screen on the device itself