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Which is the better health tracker, the Oura ring or the Apple Watch? For this showdown, I’ve chosen what I feel is the best representative of each brand, and I'll compare them against each other, with notes on pricing, comfort, and the app experience.
Our competitors are the Series 10 Apple Watch (the one our associate tech editor, Michelle Ehrhardt, has deemed the best Apple Watch for most people) and the fourth-generation Oura ring, the newest and best of that line.
Both devices promise to help you track your health, with features for measuring your heart rate and other metrics while you sleep, and for tracking your activity during the day. But you get a very different experience with each of these items—different enough that some people end up wearing both, to experience the best of what each has to offer.
Which device you choose will really be up to what you want to use it for, and what kind of app experience you’re looking for. So I won’t conclude with a “winner,” but rather, with a bottom line on who should go for the Oura ring and who will be better off with an Apple Watch.
Comfort and appearance
The Apple Watch is a big ol’ screen on your wrist, which people sometimes have strong opinions about. Maybe you want the convenience of booping buttons on your wrist, and viewing data without having to pull out your phone. On the other hand, maybe you don’t love strapping a screen to your wrist.
The Apple Watch looks nice enough, though. You can even swap out the straps, with a comfortable velcro one for the gym, and a dressy one for more formal occasions. There is also a huge library of customizable watch faces to match. I find the Apple Watch comfortable, with its smooth back and slim profile. I wear the 42 mm size (my wrists are 6” around) and there is also a 46 mm size.
The Oura ring isn’t as customizable; you buy the color that you buy, and that’s that. But like a wedding ring, it’s not hard to get used to a plain piece of metal you wear around your finger.
The ring is thicker than most jewelry rings—see my review for a photo of the Oura ring next to similarly-sized regular rings. You’ll need to know your size before you order the ring, so you’ll want to either order the $10 sizing kit (you’ll get a $10 credit to use toward your ring) or visit a store like Best Buy to try on the in-store sizers. Make sure to get the gen 4 sizing kit if you plan to buy a gen 4 ring, since the sizing changed between the gen 3 and gen 4.
You'll likely find yourself taking off your Oura ring when you work with your hands. I take mine off to lift weights or to do yard work like shoveling. The Apple Watch can stay on for more activities, but I’ll take it off if I want to use wrist wraps at the gym, or if I’m doing kettlebell presses or snatches, where the weight rests against your wrist. (If you really want to wear your Apple Watch all the time, you can get an ankle strap for it.)
Pricing and subscriptions
The base models of the Apple Watch and Oura ring are similar prices, but the Oura ring requires a subscription to use the ring’s main features. Apple doesn’t offer a subscription for their watch, but there are plenty of extra features and third-party apps that you may decide are worth paying for.
First, let’s talk base prices. With the Oura ring (gen 4), all sizes are the same price, and your only other hardware choice is which color. I tend to go for black or silver (you’ll see a black ring in the photos here), and those are the cheapest colors, at $349. Matte black or brushed titanium are more expensive at $399, with gold and rose gold in the highest pricing tier at $499. If you want to save money by going for the older model, gen 3 rings are still on sale for $199. Make sure to get the correct sizing kit, since sizing changed between versions.
For the Apple Watch, the cheapest model is the aluminum case, 42 millimeter, GPS-only (no cellular). All colors are the same price, which is $399. Upgrade to the 46 millimeter case, and you’ll spend $429. If you want cellular connectivity, those prices go up to $499 for the 42-millimeter version, and $529 for the 46 mm.
Titanium costs more, but is more durable (and also comes with sapphire crystal instead of glass). It’s $699 for 42 mm, $749 for 46 mm. This version comes with cellular connectivity; there is no GPS-only version.
The Oura ring requires a $5.99/month subscription. Without it, you don’t get any interesting data on your Oura app, just your three scores (for readiness, sleep, and activity). If you’re going to the trouble of buying an Oura ring, you should really budget for the subscription as well, to the tune of about $70/year.
The Apple Watch doesn’t require a subscription for any of its basic features, but that comes with plenty of caveats. First, you need an iPhone to set it up and to sync the fitness data—sorry, Android users, but this just isn’t the watch for you. And then, as we’ll see below, the Apple Watch may collect your data, but it doesn’t do much with it.
If you want detailed metrics on your sleep, recovery, or activity, you’ll probably end up tracking them with a third-party app. Maybe Bevel Health for $5.99/month, perhaps, or Athlytic for $3.99/month. The onboard running app isn’t the greatest, so maybe you’ll pay $7.99 (one-time fee) for WorkOutDoors. You don’t need any of these, but you may want them. Things start to add up.
Battery life and charging
There’s a quick way to sum this up: The Apple Watch’s battery lasts about a day. The Oura ring’s battery lasts most of a week. Both use proprietary chargers.
Specifically, Apple says the Series 10 watch can last about 36 hours, and my testing found that to be pretty accurate. I find that there’s usually at least 30% battery left after 24 hours of wear, including an hour-long GPS-tracked workout and a full night’s sleep. I either charge it during my shower or while sitting at my desk.
The Oura ring’s battery lasts “up to 8 days,” according to the company, with the realistic lifespan being a little less. If you have blood oxygen sensing turned on, that subtracts a day or two. And you wouldn’t want the battery to run out while you sleep, so you’ll get a notification to charge it as soon as the battery goes below about 25%. Realistically, you’ll need to charge the ring about every five days. I usually leave it charging on my nightstand when I go to the gym. As long as I remember to do that at least twice a week, I never get a low battery notification.
The Apple Watch uses its own round, magnetic charger. You can easily buy spares of the original charger (including cheap third-party versions), including portable versions and little nightstand setups that will charge your phone, watch, and AirPods all at the same time.
The Oura ring also has its own charger, but you’re pretty much locked into using the one that came with your ring. Extras are $59, and you have to make sure you get the correct size for your ring—a size 8 ring requires a size 8 charger. There aren’t any portable or third-party chargers for the gen 4 ring yet, although there are a few on the market for the older gen 3.
Activity tracking
The Oura ring can track steps and casual activity—if you go out for a walk, for example, the ring will auto-detect it. But that’s about the end of its usefulness. The Oura ring is not suited for serious athletes or even for casual joggers who want to know how fast they’re going. I'll explain what each device can do, but it's worth noting that both devices' apps can pull in workout data from other apps (including from each other). So if you track a run on the Apple Watch, you'll see a running workout "imported from Health" in your Oura timeline.
I’ve written about the Oura ring’s activity-tracking shortcomings in my review of the ring. It can’t track strength training at all because you wouldn’t want to wear the ring during most strength training activities. (It’s uncomfortable, and some people argue that it’s a safety risk, although I’m not aware of any actual injuries that have occurred as a result of strength training with an Oura ring.)
The Oura ring is also of very limited usefulness when it comes to tracking other activities. If you want to know “did I exercise, for about how long, and was it low, medium, or high intensity?” it’s fine. But if you want to track the exact length of a workout, the pace of a run, or even the specific heart rate zones you were in, it can’t accurately tell you that. Its zones aren’t very useful because it doesn’t let you customize your max heart rate (the standard formula is wrong for most people). It auto-detects the start and end of your workout, and is often wrong about that. You can start and stop it manually, in theory, but I’ve found that app function unreliable. You can’t even sync your workouts to another app like Strava for analysis.
The Apple Watch, on the other hand, is fully equipped for basic activity tracking, and with third-party apps, it can do even more. It has onboard GPS to track your pace as you run or bike. It has a decently accurate optical heart rate sensor to track your heart rate. Your workouts can sync to other apps if you’d like, or you can download third-party apps like Strava or WorkOutDoors to record directly with those other apps. You can use Hevy for strength training, AllTrails for hiking, and so on.
Sleep tracking
Both devices can track your sleep, but the Oura ring will give you more data and more context to understand it.
The Apple Watch has a Sleep app, and I have a guide here on how to set it up and read your results. You’ll be able to see a few metrics on your watch or phone, showing your sleep stages (which you shouldn’t really trust), your sleep time, and how consistent your sleep schedule has been.
There is also a Vitals app, which reports on your resting heart rate, respiratory rate, skin temperature, and sleep duration. You can access this from the watch, but there is no Vitals app on your phone. The data will show up in your Health app, though.
The Oura ring—well, this is where it shines. Every morning you’ll see a score for your sleep, and another for your “readiness” to tackle the day. You can see a detailed breakdown of not just your sleep stages, but also measures things like your sleep latency (how long it took you to fall asleep), your resting heart rate while you slept, and graphs of your heart rate and HRV during the night. On another screen, you can see your HRV, respiratory rate, skin temperature, and more. The app collects data on how you slept and exercised from day to day, providing probably more numbers than anyone needs to see, like “sleep balance” and “activity balance.” You can also chat with an AI bot about these metrics.
To summarize, the Oura ring gives you tons of data on your sleep—maybe too much, but it’s presented well. The Apple Watch collects most of the same basic data, and gives you a screen or two you can glance at. (That said, you can use a third-party app to dive deeper, such as SleepWatch for $4.99/month.)
Coaching
The Oura ring’s app integrates everything about your health and wellness tracking. Besides the sleep analysis I described above, it also measures and analyzes your activity (in terms of minutes, calories, and steps) and your stress. All of this comes together in a “readiness” score, with its own slate of associated metrics.
The Oura app will give you encouraging messages every day, suggesting that you take care of yourself when you seem fatigued, and that you take on a challenge (athletic or otherwise) when you’re well rested. Your activity goal will change from day to day as your readiness changes, and there’s a “rest mode” that pauses your goals if you’re struggling with something like an illness.
The Apple Watch doesn’t do this kind of active coaching. It does have a Fitness app, though, where you can, famously, “close your rings.” There is a red Move ring, which you close by meeting a calorie burn goal for the day. (This includes general activity, not just exercise.) Then there’s a green Exercise ring, where minutes of logged exercise count toward your goal for the day. And finally there is the Stand ring, where getting up for at least one minute every hour gets you closer to your goal.
There’s a cute animation on your watch when you close a ring for the day. I have to admit it’s a little bit motivating. You can work toward a streak of closing your rings every day, and earn badges for completing monthly challenges or doing specific workouts. The Apple Watch doesn’t give the same kind of holistic coaching or encouragement as the Oura ring app, but the Fitness app’s rings and badges aren’t bad.
The bottom line
Both devices track sleep and activity, and encourage healthy habits. Make the choice according to whether you want precise activity tracking, and whether you want a device that is infinitely customizable, or that is more set-it-and-forget-it.
The Apple Watch lets you get more specific about your activity tracking, and gives you tons of ways to customize it—both visually, with different watch faces and bands, and functionally, with a whole app store’s worth of extra features and services. The one built-in type of coaching is the encouragement to “close your rings” with three metrics of activity each day.
The Oura ring is a simpler device—just a ring, no screen—with a single (subscription) app that provides all of the metrics and coaching. It doesn’t give much detail on your workouts, but it will track whether you got some exercise. Oura devotees who want more precise activity tracking will sometimes wear the ring to bed but use another device like a Garmin (or even an Apple Watch!) to track their exercise. That said, most devices that can track activity can also do most of what the Oura ring does, so think twice before you double up.
So, who is best off with each device?
If the main thing you want is holistic coaching about how your sleep and recovery are benefiting your overall health, go with the Oura ring. It connects these concepts and gives you guidance on how to improve. (You’ll pay $5.99/month for all this.)
If you want a device that can track your exercise with precision, in addition to measuring your sleep and basic health metrics, opt for the Apple Watch. (I’d recommend a Garmin or Coros for serious athletes, but you could certainly train for a 5K or even a marathon on an Apple Watch.)
If you hate wearing a watch, go for the Oura ring, obviously. It’s more comfortable in bed, and leaves your wrist free when you’re dressing up. (Another option: the Whoop on a bicep band.)
If you aren’t sure what you want, and expect to change your mind, the Apple Watch has more versatility. You can subscribe to Bevel now and switch to Athlytic in a few months and maybe use SleepWatch and Strava sometime after that. These all have varying subscription fees, of course.
Beth Skwarecki is Lifehacker’s Senior Health Editor. She has a bachelor’s degree in biology, has written two books, and is a certified personal trainer. She’s been writing about health, fitness, and science for over a decade, and can front squat 225 pounds.
