The Oura Ring brand is incredibly popular. There’s no doubt about it. Just look at our Oura Ring 3 review, where we compliment the ring for its gorgeous design, abundant features, and convenient battery charging. When you’re done, check out this interesting look at the Oura Ring Horizon, where Digital Trends contributor Joe Maring discusses how he keeps bumping into other Digital Trends contributors that have and love the Oura Ring. So much so, that he had to try it. And he loved it, but it ultimately wasn’t for him due to having somewhat boney knuckles. In other words, the Oura Ring is great and if you’re reading this you’re probably enthralled by what they do. However, it isn’t the perfect product for everybody. So, we’re collecting some alternatives that you — and possibly Joe — might like.
The Ultrahuman Ring Air is undoubtedly one of the most complex fitness and sleep tracking rings. If you’re looking at the Oura Ring and wanting to compare it to something, this is the one. In addition to the typical measurements, it looks at your energy levels, circadian cycle, and more. That means it can suggest things like when coffee is good for you. For fitness, you can have nearly two dozen activities measured, including popular ones like walking, running, and even football.
Ultimately, this is a very advanced system. On the surface, that sounds good, but if you’re in agreeance with our Ultrahuman Ring Air review, it can be somewhat too complex. In other words, it is worth it for your if you’re ready to dive into the technicalities of bio-tracking. For example, our reviewer points out that the app refers to a “Circadian Dead Zone” and quickly points out that this is what the average morning person would call “daytime”. Likewise, the Ultrahuman Ring Air gives great advice on shifting your Circadian rhythm but won’t guide you as to why that is useful. To some degree, this means that the Ultrahuman is a technician’s smart ring, great for those willing to dive into the technicals themselves.
Key Specifications Form factor Ring Size 5-14Considered one of the best smart rings, the Amovan tracks fitness and sleep health while remaining tough. In fact, that’s its big selling point. The Amovan is made from Titanium (the same material as the Oura Ring) and has a tough exterior. Likewise, it can withstand up to 100 meters of water resistance (just like an Oura Ring). There is really a lot to like here and, considering the same basics are covered, the Amovan appears similar to the Oura Ring enough for it to be a stand out competitor.
One thing to note is that it has automatic sleep tracking. However, this automatic sleep tracking is from 10pm to 8am. For many people, sleeping during these hours is a sign of good overall sleep anyhow. Things like this and reports that hand movements can be recorded as steps make this product not as good as an Oura Ring. The Amovan, however, balances this out by being offered at a much lower price. In other words, you get an affordable, durable ring, that gives the basics of biofeedback via an Amovan.
Key Specifications Form factor Ring Size 6-13While not a smart ring, the FitBit Charge 6 can easily replace the Oura Ring’s features in a style that may very well be more comfortable for you. It has a small design that feels good and its 1-inch AMOLED screen allows for information gathering without using your hands to pull out your smartphone. This means that, unlike an Oura Ring, you can actively learn about yourself while doing “dirty” activities like gardening. While worn, it will track your sleep, ECG, and various activities.
Of course, FitBits are known for having more to them than just fitness and sleep health tracking. Our Fitbit Charge 6 review goes into all of these details, but the basics include: Google Maps, YouTube Music, and Google Wallet integration. This is a fully-featured smartwatch. Oh, and it is also really affordable compared to the Oura Ring, but the temptation to get FitBit Premium may very well increase your long-term costs.
Key Specifications Form factor Smartwatch Size Small (140mm – 180mm wrist) and Large (180mm – 220mm wrist)If mom or dad have an Oura Ring, and love chatting about their body stats, it only follows that the child will want something like that, too. However, rings aren’t likely that wise to put on rapidly growing hands. Instead, a smartwatch made specifically for children is a great alternative, and provides child-appropriate sleep and fitness tracking, alongside age-appropriate health encouragement. For example, reminders to get up and move and plentiful, encouraging increased metabolism and a lifetime of movement in an age of increasing youth obesity and earlier sedimentary lifestyles.
Our FitBit Ace 3 review will be the first to point out that the children’s smartwatch works best with a family of FitBit users. When used together as a family, it allows for fun challenges and more. That means it might not be perfect if you’re an Oura Ring only kind of family, but it’s an absolutely fun experience if your family is connected.
Key Specifications Form factor Smartwatch Size One size (S and L bands included)If we boil the Oura Ring down to its most basic properties, we see three things: an object that is a ring, an object that can track sleep, and an object that can track fitness.
Ring, Fitness, Sleep… these are the three key ingredients of an Oura Ring
Surprisingly, the ring part of the Oura Ring was the most discardable element. Our colleague Joe, after all, lost out on a great sleep and fitness tracker as a result of its shape. The reality is, we’re looking for sleep and fitness trackers here, if they’re in the form of a ring, that’s just a bonus (sometimes). To put it another way, many people that wear an Oura Ring would consider wearing a hypothetical “Oura Necklace” as a substitute. Few, however, would wear a rose gold wedding band and substitute it for an Oura Ring, that just doesn’t make sense.
Additionally, we favored trusted products that had either been reviewed in-house or recommended before. This doesn’t mean that just anything we’ve enjoyed in the past made it in, however. Our personal experience from the Whoop 4.0 review kept it out of the list.
One somewhat awkward part of writing this in the beginning of 2024 is the upcoming Samsung Galaxy Ring was teased just days before this article was published. Many of you probably came to this page looking for information on the Galaxy Ring, as some coverage of it hyped its appearance so much that it seemed as if it were launched today. In fact, it is not. Luckily, good Oura Ring alternatives exist today, but we can also expect the wearable ring market to continue pumping out updates, innovation, and even products in the year to come.
This article is managed and created separately from the Digital Trends Editorial team.
If there is one product category that’s experiencing a big boon right now, it’s the smart ring. The first smart ring to hit the market and really take off was the Oura Ring. The current Oura Ring Gen 3 has been available since late 2021, and it’s quickly become the default smart ring of choice.
However, now we have several other options, such as the Movano Evie Ring, Ultrahuman Air, RingConn, the Circular Ring Slim, and more. Even Samsung will be entering the smart ring space soon with its own Galaxy Ring, which was teased at the end of the January Galaxy Unpacked event.
Recommended Videos
However, while there are more options available than ever before, the Oura Ring remains the best smart ring you can buy. Yes, even though it has that annoying subscription fee to get the most out of the ring itself, the other options just don’t hold a candle to the Oura Ring.
When you wear a health tracker, such as a smartwatch or smart ring, you want the health data it collects to be accurate. Otherwise, what’s the point if the data is going to be way off or just downright incorrect? This is an area where Oura kills it.
The biggest reason I wear an Oura Ring is for sleep tracking. I have and wear an Apple Watch Ultra, and though I’ve gotten accustomed to the size during the day, it’s still bulkier than I’d like when going to sleep. That’s where a smart ring comes in — it’s far less intrusive to wear to bed than a smartwatch, and once you get used to it, you pretty much forget it’s there.
I’ve been wearing the Oura Ring for several years now, and it has pretty much always been accurate with the times I fall asleep, detecting if I have any awake moments throughout the night and knowing when I actually wake up for the day. Even if I wake up for a while and then go back to sleep, it notices that, too. And if I am able to sneak in a quick nap during the day, it is pretty good about catching that, too, as long as I meet the criteria threshold.
With the Oura Ring, you get three scores: Readiness, Sleep, and Activity. The Readiness score takes certain factors into account, such as the activity from the previous day, your sleep, resting heart rate, recovery, and more. The Sleep score is calculated based on restfulness, efficiency, REM and Deep sleep, latency, and timing. And your Activity score — well, that one’s pretty self-explanatory.
I think the Readiness score is a fantastic depiction of my energy level for each day. I say this because when I have a low score, I do, in fact, feel bad that day. Comparatively, when it’s high, I am well-rested and feel pretty good. When I have a low score, it gives me a reason to look into why I feel that way and makes me more aware if I’m coming down with something.
The Oura Ring is also great at actually detecting if I’m moving, similar to my Apple Watch Ultra. Even if I don’t log a workout with my Apple Watch, the Oura Ring detects when I’ve been walking for a period of time (such as one of my trips to Disneyland) and keeps logs of that in the Oura app. It’s one of the best things about the Oura Ring. I often forget that it’s there, but it’s always logging everything for me without me even needing to do anything — and with accuracy I can depend on.
When Movano first announced the Evie Ring a few years ago, I was excited. A smart ring designed with women in mind? Sign me up! Well, I finally got one and tried it out, and I am extremely disappointed. I wore both the Oura Ring and Evie Ring together for a few weeks, and the Evie Ring just does not compete.
I mentioned it in my review, but the Evie Ring is wildly inaccurate, and the syncing was often painfully slow. There were also frequent discrepancies between it and the Oura Ring as to when I actually fell asleep and when I woke up. Often, the difference would be something big, like 30 minutes to an hour. And the Evie Ring would think I’m still asleep even though I’ve been awake for the past hour or so in the morning. I’m not sure how that even works.
The step count that the Evie Ring recorded also seemed abnormally high compared to my Apple Watch Ultra and Oura Ring. Furthermore, I was puzzled by Movano’s implementation of workouts—you just input the amount of time you plan for a workout session, and then the ring records the heart rate during that time. There is no way to specify if it’s a walk, run, cycling, or other kind of exercise. Honestly, it’s baffling that it’s done this way.
Movano’s design for the Evie Ring is unique and comfortable, but none of that really matters when it offers such skewed health data and barebones workout features. For what was supposed to be one of the better Oura Ring competitors, the Evie Ring was a real letdown.
My experience with smart rings so far has only been with the Oura Ring and Evie Ring. However, my colleague, Andy Boxall, has reviewed several other smart rings for Digital Trends: the Ultrahuman Air, the RingConn Smart Ring, and the Circular Ring Slim. Some of those are certainly better than others, of course, but they still don’t quite match up with the greatness of the Oura Ring.
The Ultrahuman Ring Air is simple and comfortable to wear, which is fine and dandy. However, understanding the data that you get from it is a bit more complicated than the Oura Ring and requires more work on your part.
Not only are you asked to manually input things like your daily mood and even food and caffeine intake, but the Ultrahuman Ring Air uses very unique language to explain specific health metrics. The main focus is on light exposure and stimulants (e.g., caffeine), and it uses terms like “Phase Response Curve” (when it’s a good time to exercise, drink coffee, sleep), Circadian Dead Zone (daytime), Minima Time, Phase Advance, Phase Delay, and more.
Didn’t understand most of those terms? Yeah, most normal people don’t. Further, Ultrahuman doesn’t really explain what everything is, the significance of the data, or why you should care about these things in the first place. You get three number ratings for your movement, sleep, and recovery, like the Oura Ring, but there’s still a lot of extraneous data that just isn’t presented in the most user-friendly manner.
Due to the tapered edges, the RingConn Smart Ring‘s unique squircle shape could be considered more comfortable overall, though it’s slightly thicker than the Oura Ring. It may be a bit more noticeable in certain situations, like wearing gloves, but it isn’t enough to interfere with daily life.
Unfortunately, RingConn can’t do much at the moment. On its website, RingConn says that features like workout tracking, mindfulness, meditation, and cycle tracking are still under development. If you buy the RingConn Smart Ring now, these features won’t be available just yet.
Instead, the RingConn is currently a pretty simple sleep tracker with passive activity tracking throughout the day. It will monitor your sleep, stress, heart rate, blood oxygen levels, heart rate variability (HRV), skin temperature, and basic movement — all standard, expected health tracking features.
Again, those extra features will come in the future, but as of right now, the RingConn is still considerably more basic than the Oura Ring.
Similarly to the Evie Ring, the Circular Ring Slim is one of the worst smart rings we’ve reviewed. Though its design makes it one of the most comfortable smart rings out there, it falls short in both durability and reliability.
Unlike most of the smart rings we’ve tried, the Circular Ring Slim is made of aluminum, not titanium, which makes for poor durability. Within a few weeks of wear, it can show chips and scratches that reveal the metal underneath the matte black finish. It also lacks dust resistance, as it only has an IPX8 water resistance rating.
As for reliability, the Circular Ring Slim has been incredibly unreliable. It only tracks sleep and basic activity during the daytime, as there is no way to track exercise or workouts, and there isn’t even a way to add that data manually. The sleep tracking isn’t accurate either, as from Andy’s review, the Circular Ring Slim thought he was asleep when he simply sat down to relax in the evening. Because of this, the Circular smart ring thought he had gotten many more hours of sleep than he actually did, and that skewed data throws off everything else, including Circular’s other health recommendations.
Syncing the data to the app is also painful, as it is slow and can take a long time for all the data to show up. The only neat thing about the Circular is that it can have a silent vibrating alarm that you turn off by tapping on the logo twice. However, this is also unreliable because, in our testing, it never actually vibrated when it was supposed to.
I’ve pointed out the issues with all of the Oura Ring competitors so far, but the Oura Ring hasn’t always been perfect either. I got the third-generation Oura Ring when it launched, and it certainly had its flaws.
For one, the Oura Ring 3 did not launch with all of its current features immediately, which was a drawback that many users weren’t too fond of. It did take a bit of time, but we eventually got new sleep-tracking features, SpO2 levels, workout HR tracking, and more.
Then, of course, we had the debacle of Oura switching to a subscription-based model, which is something many Oura competitors are avoiding. While that may be a selling point for those other rings, it doesn’t quite help when the data is inaccurate or hard to understand. Though I’m not a fan of Oura using a subscription model, I honestly think it’s worth it (at least for me) because it’s accurate and gives me good insights — something we can’t say about competing smart rings.
And despite the Oura Ring being the gold standard for smart rings, it continues to get better. In the last few months, Oura has added some new features like Resilience and even pregnancy insights for women. Oura even added a new brushed titanium finish, adding to its already impressive repertoire of color options.
It’s been a long road for the Oura Ring, but it’s been worth it since it’s the best smart ring we’ve tried. While the smart ring market is going through a boom, I’ve yet to find something better than the Oura Ring. And based on all of the competition we’ve already seen and tested, it looks like that’ll remain true for a while to come.