Good quality sleep is linked to general health, mental well-being, and even the avoidance of serious illnesses, so using a bedtime tracker to check you’re getting enough rest can be a genuine help.
After all, wellness isn’t just about doing cat yoga and drinking alt-milks; sometimes you simply need a good sleep schedule to help you feel better.
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Luckily, there are plenty of different ways to track sleep, too, whether through a bedside monitor, a wrist-worn wearable like a smartwatch, a device that fits under your mattress, or even a smart ring.
All will give slightly different insights and personalized tips on improving your rest time. However, the options we’ve picked below are worth exploring if you want to know exactly how you sleep – and make positive steps to improve sleep quality.
We’ll be breaking down what to look for in a sleep tracker, how it tracks sleep accurately, and the best sleep gadgets to buy. We’ve tested each’s accuracy and design so you don’t have to.
- Apple Watch sleep-tracking apps
- Sleep monitoring explained
Summary: The best sleep trackers we’ve tested
- Our top overall sleep tracker – Oura Ring Gen 4
- The best option for training insights – Whoop 4.0
- The top choice for Android users – Google Pixel Watch 3
- The best pick for iPhone users – Apple Watch Series 10
- The top option for Samsung phone users – Samsung Galaxy Watch Ultra
- A superb under-mattress design – Withings Sleep Analyzer
- Our favorite bedside option – Google Nest Hub (2nd Gen)
- A hybrid smartwatch for sleep tracking – Withings ScanWatch 2
Sleep tracking terminology explained
Before picking the right sleep monitor to watch over your night, you need to know exactly what you want from one.
The tech involved here is much more advanced than the smartphone apps that use the accelerometer to track movement under your pillow – and, as a result, things are much more accurate.
HR versus movement sensors
Older fitness trackers used wrist movement to track sleep. Now, this is all combined with heart rate monitoring – and companies like Google/Fitbit and Withings are looking at your beats per minute (bpm) during sleep to make assumptions about duration and sleep stages.
Sleep stages
Most sleep monitors will now offer estimates of your sleep stages, meaning you get a breakdown of light, deep, and REM sleep (plus any awake time).
You typically cycle through these sleep stages a few times per night to feel rested – and the trackers in this guide will show this in their analysis.
If you’re not cycling between them – or missing out on some of these stages altogether – it’s a smoking gun for bad sleep, and a great place to start improving.
With sleep stages, however, it’s important to note that accuracy is much more limited than in other tracking – such as heart rate or GPS.
Even the best sleep trackers (such as Oura) can only manage around 80% accuracy compared to medical-grade sleeping equipment’s assessments of sleep stages, so take all this data with a pinch of salt.
Sleep scores
Looking at all this data can feel overwhelming – and, when you’ve looked at the data for a few weeks, you’d be forgiven for wondering what it all means.
Many brands now distill your data into a meaningful number, meaning you can see how your slumber stacks up. Several devices we’ve listed (Pixel Watch 3, Oura, and Garmin) offer a single sleep score from their data.
Blood oxygen and sleep apnea
The latest data in town is blood oxygen saturation – which is tracked using a SpO2 sensor. You’ll find them on Google-Fitbit, Garmin, Withings, Whoop, and Oura.
That might sound nuts, but the amount of oxygen in your blood – or at least a dip in levels while asleep – is linked to sleep apnea. It’s estimated that 22 million Americans suffer from it, and the majority don’t realize it.
Choosing a sleep-tracking wearable with a SpO2 sensor will offer up this data, so you can ensure you’re not an unwitting statistic.
In 2024, we’ve seen this take a huge step forward. Samsung received FDA approval for an official sleep apnea analysis feature in February, and Apple followed suit with the Series 10 (also available on Series 9 and Ultra 2) in September.
Oura Ring Gen 4 (and Gen 3)
The best overall sleep tracker
While a smart ring may not be the first device you’d think of, the Oura Ring is a powerful and discreet sleep tracker worth serious consideration. We’ve found that it’s one of the most comfortable and accurate ways to track your bedtime.
It’s packed with sensors, too, with 18 sensor pathways for the Gen 4 version (up from eight in Gen 3), enabling the ring to keep tabs on heart rate, movement, and body temperature. That jump in sensors results in fewer gaps in nighttime HR readings compared to the older model, and increased accuracy for overnight SpO2 data and breathing index data, but the core tracking is much the same.
It includes capturing data like sleep or nap duration, time spent in bed, sleep efficiency, resting heart rate, heart rate variability, and sleep stages.
As we say, blood oxygen data is also tracked through the night and presented as an average figure the next morning, with breathing regularity also measured and graded based on fluctuations.
Each metric can be accessed easily, but the key data is distilled into a sleep score each morning that’s both true to feel and not needlessly harsh, making things feel much more actionable. We think it accurately gauges when we need to take it easy and when we’re fine to take on with the day and be active.
Oura also suggests realistic sleep times, and all the data and trends hold up very well against the likes of Fitbit and Whoop, from our experience.
We still grade the last-gen Oura Ring 3 as a viable option, too, if you don’t think you need the insights unlocked by the fourth-gen ring. It’s a great way to save a bit of cash.
- Check out our full Oura Ring 4 review
Whoop Strap 4.0
The best sleep tracker for training recovery insights
You can read about the fitness tracking aspects of Whoop in our best gym trackers guide, but, given the emphasis on recovery insights, sleep tracking is also a huge part of this subscription experience.
Wearing the Whoop 4.0 tracker to sleep will help unlock insights in the companion app, with the recovery percentage at the core. A traffic-light system will factor in your sleep performance with HRV, RHR, and respiratory data to provide an insight into how ready your body is to take on more training strain.
But the sleep-specific data is just as actionable, with Whoop showing rolling trends of your time in bed, sleep schedule consistency, sleep efficiency, sleep debt (time you owe from late nights/early starts), and your percentage of restorative sleep time.
We also love the Sleep Planner feature, which dynamically adjusts your bedtime based on your current day’s activity and how recovered you intend to be the following day. This also syncs with the band’s vibrating alarm, which can be set to wake you up at an exact time, when you hit a green recovery zone, or when your sleep need has been met.
We haven’t had the chance to verify Whoop’s sleep stage data against polysomnography, but it’s certainly accurate enough to provide bang-on fall-asleep/wake-up estimates – and those stages are still well within a healthy range when compared to others on this list.
If you’re looking for a wearable that can deliver actionable, behavior-informing insights to help take your training to the next level, Whoop comes thoroughly recommended.
- Full review: Whoop Strap 4.0
Apple Watch Series 10
Best sleep tracker for iPhone users
After taking quite a while to get to grips with the idea of tracking sleep, Apple’s interpretation has developed into a top solution for those who want insights from their slumber.
The headline addition for Series 10 is sleep apnea detection, which assesses the user’s breathing disturbances at night and works in the background to spot trends over months.
A prompt to warn that the user might have sleep apnea will only be delivered if half the nights tracked over an entire month show elevated breathing disturbances.
It’s set-and-forget stuff, with the rest of Apple’s sleep tracking package more the kind of thing to check in on every day. For what it’s worth, given no optical sensor can track information with accuracy akin to the gold standard (polysomnography), Apple is right up there with the best wearables in sleep stage accuracy.
Your sleep data now also feeds into more insights, thanks to the Vitals app (which features an overview of your core vitals: heart rate, temperature, blood oxygen, sleep, and breathing rate). Apple still prioritizes putting your sleep schedule and time spent asleep, but our major criticism of tracking in its current form is that it’s much more of an overview than a proactive coach.
Apple Health’s impenetrable metrics dump is part of the issue here. But, yet, for those who like data and don’t care as much about actionability, the Series 10 is a superb pick.
Fitbit Pixel Watch 3
Best Fitbit smartwatch for sleep tracking
The Google Pixel Watch 3 is one of the best smartwatch sleep trackers on the market, powered by the excellent Fitbit algorithms and presentation refined over the last decade.
While Fitbit’s smartwatches use the same technology, the Pixel Watch 3’s wider smarter experience – and, more importantly, the fact there’s now a 45mm edition that can last a couple of sleeps on a single charge – makes it a top pick to consider.
Fitbit Sleep Stages ensure that you can get a daily look at your light, deep, REM, and awake times, and you can still check in on how your night compares to the last month and other people your age. This data is then all distilled into a sleep score – one we’ve found to be very true-to-feel in testing.
The Pixel Watch 3 can’t deliver FDA-approved insights into sleep apnea, but the brand’s ‘Estimated Oxygen Variation’ is a close imitation. This measures the oxygen in your blood while you sleep, with large swings a possible sign of the disorder.
Google/Fitbit’s sleep insights have begun to be overtaken by the likes of Oura and Whoop over the last few years, in no small part because a lot of sleep data is still locked behind Fitbit Premium, but Daily Readiness Scores being accessible to all users (starting with the Pixel Watch 3) does help offset some of this disappointment.
Plus, as we say, the Pixel Watch 3 and Fitbit tracking is incredibly intuitive and varied; there’s solid activity tracking for all levels, wide-ranging food/calorie logging, integration with Fitbit smart scales, and room for plenty of health features.
- Check out our full Google Pixel Watch 3 review
Withings Sleep Analyzer
The best mattress sleep tracker
The Withings Sleep Analyzer is the brand’s remaining mattress-style sleep tracker, and the key selling point here is the clinically validated sleep apnea feature. With no FDA approval, however, it’s still only available in the UK and Europe despite being released years ago.
There’s more than just sleep apnea insights here, with data like sleep duration, interruptions, light, deep, and REM sleep – plus snoring, thanks to a built-in microphone.
It can also tap into the Withings app, giving you a coaching program to help reduce fatigue and improve your health.
Sleep score is a major focus, as it is on most tracking apps. It’s the most obvious way to find out whether you had a good night’s sleep and will be in red if you had a bad night. The higher the score, the better night of sleep you had.
Even better, the app helps you understand what makes a good night of sleep by telling you how to raise your Sleep Score. However, we did encounter some accuracy issues with the Withings Analyzer when waking up but staying in bed, so keep that in mind if you don’t immediately rise after sleep.
- Check out our full Withings Sleep Analyzer review
Google Nest Hub (2nd Gen)
The best bedside sleep tracker
If you’re not a fan of wearing a tracker or having something live under your mattress, the Google Nest Hub (2nd Gen) is a superb pick – and one of the most accurate we’ve tested.
Primarily, the smart display’s Motion Sense does the tracking, using a low-energy radar to detect movement and breathing rate. Then, this radar data combines with Google’s Sleep Sensing, which accounts for light, sound, and room temperature to deliver a comprehensive verdict on your sleep.
The result is a detailed on-device summary of your night’s sleep – including sleep stages and suggestions on improving your rest – with this raw data also feeding into the Google Fit app to give you a historical view of your trends over time.
There’s no kind of sleep score here, with Google instead opting to summarise your sleep with one of either ‘Restful’, ‘Fairly Restful’, or ‘Restless’. And, in some senses, we prefer it to a score – it feels a bit more of an intuitive reflection.
We also find, on the whole, the sleep stage data to be much more consistent than many wearables. There are very few – if any – eyebrow-raising sleep stage estimates, making it a much more useful tool when trying to match up with your intuition on your readiness to take on exercise strain or a big day of work.
There are now deeper integrations with the Google Pixel Watch and Fitbit devices on the Nest Hub, linking information regarding exercises and calorie burn. Considering this one also acts as a smart speaker, YouTube player, and supports apps like Headspace, it’s a rounded device.
The only downside is that you’ll need to place this much more carefully than other devices on this list. You essentially have to have a bedside table at roughly the same height as your mattress, and, rather than being up against the wall, it’ll need to be in line with your pillow to deliver the most accurate results.
It can also struggle to register when you’ve woken up but are still in bed, as we’ve found with mattress trackers.
Samsung Galaxy Watch Ultra
The best Samsung smartwatch for sleep tracking
The Samsung Galaxy Watch Ultra will track your sleep duration, sleep stages (awake, REM, light, and deep), blood oxygen levels throughout the night, sleep cycles, and even snoring time.
It’s a comprehensive tracking experience and stacked up well in our testing against Oura and Whoop – which isn’t the case for most Wear OS smartwatches.
Crucially, Samsung this year also became the first major smartwatch maker to get clearance for sleep apnea detection – and the Ultra (along with the Galaxy Watch 7) are the only devices that let you access this.
The Galaxy Watch Ultra also provides insights into your sleep chronotype using sleep animals to characterize your sleep profile and help you understand your natural, circadian habits.
The all-new Energy Score also debuts here, with the sleep tracking underpinning most of this useful feature; your recent sleep averages, consistency, bed/wake-time consistency, sleeping HRV, and sleeping HR all contribute.
- Check out our full Samsung Galaxy Watch Ultra review
Withings ScanWatch 2
Best hybrid smartwatch for sleep tracking
The Withings ScanWatch 2 is the best hybrid smartwatch to offer sleep tracking – although its prowess has slipped behind the likes of Oura and Whoop.
It logs sleep duration and the time spent in the key deep, light, and awake stages. It will also score duration, depth, regularity of bedtimes, and interruptions. However, you won’t be able to view REM sleep stage data, which is an odd omission.
With a heart rate on board, the ScanWatch will also monitor average sleep hearing rate, while there’s a SpO2 sensor to help monitor breathing disturbances and potentially detect signs of sleep apnea. Those sleep disturbances are scored on a color-coded scale.
Unless you’re someone who detests having anything on their wrist in bed, the ScanWatch 2’s slim physique makes it very comfortable to wear to sleep. There’s an alarm, as well, so you can be woken by a gentle vibration on your wrist, instead of a blaring noise.
The data is easy to digest, as shown above, but sadly the insights aren’t quite as meaty as we’d like. However, if you’re looking for something good at the sleep basics, the ScanWatch isn’t a bad call.
- Read our Withings ScanWatch 2 review
The post Best sleep trackers in 2024: Tested and rated options from our reviews appeared first on Wareable.
