The Oura Ring is gaining serious traction – the company has now sold 2.5 million units as the smart ring market booms.
Smart rings have captured the imagination by offering a more discreet way of tracking sleep and activity from the finger. They’re a mile away from smartwatches, with their screens and digital distractions.
But the Apple Watch is universally popular, with some of the best health tracking available – and it’s a workout-tracking powerhouse, too.
Many people face this decision, and many choose both. 40% of Oura Ring users also have an Apple Watch, which is astonishing. But if you’re choosing between them, here’s what you need to know.
Oura Ring Gen 3 review | Oura Ring 4 review | Apple Watch Series 10 review
How we tested
James has worn both the Apple Watch (Series 1-10) and Oura Ring 4 (and Gen 3) extensively – with years of experience in these ecosystems. He’s slept, walked, run, swum, and lived with them extensively – and compared hundreds of nights of data.
Price compared
The Oura Ring Gen 3 costs around $299 to $349, depending on the model and finish. However, that has now been replaced by the Oura Ring 4, which starts at $349, rising to nearly $500 depending on the finish.
To use Oura, you also need the $5.99 monthly subscription to the app.
The Apple Watch, on the other hand, has a broader price range. The latest Apple Watch Series models can start around $399 or $429 for the 44mm model.
It will go higher depending on case material or features such as LTE. The Apple Watch SE is more affordable at around $249 but is quite dated these days.
Read next: Best smartwatches from our reviews
Design and features
We won’t bore you here – the design differences are obvious. One is a discreet-ish ring, and the other is a smartwatch.
The Oura Ring 4 is no longer the thinnest or lightest ring on the market by any means (the Galaxy Ring and RingConn 2 are both significantly smaller) – and the Apple Watch Series 10 has also grown in size as well.
The Oura Ring can’t offer live feedback on fitness or metrics, so all of that needs to be done via the smartphone app.
The Apple Watch offers feedback via the large OLED display – and naturally – can show the time as well. It also offers things like Apple Pay, access to Apple Watch apps and glanceable, bite-size information from its new Smart Stack Widgets.
Winner: Totally depends what’s important to you.
Wellness features
Both the Oura Ring and Apple Watch are excellent health devices – but in very different ways.
From our experience using both, the Oura Ring is the better passive tracker and superior when it comes to sleep tracking and offering insights into your readiness and health.
But the Apple Watch is far better at serious health features, including ECG, sleep apnea, and fall detection. And as we’ll come onto, it’s the best pick for fitness, too.
The Oura Ring focuses heavily on sleep tracking and recovery metrics – and bases pretty much all of its insights around this data. This contrasts with the Apple Watch, which tracks sleep but doesn’t offer as much analysis around it.
It records not only sleep duration but also breaks down your sleep into stages: deep, light, REM, and wakefulness. It also talks about consistency, offering insights into your circadian rhythm, how your sleep and wake times correlate, and what chronotype you are – which can be insightful for planning productive time.
Oura tracks HRV during sleep, a key measure of autonomic nervous system health and a crucial indicator of recovery and stress levels. Higher HRV generally indicates better recovery and lower stress – and it feeds this into a recovery and stress resilience rating. These are two features the Apple Watch overlooks.
The Apple Watch has the new Vitals app that keeps tabs on your personal health baselines, while Oura has an identically-named tab in its revamped app. Both track breathing rate, temperature, sleep, and resting heart rate, and could be used to show when you’re getting ill or run down.
Winner: Oura
Health tracking
Both the Apple Watch and Oura Ring offer body temperature tracking, which can be used as part of each device’s wellness tracking.
These also feed into female health tracking. The Apple Watch uses temperature and reported symptoms to track periods and uses the temperature data to validate the cycle retrospectively, warning users of any changes that could signal health conditions.
Oura is more comprehensive and features period tracking, prediction, and a new Fertility Window, which shows when the best time to conceive.
Both Apple Watch and Oura are winners when it comes to integrations with female health services, with apps or integrations with Natural Cycles, Clue, Flo, and others.
While the Oura Ring offers more wellness insights, the Apple Watch goes bigger on lifesaving features.
It has an electrocardiogram (ECG), a medical-grade ECG feature, which can detect irregular heart rhythms like atrial fibrillation (AFib). And the company just added sleep apnea detection to Series 10/9, which will alert you if breathing disturbances reach a dangerous level.
Oura features a breathing disturbances metric but stops short of warning about sleep apnea.
The Apple Watch also adds fall detection, car crash detection, and hearing protection features.
Winner: Apple Watch
Fitness Features
Oura has made huge strides this year to be a better tracker for active people – but it still lags way behind the Apple Watch.
The Oura Ring takes a more passive approach to fitness tracking, focusing on general activity and recovery rather than specific workout performance.
The Oura Ring will automatically detect and log exercise – and this number has risen to 40 activities in the latest update.
You can also manually track the heart rate of sessions in the app.
Oura has added VO2 Max and cardiovascular age features too (see above). And it does a pretty good job of analyzing your activity and making it meaningful.
More simply, Oura will also track daily activity against a specific calorie goal.
We have tested Oura Gen 3 and Ring 4 and found exercise tracking to be a mixed bag. Oura’s focus is to look at all “exercise” holistically, so if you like delving into specific workout performance, this isn’t for you. The data on specific tracked sessions is light on detail and isn’t logged in a coherent way but as a massive timeline of activities, including walks to the shop or around the house.
Automatic detection is also pretty patchy, and adding workouts retrospectively is clunky.
In short, it serves the purpose of assessing overall movement, but this isn’t a workout device.
The Apple Watch, on the other hand, is a powerhouse for workout tracking. There are heaps of great workout profiles, and you can even structure sessions, race your own PBs, get in-depth views of your training load (above), and peruse VO2 Max data.
The Apple Watch ecosystem also has Fitness+ for guided home workouts.
The Oura Ring uses your smartphone’s GPS to get route data, which was solid in our testing. But you do need to take your phone with you. The Apple Watch has GPS as standard – and the Ultra 2 has multi-band for some of the best accuracy out there.
The Apple activity rings are a good way of getting calorie burn and stand hours, and of course, you can check those at a glance on the display, which you can’t do with the Oura Ring.
The heart rate is also much more accurate than Oura’s during exercise. Oura Ring 4 does improve active heart rate tracking during exercise, but in our testing, Apple Watch was still way ahead.
Both devices have 5ATM water resistance and are good for a dip in the pool. But while Oura will track HR in the pool and the time of the session, only the Apple Watch can detect strokes, lengths, and all that good stuff.
In essence, when it comes to working out, there’s only one winner.
Winner: Apple Watch
Battery life
Here’s a big win: despite being a tiny smart ring, the Oura Ring 4 beats the Apple Watch with 8 days of battery life. It’s usually good for that, or 6-7 days solidly.
That is totally at odds with the Apple Watch, which will last around 26 hours on average in our testing — admittedly better than the 18 hours Apple touts.
You can go for the Apple Watch Ultra 2, which reliably gets 2-3 days in our testing.
Verdict
It should be pretty easy to choose between these two. The Oura is a sleep-tracking and wellness powerhouse that can transform your life with gentle nudges – without bugging you with notifications every five minutes.
But the Apple Watch is all about big fitness features, helpful interventions, wrist payments, health features such as ECG, and of course, telling the time.
Buy the Oura Ring 4 if…you want the best sleep and recovery tracking out there – and gentle insights into your circadian rhythm. But overall it’s discreet, and a much gentler experience.
Buy the Apple Watch if…it’s a no-brainer for those who like to work out – and people who want to be plugged into their notifications. The Apple Watch has hundreds of useful utilities, but it’s a totally different proposition in terms of the level of interaction you want to have with a wearable.
And of course, if you still can’t decide, do what 40% of Oura users do: get both.
The post Oura Ring vs. Apple Watch: Key differences revealed appeared first on Wareable.
