The Oura Ring 4 is now the best smart ring on the market, which is getting more and more competitive. It promises to give you a full picture of your health by tracking everything from sleep and stress to heart rate and women’s health metrics. It has a sleek design, better sensors, and a new app. But does it really live up to the hype? Is it worth the $349 starting price and a subscription? I have been testing the Oura Ring 4 for weeks to find out.
Design: More like jewelry, sleeker, and lighter
The Oura Ring 4 is a great example of how to be subtly sophisticated. The Gen 3 had big, clunky sensor bumps, but the new one has a smooth, all-titanium body that feels lighter (3.3g to 5.2g depending on size) and more like jewelry than a tech gadget. It comes in six colors: Black, Silver, Brushed Silver, Stealth, Gold, and Rose Gold. The last two cost $499 more, but they fit in with your style perfectly. The ring is now available in a wider range of sizes (4 to 15), which means it will fit more people better.
The Ring 4 is much more comfortable because it doesn’t have the internal sensor domes that were a feature of earlier models. It fits snugly against the skin, which makes it less likely to irritate when you lift weights or when your fingers swell. But some users, including me, thought the fit felt a little different because the underside is smooth. To get it right, you need to use Oura’s free sizing kit. The fit needs to be snug but not too tight so that it can collect accurate data.
Hardware: Sensors that are smarter and a battery that lasts longer
The Oura Ring 4 has Smart Sensing technology that uses 18 signal pathways (up from eight in the Gen 3) to change based on the shape, color, and position of your finger. This means that there are fewer gaps in the data and that readings for things like heart rate, heart rate variability (HRV), blood oxygen, respiratory rate, and body temperature are more accurate. The sensors, which include red and green LEDs, infrared photoplethysmography (PPG), a digital temperature sensor, and an accelerometer, are now set back, which makes them more comfortable and accurate.
The battery life is also good; the Ring 4 lasts up to eight days on a single charge, but I usually got 5.5 to 6 days with heavy use. The new charging dock looks great and charges the ring in about 80 minutes, but it doesn’t work with the Gen 3, which might annoy people who want to upgrade.
Software: An Updated App with Useful Information
The Oura Ring 4 comes with a new app for iOS and Android that organizes data into three easy-to-use tabs: Today, Vitals, and My Health. The Today tab shows you a timeline of your day that changes based on your activities, stress level, heart rate, and events you tagged yourself, like meals or workouts. The Vitals tab goes into great detail about things like HRV, sleep stages, and respiratory rate. The My Health tab shows long-term trends like cardiovascular age and stress resilience.
Some of the new features are automatic heart rate monitoring during workouts, better tracking of stress during the day, and women’s health tools like Cycle Insights, which can help you predict when your period will start, and Pregnancy Insights, which can help you keep track of changes in your body during pregnancy. The app’s AI-powered advisor gives you personalized suggestions, like changing your bedtime based on your sleep data or telling you to rest when your temperature goes up, like when I had a cold.
Oura’s Labs hub, which is now available on Android, lets users try out new features like keeping track of meals and managing stress. After a free month-long trial, you can get full access to these insights for $5.99 a month or $69.99 a year. This may be a problem for some people.
Best-in-Class Performance Tracking Sleep and Health
The Oura Ring 4 is great at what Oura does best: keeping track of sleep and overall health. It accurately recorded when I went to sleep and when I woke up, matching my manual logs almost perfectly. It also gave me detailed breakdowns of my sleep stages (light, deep, REM). It even caught a night of insomnia that my Garmin smartwatch missed. The Readiness Score, which combines information about sleep, heart rate variability, and activity, was very helpful. It told me to take it easy after a stressful day or bad sleep.
The Ring 4’s better temperature sensor makes it easier to track your cycle, which helps you guess when you’ll ovulate and keep an eye on your perimenopause symptoms. People who are trying to get pregnant will find it useful to be able to connect with apps like Natural Cycles (for an extra fee). Oura’s work with UC Berkeley and Clue to study perimenopause shows how much it cares about women’s health. Women now make up 59% of its users.
But tracking activities is still a weak point. The Ring 4’s automatic activity detection is better than the Gen 3’s, but it’s not as accurate as a Garmin or Apple Watch that is made just for fitness tracking. It kept track of six hikes over the weekend, but it sometimes got the names of tasks wrong, like calling driving “walking” or bedtime routines “yoga.” You can fix activities in the app by hand, but it’s a pain. A wrist-based tracker is still the best choice for serious athletes.
Compared to Other Companies
The Samsung Galaxy Ring ($399) and RingConn Gen 2 ($279) are tough competitors for the Oura Ring 4. The Galaxy Ring is thinner and lighter, but it only works with Android and doesn’t track sleep and women’s health as well as Oura does. The RingConn Gen 2 is very thin (2g) and doesn’t require a subscription, so it’s a good choice for people on a budget. However, its app and insights aren’t as good. Oura is the best choice for most people because it works on many platforms and has a lot of data. However, its subscription model and higher price may turn some people off.
Is It Worth It?
The Oura Ring 4 isn’t cheap at $349 (or $499 for premium finishes) plus a $5.99/month subscription. If you’re new to smart rings, this is the best one on the market. It has the best sleep tracking, great women’s health features, and a sleek, comfortable design. What makes it different from other products is that it can give you useful information, like telling you to rest when you’re sick.
But if you already have an Oura Ring Gen 3, you don’t need to upgrade right away. The Gen 3 has most of the software updates, such as the new app and health metrics. The hardware improvements are nice, but they may not be worth the extra money unless comfort or battery life is a big deal for you.
If keeping track of your workouts is important to you, a smartwatch like the Apple Watch Series 10 or Garmin Forerunner 265 will work better for you. The Oura Ring 4 is hard to beat for people who want a discreet, all-in-one health tracker that fits into their daily lives.
Final Decision
The Oura Ring 4 is a better version of an already great device. It is the best smart ring for tracking sleep and wellness because of its sleeker design, smarter sensors, and easy-to-use app. The Ring 4 is worth the money for people who want to learn more about their bodies, even though it has some problems with subscriptions and activity tracking. It can give you useful, personalized health information. The Oura Ring 4 is still the best smart ring out there, whether you’re buying it for the first time or you’re a health nut.
