The best smart rings

If you're into fitness tracking but hate bulky wearables or constant pings, a smart ring may be your move. The best smart rings on the market right now deliver the same key health metrics — sleep, steps, stress, recovery — in a minimal, sleek design with accuracy to rival many of the best fitness trackers. These usable insights can help you sleep better, train harder, perform better at work, and feel more in sync with your body over time.

Over the last four months, I tested the leading smart rings head-to-head — often wearing them alongside the best Fitbits and best Garmin watches — to see how they really stack up in terms of accuracy, comfort, and usefulness. The Oura Ring 4 is my top pick for its accurate tracking, approachable advice, and lightweight design. Whether you're looking to ditch your smartwatch or want a more subtle way to stay on top of your health, these are the best smart rings worth your money right now.

Top picks for fitness rings

Best overall: Oura Ring 4 - See at Amazon

Honorable mention for Android users: Samsung Galaxy Ring - See at Amazon

Best budget: Amazfit Helio Ring - See at Amazon

Best for biohackers: Ultrahuman Ring Air - See at Amazon

A note about smart ring sizing

Having a smart ring that fits well is absolutely crucial to getting the most out of your wearable. If the ring is too loose, the sensors won't have constant skin contact to record your biometrics, and your data will be spotty. This is why brands with more sizes are better.

All smart ring brands mentioned here offer a ring sizing kit you can use to get the right fit. You can either try it on at local retailers like Target and Best Buy, or you can have a kit shipped to you for $10 to $15. The brand will then credit you for the cost of the kit when you buy the full ring.

You want your smart ring to fit snugly but comfortably, and most brands recommend you wear the sample size for two full days to make sure it's still comfortable as your fingers swell and contract.

Best overall

Of all the smart rings I tested, the Oura Ring 4 easily took the lead as the one I'd pay money for, again and again. The only smart ring I tested to be beyond its first generation, the Oura Ring Gen 4 has nearly everything you'd want in a smart ring: the most accurate and consistent tracking among its competitors, a long battery life (less charging = more time collecting data), and an intuitive app that delivers a simplified and informative interpretation of your metrics. Whether you're looking to track your sleep, recovery, activity, or menstrual cycle, the Oura Ring 4 delivers the most well-rounded insights in a format that's digestible, not overwhelming.

This isn't the sleekest of rings, but after a few days getting used to it, I found the all-titanium design to be lightweight and comfortable to wear 24/7. The Gen 4 features upgraded "smart sensing" technology that uses more sensors and pathways (18 vs. the previous eight) to maintain a more consistent connection. Paired with a wider range of sizes to choose from (10) for a closer fit, this ring has uninterrupted tracking.

This allows it to quietly collect advanced data — including resting heart rate, skin temperature, sleep stages, and daily movement — and then distill that into a simple readiness score or sleep quality metric you can check on your phone in seconds. Oura's updated app is now streamlined into just three tabs — Today, Vitals, and My Health — which I found makes it incredibly easy and intuitive to glean insights into everything from how well-rested my body is to bigger concepts like my chronotype or cardio capacity. In side-by-side tests with Garmin watches, I found Oura's sleep and readiness scores to be impressively accurate; many women also find its menstrual tracking to be invaluable thanks to the accurate skin temperature read.

Another thing that sets Oura apart is AI-driven features like Oura Advisor, where you can ask questions about your cycle, heart health, or what to do when your recovery metrics dip. It also feels smarter and more adaptable than other rings, utilizing small changes in your skin temperature to alert you to early signs of an illness and adjusting your daily step goal when your body shows signs of stress — small touches I appreciated while recovering from COVID. I also love that the Oura Ring auto-detects every small movement throughout the day, asking you to verify even just a few minutes of housework — this attention to the minutiae made my overall calorie burn and readiness score feel the most accurate of any wearable I tested.

Still, the Oura Ring 4 isn't perfect: You'll need to pay $6 a month to access most features beyond your sleep, readiness, and activity, and it's not made for real-time workout tracking and cuing like a Garmin or Apple Watch. The ring design is simple enough to conceal in a ring stack, but definitely a bit clunky for someone who doesn't wear any jewelry. And premium materials, such as rose gold, can cost as much as $150 extra. That said, if your main goal is to better understand how your lifestyle habits are affecting your body — and you want that info presented in a subtle, non-intrusive way — the Oura Ring 4 is the smartest, most well-designed option on the market.

Read my full Oura Ring 4 review.

Honorable mention for Android users

After months of testing the top smart rings head-to-head, I still think the Oura Ring (which works with both Android and iOS) is the best pick for most people. Its deeper health insights, more robust app, and smarter activity detection just go further than anything else on the market. But if you're an Android user — particularly one already invested in the Samsung ecosystem — the Galaxy Ring is absolutely worth considering.

It's the thinnest and most discreet ring I tested, with a slimmer design and scratch-resistant, concave titanium build. It comes with a jewelry box-style charging case that keeps your ring safe and, like an AirPods case, can charge your ring without a cord (up to 1.5 times), making it handy for travel. This ring has no subscription fee — just a one-time purchase fee — which is a major win in a category where monthly costs add up fast.

For Galaxy Watch users, the ring serves as a smart companion device: it tracks sleep while your watch charges (conserving battery on both) and seamlessly syncs with the Watch's superior daytime activity data in the Samsung Health app. It has added perks for Samsung Galaxy phone users — make a double-tap pinching gesture on your ring-wearing finger and thumb, and you can take pictures on your phone or dismiss an alarm.

That said, the Samsung Galaxy Ring is still a first-gen product — and it shows. I found the Galaxy Ring's health insights to be fairly surface-level and its activity tracking limited. It auto-tracks just walking and running, and, while you can manually log (a select number of) other workouts, I found this to be too much of a pain to be practical. Also, the Ring is set up to with through both the Wear app (for pairing and quick settings) and Samsung Health (for your actual health data), but I found this to be clunky and confusing and not nearly as intuitive or streamlined as Oura's app.

If you're looking for actionable feedback on how to improve your health or the comprehensive recovery metrics of most fitness wearables these days, this ring isn't quite there yet. But for Android loyalists who want a lightweight, minimalist tracker that plays nicely with tech they already own, the Galaxy Ring is a promising smart — and one of the few smart rings that fits seamlessly into the Android world.

Read my full Samsung Galaxy Ring review.

Best budget

If you're set on getting a smart ring but can't justify spending $350+, the Amazfit Helio Ring is one of the few budget options out there. At around $200 with no monthly subscription, this ring checks the box on affordability. That price gets you the basics: It tracks sleep stages, stress levels, steps, and generates a general readiness score for how prepared your body is for the day ahead. The ring itself is made from lightweight titanium, which feels surprisingly premium for the price. The Zepp app the ring pairs with also has an AI chat feature where you can get more insight into what might be affecting your sleep quality or other burning health questions.

But in my experience, this is very much a "you get what you pay for" situation. The Zepp app is a bit clunky and uses a layout and language that feels a bit outdated. For example, the main Overview tab puts food tracking front above sleep scores or daily step count, and after initial setup, it delivered me an "overweight" label on the homescreen based on BMI alone, which just felt entirely unnecessary since it hadn't asked me about health goals. It also doesn't track skin temperature, which rules out the nice-to-haves of higher-cost rings like illness detection or menstrual phase tracking. It doesn't autodetect walks or movement throughout the day, and its manual activity tracking is limited to just four workouts — none of which include strength training. Also, the battery life is painfully short at just three or four days.

It only comes in one color, and sizing is limited to three options; the latter is less of a big deal since it doesn't track skin temperature, but it could still affect the accuracy of heart rate variability while you sleep.

Overall, this ring will provide the basics of health tracking. The real benefit of the ring comes from pairing it with other Amazfit products, like the Amazfit Smartwatch or faceless Helio Strap; you can wear it when you don't want a watch on or while the watch is charging to ensure continuous tracking. But once these multiple purchases stack up, you would've been better off investing in a better smart ring like the Oura 4 or a better smartwatch or fitness tracker.

The Helio Ring might work for first-time buyers or students who only care about tracking sleep and steps in a minimalist form. But in my opinion, for the same price or cheaper, a fitness tracker like the Fitbit Charge 6 ($120) will give you far more insight, accuracy, and value.

Best for biohackers

If you're deep in the health data and optimization rabbit hole, the Ultrahuman Ring Air offers some unique and useful insights biohackers will love to get a read on. This titanium ring looks like most mainstream options, but it goes beyond just step counts and sleep scores. It offers advanced insights into things like cognitive recovery, circadian phase shifts, and glymphatic system activity (i.e., whether your brain cleared out waste properly overnight). It's one of the few wearables that tracks longevity markers and neuro metrics — data other wearables don't even touch.

While this is exciting for the biohacking community, fair warning: This ring is not particularly beginner-friendly. The app leans hard into raw data without much guidance or context. So, unless you're already fluent in terms like "phase advance" or know what to do with a read on your brain age, you'll likely feel overwhelmed by the info this ring supplies.

While I appreciate that the ring offers a robust interface of features for free, it also has a pay-for tool library to access things like advanced ovulation tracking ($3.99/month) and cardio adaptability ($2.90/month), and these monthly fees can easily add up to negate that pro.

Also not ideal: The Air's battery life maxes out at around five days, which I found to be incredibly inconvenient. When I wore it alongside other smart rings and fitness watches, its activity and sleep tracking were noticeably less accurate. The first Ultrahuman ring only launched in 2022, so there's still a lot of optimizing that needs to be done.

Still, there's a place for the Ultrahuman Ring Air — namely for someone more interested in optimizing their bigger picture, long-term health versus their day-to-day recovery and readiness. The Air isn't the best ring to make sure you're getting your 10,000 steps in or gauging how well recovered you are for today's grueling workout, but it will help you understand how you can optimize your brain health, cognitive performance, and circadian alignment. Just be ready to dig through some science yourself to score a solid action plan.

Read my full Ultrahuman Ring Air review.

How we test smart rings

I tested the four leading smart rings over the course of four months, for roughly one to two months each. During the testing period, I wore each ring all day, every day, 24/7, while sleeping, working, exercising, showering, and in everyday life. Additionally, I wore a Garmin or Fitbit watch simultaneously during testing to better gauge the accuracy of the ring.

Every ring was tested in a variety of situations, from full rest days to strenuous workouts ranging from strength workouts to 5-mile runs to mountain bike rides; perfectly restful and terribly restless nights' sleep; long days traveling through different time zones and monotonous days at work.

I evaluated each smart ring on:

• How well it fit.
• How comfortable it was while sweating, sleeping, and showering.
• How scratched up it got over the course of a month.
• How long the battery lasted.

Additionally, I evaluated each accompanying app on:

• How accurate the data was compared to other smart rings and smart watches I was testing simultaneously.
• How intuitive the app was to navigate.
• How helpful and streamlined the metrics were to help me understand my sleep quality and health.

Overall, each smart ring was tested for comfort, accuracy of biometric data, and how succinctly and helpfully the data was packaged into advice that I could use to improve my health.

The post The best smart rings appeared first on Business Insider