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The $399 Oura Ring 5 stands out from the field of screenless fitness trackers with its exceptional design. It feels weightless on the finger, with an even thinner, more elegant frame than the previous-gen model, while managing to add an extra three days of battery life in my testing. It launches alongside new features in the already robust Oura app, including long-term breathing-pattern measurements and overnight blood-pressure checks. The Fitbit Air ($99) wristband offers superior exercise monitoring for a lot less, making it our Editors' Choice for fitness trackers. If you want a holistic wellness tracker that doubles as jewelry, the Oura Ring 5 is the best one you'll find, and it succeeds its predecessor as our Editors' Choice for smart rings.
Price and Membership: An Expensive Investment
Starting at $399, the Oura Ring 5 costs $50 more than the base Oura Ring 4, which remains available as of this writing and offers all the same tracking features as its successor. Regardless of the model you choose, Oura charges a $69.99 annual membership fee for access to most of the ring's features.
All costs combined, the Oura Ring 5 is the most expensive smart ring that I’ve tested, exceeding the Samsung Galaxy Ring ($399.99), which doesn’t require a subscription. If you just want a basic fitness tracker, the wrist-based Fitbit Air costs much less and provides all key features without a subscription, though you can optionally pair it with Google Health Premium ($99.99 annually), which gives you access to a Gemini-powered health coach and guided workouts. As for other screenless fitness tracking options, there's also the Whoop 5.0, which costs $239 annually.
The base Oura Ring 5 comes in black or silver, with premium finishes including brushed silver, deep rose (rose gold), gold, or stealth (matte dark gray) available for $499. As a more affordable alternative, the Ring 4 is currently available in silver and stealth for $349 (down from $399 at launch) or gold for $399 (down from $499). The extra-durable Oura Ring 4 Ceramic is still available in midnight (dark blue) and cloud (white) for $399, a $100 discount from its launch price.
Oddly, the Oura Ring 5 comes in a smaller size range than its predecessor, 6 through 13, versus 4 through 15. The latest model's design is different enough from its predecessor that the company recommends getting a new sizing kit before ordering, even if you already have an Oura Ring 4. Oura offers a sizing kit for free with the purchase of a ring. Retailers like Amazon charge $10 for a sizing kit, but pair it with a coupon for $10 off the ring to offset the cost if you follow through on the purchase.
Design: The Reason to Splurge
I was initially worried about the Oura Ring 5's limited size range because I wore a size 14 in the Ring 4. Now, I understand why Oura recommends getting a new sizing kit for this generation. The refined design makes a big difference in several ways, including sizing. The company sent me a silver Oura Ring 5 in size 13 for this review, and it perfectly fits the same index finger where I wore the Oura Ring 4.
The Oura Ring 5 looks like ordinary jewelry at a glance, with minimal signs of the underlying tech when worn on your finger. Like its predecessor, it has a uniform, rounded exterior, whereas the Oura Ring 3 Heritage has a flattened top, and the Samsung Galaxy Ring has a concave design.
Measuring 0.24 inches wide by 0.09 inches thick, the Oura Ring 5 is 40% slimmer than its predecessor (0.31 by 0.11 inches), which is already a thin and comfortable smart ring. For those willing to splurge, this design in particular makes the Oura Ring 5 worth the upgrade over the Ring 4. The fifth-gen model is so thin that I often forget I am wearing it, and its elegant, stylish design always catches my eye when I look down. Unlike Whoop and some other wrist-based trackers, it doesn't ever detract from my look. In fact, on fancy occasions, it adds a little panache of its own.
As for comfort, the Oura Ring 5 feels unobtrusive even when my hand is clenched in a fist. I noticed it when lifting weights, but that’s a disadvantage of all smart rings compared with wrist-based trackers. That said, while the Fitbit Air gets in the way less at the gym, I prefer Oura’s look when dressing up. For durability, it’s made of high-performance titanium, with an IP68 weather resistance rating, and is waterproof down to 328 feet. The Oura Ring 4 is similarly durable.
A small white notch on the bottom of the Oura Ring 5 serves as a directional indicator; it’s meant to face your palm. Like the Oura Ring 4, the Oura Ring 5 has red and green infrared LEDs to measure blood oxygen saturation (SpO2), heart rate, heart rate variability (an indicator of stress), and respiratory rate, plus skin temperature sensors and an accelerometer.
The red and green LEDs are visible on the inside, but barely. With the Oura Ring 4, Oura trimmed down the size of the sensor bumps from the previous generation. On the Oura Ring 5, they're so minuscule that you have to feel along the inside to even notice them. You’ll occasionally see a splash of light from the LEDs when you're in a dark room, but only if you’re staring at your finger at the time.
Battery Life: Even Better Than Last Gen
Given the Oura Ring 5's extra-thin frame, a small sacrifice in battery life compared with its predecessor would have been understandable. Oura impresses me on this front by somehow squeezing even more battery life into the petite Oura Ring 5.
The company officially estimates that the Oura Ring 5 should last between six and nine days on a charge, depending on usage, up from five to eight days for the Ring 4. In testing, the Oura Ring 5 exceeded that estimate, lasting 10.5 days in two separate battery rundown tests with typical usage.
It easily beats the Ring 4, which lasted just over seven days between charges in my testing under similar conditions. This battery life also gives the Oura Ring 5 an advantage over the Fitbit Air, which lasted 8.5 days per charge in my testing.
The Oura Ring 5 includes a size-specific charging stand in its box. Fitting the ring onto this stand is simple; it only slots into place when correctly aligned. The box also includes a USB-C-to-USB-C charging cable, but no brick. You can optionally get an aluminum charging case ($99) that holds some battery life of its own. I did not have this case during testing. On the included stand, the Oura Ring 5 charged back to full in 83 minutes.
Setup: Quick Pairing and a Questionnaire
To get started with the Oura Ring 5, place it on the plugged-in charging stand, and wait for the light on the stand to blink blue, indicating the ring is ready to sync. From there, download the Oura app (for Android and iOS) and sign up for an account if you're new to the brand. The app will prompt you for permission to find nearby devices, then walk you through pairing with the ring.
The Oura Ring 5 has Bluetooth Low Energy built in, and it paired with my phone through the app within a few moments. Once synced, the app asks for your birthday, weight, height, and gender (male, female, or other) so it can properly calibrate the data it collects from the ring. It also asks for permission to connect to third-party health services on your phone to collect more data. I set it up on an Android phone, and it synced seamlessly with Health Connect once I granted permission.
Finally, it asks you to choose goals and focus areas. I set a goal to “be productive and energetic," but Oura offers several other options like "improve my athletic performance,” as well as broader focus areas like “stress.” It then asks you to select your most common lifestyle and sporting activities and specify whether you have any extenuating circumstances, such as young kids or a job with night shifts.
While the syncing occurred in mere moments, it took me a few minutes to go through the full questionnaire. The questions all felt both straightforward and fair for a device meant to provide holistic health guidance. I didn’t find them intrusive. With the setup process complete, the app was ready to go, but as with most fitness trackers, I needed to wear the ring for a few days before the app filled in most of my info.
Holistic Health Monitoring: Richly Detailed, Well-Organized
The Oura Ring 5 tracks more than 50 health metrics according to the company, including movement throughout the day, a range of different exercises, sleep duration and stages, and stress levels. The Oura app organizes this information into various scores, including Activity and Sleep, and your overall Readiness on a scale of 1 to 100, letting you know whether you're prepared for an intense workout or in need of rest. Over time, the Oura Ring 5 tracks long-term health metrics, such as cardio capacity, cardiovascular age, and sleep regularity.
New features arriving with this generation include the ability to monitor overnight blood pressure for signs of hypertension, keep tabs on your long-term breathing patterns, and even track the effects of GLP-1 weight-loss medication. The blood pressure feature doesn’t actually take any active measurements that you can check. The feature functions similarly to Apple’s Hypertension notifications on recent Apple Watches. Oura monitors your blood pressure over time and alerts you if it detects a problem.
You can also now optionally import your medical records, chat with a doctor through the app, and/or sign up for a Brain Health study to track changes in your cognition. Note that these new features are also available on the Oura Ring 4 via an app update.
The Oura App: Today, Vitals, and My Health
The Oura app organizes all of your information into three main tabs. The Today tab shows you your scores at the top, as well as a customizable list of metrics. Scroll down for a dynamic spotlight section that surfaces the most relevant information, based on the time of day. For example, it could show your sleep score in the morning and swap it with either your activity score in the afternoon if you’re behind on your goal or your stress score if you need to relax. Scroll further on this tab for a timeline of recorded events, such as exercise and sleep.
The Vitals tab has a customizable list of scores and metrics at the top, and shows each alongside small charts and explanations of the data. Select any of the cards for more information and longer-term charts, or tap on any of your scores for details on the contributing factors.
The My Health tab shows charts for longer-term stats like cardio capacity, cardiovascular age, and sleep regularity. In this tab, you can also talk to a generative AI advisor about any of your stats. Scroll down on this page to see new features like nighttime breathing grouped under a Health Radar button.
Accurate, Descriptive Metrics
Using the Oura app feels intuitive to me. I can readily find any information I’m curious about, and the app does an excellent job of showing key metrics at a glance, with additional details available via a quick tap. In terms of how it organizes your data, I prefer the Oura app to the Google Health app (which replaced the Fitbit app when the Fitbit Air launched) and the Whoop app.
I also find Oura's holistic scores to be anecdotally correct. Its Readiness number always matches my mental state. I'm encouraged to see positive long-term health metrics as well; it says my cardiovascular age is a year younger than my actual age. As far as the new features, it showed steady long-term breathing patterns for me. Additionally, it did not spot any concerning blood pressure signals during my testing.
Oura deliberately isn’t as prescriptive as either Fitbit or Whoop. If you’re looking for guidance to reach your fitness goal, both of those platforms offer more hand-holding. Oura provides some advice through its customizable activity goals and health and readiness assessments, but its approach leans more toward that of an accountant versus an advisor. It tracks your data, makes it easy to find, and lets you do with it what you will.
Exercise Tracking: Still Waiting for a Breakthrough
With the Oura app, you can track a huge range of activities, exercises, and sports. It even counts everyday activities like household chores and yard work toward your goal. You can manually start tracking an activity, or let the ring automatically detect your movement. That said, it lags behind wrist-based competitors in exercise monitoring, a weak point for smart rings in general.
On some days, the Oura Ring 5’s automatic workout detection nailed it, accurately breaking down my HIIT session into three individual parts: the walk to the gym, the actual workout, and the walk home. It also seems to improve over time, learning my behaviors and preferred activities as I manually correct or add missed entries.
However, even after wearing it for a couple of weeks and manually correcting several sessions, it will occasionally miss a workout, an issue I also experienced with the Oura Ring 4. This mostly affected HIIT workouts, though it also missed some shorter walks and housework. Overall, the Whoop 5.0 is a more reliable automatic fitness tracker; it accurately detected all of my workouts throughout my testing period.
When it records an exercise, the Oura app shows heart rate zones along with your average and max pulse for the session, but you can’t see moment-to-moment values like you can with the Fitbit Air and the Whoop 5.0. Additionally, Oura now lets you track your workout data in real time via the app, but this feature only populates your pulse information if you're using a synced third-party heart rate monitor. The Oura Ring 5 also tracks exercise stats like calories, distance, pace, and time, but it lacks some of the granular details you get with many smartwatches, including running metrics like ground contact time, vertical oscillation, and power.
The Oura Ring 5's average heart rate figures proved accurate for HIIT and running workouts when I tested it alongside the proven $799 Apple Watch Ultra 3 and the Fitbit Air. Its maximum heart rate values were often 10 to 15bpm lower than those from the other devices, indicating it didn’t always keep up during intense moments.
The thinner Oura Ring 5 only traces 12 signal pathways through your finger, down from 18 on the Oura Ring 4, but still performs similarly to its predecessor. I would have appreciated a bigger step forward on this front, especially given the increased competition from screenless trackers for the wrist like the Fitbit Air and Whoop 5.0.
Sleep and Stress: As Good As It Gets
While Oura trails the wrist-based competition at exercise tracking, it’s my preferred platform for measuring both sleep and stress. Like the Oura Ring 4, the Oura Ring 5 measures sleep duration, efficiency, latency, restfulness, time in bed awake, timing, and the amount of time you spend in each sleep stage, plus health metrics like average heart rate variability, blood oxygen saturation, breathing regularity, and resting heart rate. It assesses these various contributors to give you a sleep score and personalized assessment.
Over time, Oura also calculates long-term metrics such as sleep regularity and sleep debt, in addition to the new nighttime breathing and blood pressure features mentioned above. These long-term numbers made sense in practice, docking me when I had a late night on a weekend, and showing some sleep debt after a restless night.
I compared the Oura Ring 5’s nightly sleep data with that of the Fitbit Air and the Apple Watch Ultra 3, and Oura’s charts and values consistently matched those of the control devices to a reasonable degree. Moreover, I appreciate the way Oura lays out sleep data with clear, well-organized charts that you can tap for more information.
Oura’s stress measurements also proved anecdotally correct. You can optionally overlay your activity and movement data onto the stress chart for a clear view of what might have caused certain spikes.
Both the Fitbit Air and the Whoop accurately track sleep and stress as well, but both apps, with Whoop being the worst offender, put prescriptive advice front and center while making the actual charts and data a bit harder to find. Oura provides some advice, and sends notifications to remind you to start winding down, but again mostly just provides the data to use as you see fit.
