Which Is Better: Whoop vs. Oura

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Comfort and sizing

Both Oura and Whoop bring a different experience than wearing a watch (although you can wear the Whoop on your wrist), and each takes some getting used to in its own way. The Oura ring is, of course, a ring that you wear on your finger. It’s chunkier than most rings you would choose to wear as jewelry, and the feel of it can take some getting used to. My wedding rings are pretty chunky as wedding rings go, and the Oura is far thicker. Still, it’s easy enough to get used to. The gen 3 Oura ring has three sensor bumps on the inside. The redesigned gen 4 loses those bumps, and is a bit slimmer (and is supposed to be more comfortable as a result). 

Before you order your ring, you should make sure you know your size. With both the gen 3 and gen 4, you can order a sizing kit that contains a plastic ring in each size. The company recommends that you not only try the rings on, but also that you wear your chosen size for 24 hours so that you can see how it fits throughout the day. Our fingers often swell a bit during sleep. It’s also worth noting that our fingers’ size can change with the seasons. I wear my Oura ring on a different finger in the summer than in the winter for this reason. 

If you’re shopping for a gen 4 ring, you have another sizing option: You can go into a Best Buy store and try on the plastic sizing rings in-store. This is how I discovered that I would need to go down half a size to upgrade to the gen 4 ring. And Oura doesn’t offer half sizes, so instead of going from a 7 to the nonexistent 6.5 for my ring finger, my better bet would be getting a size 8 for my middle finger (which previously was between size 8 and 9). Oura recommends using your middle or index finger, anyway.

The Whoop band, by contrast, is easier to shop for. The device itself is a rectangular nugget of plastic, and it attaches to a fabric band with a clasp. The default band is a wristband, designed to be worn like a watch. But you can also buy a bicep band (a longer version of the wristband, meant to be worn on the upper arm) or explore Whoop’s line of clothing, including underwear and bras, that has a little pocket to slip the Whoop into (minus its band, of course). 

My preference is to wear the Whoop with the bicep band. An anatomical note: The band is meant to fit not on your bicep, but just above it, below your deltoid. Or to put it another way, it should go as high on your arm as you can comfortably get it, a few inches below your armpit.

Cost (and subscription fees) 

All right, it’s math time. Both Oura and Whoop have subscription fees that makes the question of “which costs more?” a bit complicated.

The Oura ring has a different base price depending on which generation, color, and finish you choose. The gen 3 ring’s list price ranges from $299 for black or silver, up to $449 for gold or rose gold—although at the moment, an early Black Friday sale has prices on some models as low as $249. The gen 4 Oura ring costs about $50 more for each configuration, ranging from $349 for silver to $499 for gold.

Once you own the hardware (and get your first month free), you have to pay for a $5.99/month subscription to get the most out of your Oura ring. (Without a subscription, you just get a few summary scores. If you’re bothering to buy the ring, you want the subscription.) You can pre-pay for a year’s subscription for $69.99, but that only saves you about two dollars.

• Oura ring costs in the first year: $299 to $499 plus $65.89 for 11 months’ subscription fee (total: $364.89 to $564.89)

• Oura ring costs for the first two years, combined (the above plus a $69.99 annual subcription): $434.88 to $634.88

I’m hesitant to price out the Oura ring beyond the first two years, because my gen 2 ring and my gen 3 ring both gave up the ghost at the two-year mark, refusing to hold more than about a day’s charge. That said, the gen 2 was under warranty at that point, so I got a free upgrade to gen 3; and my gen 3 died right when Oura launched the gen 4 and they must have needed to get rid of some old stock, so they gave me the choice of a discount on a gen 4 or a newly refurbished gen 3 for free. (I took the free replacement.) But I can’t promise that anyone else will be that lucky. The warranty is now only one year, not two.

The Whoop strap has an entirely different price structure. Technically there’s no charge for the hardware at all, but you need to commit to a subscription to get it. (There is a one-month free trial that comes with a pre-owned device, at the end of which you need to either return the device, paying $8.99 shipping, or choose one of the standard subscription options.)

The simplest way to get into the Whoop ecosystem is to buy a strap + one year subscription package, which you can do on Whoop’s website or through Amazon. It’s $239 for a year. Or you can pay by the month, at $30/month, but you still need to commit to 12 months (which would be $360 for the year). There’s also a two-year membership available for $399 if you know from the start that you’re going to keep it that long. You can view the pricing tiers here. While you’re a Whoop member, your device is under lifetime warranty, and you can also upgrade for free when a new generation of the device comes out.

• Whoop costs in the first year: $239 for a 12-month subscription (or $399 if you go for the 2-year subscription)

• Whoop costs in the first two years, combined: $599 if you renew at $30/month, $478 if you buy a second 12-month subscription, or $399 if you knew from the start that you wanted a two-year subscription and just started with that.

The only caveat on the Whoop pricing is that you may end up wanting extra accessories so you can wear the device in more ways (or accessorize for fashion purposes). The bicep band is $54. There’s also an arm sleeve for $34, a bra for $39, and a pair of boxer briefs for $29, to give a few examples.

From a pure numbers standpoint here, the Whoop wins out. You can get two years’ worth of the subscription and the device and unlimited warranty replacements and upgrades for $399—which is the same cost as a brushed silver gen 4 Oura ring before any subscription fees. You could argue the Oura is worth the price because it’s a nice bit of jewelry. That’s fair. But you’re paying extra for it.

Charging

Both devices have a battery that lasts several days, and use a proprietary charger that plugs into a USB-C cable. That said, the charging experience is different for each.

The Oura ring is the simpler of the two: The ring comes with a charger that fits that exact ring size (so if you wear a size 7 ring, you need a size 7 charger), and the charger sits on your nightstand or desk with the ring holder portion pointing upward. To charge the ring, you just slip it onto the charger. I charge mine during workouts—and we’ll get to why when we talk about activity tracking.

(It has occurred to me that the perfectly sized charger is a bit of a theft deterrent: When I clip my ring onto my gym bag during a workout, I sometimes chuckle at the mental image of somebody stealing the ring, then trying to figure out what size it is so they can order the matching $59 charger. Whoop’s battery pack is in the same price range at $49, but isn’t sized.)

The Whoop device is meant to be worn 24/7, and the company encourages you not to take it off to charge. Instead of plugging the device into a charging cord, there is a little portable battery pack. You use a standard USB-C cord to charge the battery pack, and when your Whoop is running low, you slide the battery pack onto the Whoop as you’re wearing it. 

While this is convenient in theory, I don’t love charging it this way. The battery pack sticks out from your wrist (or arm, or wherever you’re wearing it—and it doesn’t fit into the pockets of the Whoop Body clothing, anyway). You’re going to whack it into things because you’re used to the Whoop’s low profile. I also don’t want to wear the Whoop 24/7, because that means wearing it into the shower and getting the band all soggy. So I use the battery pack like a charging adapter: Before I step into the shower, I take the Whoop off, slide it into the battery pack, and plug in the battery so it can charge while I shower. 

Battery life

• Oura says a gen 3 ring lasts up to seven days, and a gen 4 ring lasts up to eight days. Blood oxygen sensing uses more battery, but you can turn that off (and I’d argue you should, since that data isn’t particularly useful). 

• Whoop says its battery lasts four to five days. It draws less charge when you aren’t moving, and uses more battery during activities. So the more active you are, the faster the battery could run down. 

• In my own tests, I turned on the Oura’s blood oxygen sensing, and found that it and the Whoop kept pace together on battery life, reaching the three-day mark at 52% (Whoop) and 51% (Oura), suggesting a battery life for both that is just short of six days. Turning off blood oxygen will make the Oura last longer, and the Whoop’s battery life will depend on how much time you spend working out.

I also noticed that tracking activities with Whoop increased my phone’s battery usage. One day I tracked a strength workout with Whoop, and noticed later that day that my phone’s battery was lower than I’d expect. On days that I track an activity with Whoop, my iPhone’s battery analytics show that Whoop’s background activity has been responsible for 20 to 25% of my phone’s battery usage that day. 

From a strictly numbers standpoint, the Oura wins here on battery life. But both devices will last you most of a week, and you won’t have to really think about their battery life at all you get into a routine of charging them a little bit every day or every couple of days (while you work out for Oura; while you shower for Whoop).

Sleep and recovery tracking

Tons of devices call themselves fitness trackers, but both Oura and Whoop market themselves as precision devices for the other side of training: how you sleep, and how well you recover from training, respectively. (Same data, different angles of interpretation.)

I want to pause here to appreciate something. In Oura’s case, the focus on sleep was a smart way to deal with the technology’s inherent limitations. It’s hard to get good, accurate readings from any optical sensor on a moving body part, which is a hurdle that watches have mostly managed to deal with. But a finger is even tougher to gather data from. (See this review of Motiv, an early fitness ring, I did in 2018—it just couldn’t get a good reading during exercise.) Accuracy goes up if you hold very still, though, and if your surroundings are dark. Therefore, the perfect use case is when you’re asleep. Give these guys some kind of product-development Nobel prize.

The sleep experts I’ve spoken with in the past were generally positive about the idea of paying attention to how much sleep you’re getting, which trackers can help with, but they don’t recommend people obsess over exactly what “quality” of sleep you’re getting or how much time you’re spending in each sleep stage. Trackers are also notoriously bad at detecting awake time during sleep, by the way; they may say that you woke up briefly when you didn’t, or vice versa.

A 2024 review of studies on sleep trackers found that it’s hard to meaningfully evaluate commercial sleep trackers’ accuracy, because the companies closely guard their algorithms rather than making them fully available for scientists to check out. A 2023 study that compared Oura, Whoop, and other devices to polysomnography (the kind of analysis you’d get in a full sleep study at a hospital or lab) found that Oura got the sleep stages right 89% of the time, and Whoop 86% of the time. That’s a “hey, cool that it can do it at all” kind of reading, but it’s not accurate enough to base your actions around, say, getting more REM because a device said you didn’t get enough. And even though Oura scored higher, I truly can’t recommend one device over another based on that 3%.

Oura gives a graph of your sleep stages each night, and rates how well you did on factors like total sleep, how long it took you to fall asleep, and whether your overall sleep timing is on track (keeping a consistent bedtime and wake-up time will improve this score). All of this is summarized in a sleep score out of 100. Meanwhile, Whoop gathers similar data but presents it differently. You get a sleep “performance” score out of 100, for example, and the total time and “consistency” (rather than “timing”) are among the data presented. There’s no timeline of your sleep stages during the night, but there is a bar graph that will show you how much deep sleep and REM sleep it thinks you got each night.

Whereas Oura tracks your sleep as a day-to-day “here’s how you did,” Whoop approaches it more like a bank account. It calculates how much sleep it thinks you need each night, and shows you a graph of how your actual sleep compared to the hours you needed. The shortfall is labeled “sleep debt.”

Overall, Oura is better at showing you what’s going on and letting you decide how to feel about it. Besides sleep and readiness scores, it will also measure your heart rate throughout the day and interpret that as stress, and also score your “resilience” (how your stress compares to how well you’ve been recovering). Whoop, on the other hand, really leans into the coaching angle. You can even create a “plan” in Whoop that will make the app gear its suggestions toward, say, pushing you athletically, or prioritizing relaxation. Even without a specific plan, Whoop will recommend a “Strain” score each day, urging you to get more exercise on days you’re better recovered.

I’m not going to award a winner for this category. Both apps provide a thoughtful approach, and it’s really up to your preference which one fits your life better. Whoop is arguably the more useful one for athletes, Oura for minimalists or for scientifically minded folks who just want the data presented neutrally.

Activity tracking

Bad news for Oura here: It doesn’t really track activities. Now, it can use activity tracking data from other apps, so if you’ve got multiple devices—like if you track runs on a Garmin—you’ll get the big picture in terms of data. But as an activity tracker itself? It’s garbage. 

Oura’s first problem with activity tracking is that you can’t use it when strength training. Sure, you can buy a silicone ring protector to keep it from getting scratched in the gym, and you can keep it on for push exercises like bench press, but you’re not realistically going to make it through pull exercises like pullups or deadlifts without it digging into your finger and hurting like a mofo. Even if you have a high pain tolerance, it’s still messing with the effectiveness of your grip. I put my Oura ring on its charger when I head for the gym. 

And then there’s cardio tracking: Oura can tell that you were running, for example, but it doesn’t know anything about how your run went. You’re not going to get mile splits or feedback on your performance, and honestly most of the time I’ve attempted to use the “record workout HR” feature, the app crashes. Activity tracking with Oura is a non-starter as far as I’m concerned. 

Whoop does much better here, although it’s still not great. I would say that software-wise, it’s excellent; hardware-wise, however, it just doesn’t have the sensors to do a good job. I’ll get into those drawbacks in the accuracy section, below. 

For cardio, Whoop is basically just a heart-rate monitor. You tell it what kind of exercise you’re doing, and it measures your heart rate. From that heart rate data, it calculates your “strain” for the day. If you’re running or walking outdoors, it can also track your location to get a sense of your speed and distance. Since the Whoop device doesn’t have a GPS sensor itself, it needs to be connected via Bluetooth to your phone, and it uses your phone’s GPS. The result is a data file that it can upload to running sites like Strava, giving you the ability to analyze your data after the fact. (Since it has no screen, you can’t glance at your pace while you’re running; but if you’re able to have your phone in view, say on a bike at the gym, you can at least see your heart rate mid-workout.) 

For strength training, Whoop can do even better. It used to just track strength workouts like a cardio activity, using your heart rate to add to your “strain” (which is silly, since strength training is about its effect on your muscles and can’t really be measured through heart-rate data the way cardio can). But last year they introduced a Strength Trainer, which bumped up your Strain score if you followed along with a workout in a very specific, finicky way. (I reviewed it here: I appreciated the thought behind the feature, but hated the experience.) Well, now Whoop has figured out how to make the darn thing useful. You can track a strength workout, and then after the fact it will ask if you’d like to tell it what exercises you did. You can enter the workout then, with sets and reps and weight, and it adjusts your Strain score to match. Genius.

Accuracy

Not to be mean, but there’s not really any point to discussing the Oura’s accuracy in tracking workouts. (It has been disqualified from this part of the competition.) So I’ll give a few notes about the Whoop band’s accuracy here. It’s an okay workout tracker, but you’d be better off with a different device if you want the best accuracy.

When you’re using the Whoop to track an outdoor activity like a run, it relies on your phone’s location sensors. That means you can’t use it to track your location or speed in activities where you don’t carry your phone (like swimming, or if you prefer to leave your phone at home when you run). Phones’ location systems aren’t usually anywhere near as good as running watches or smartwatches, so you’ll have a more scraggly GPS track, and your pace and distance readings should be treated as rough estimates.

On heart rate, the Whoop ranges from “good enough” to “pretty good, actually.” Depending on the activity, I sometimes find that the sensor isn’t picking up my heart rate very well. I’ve noticed in the past that adjusting the band will sometimes bring a low reading up to a more realistic number. This probably depends on the band’s placement; from my general impressions, it seems to be more accurate in the bicep band than worn on the wrist.

In my tests for this review, the Whoop (blue line) tracked a chest strap heart rate monitor (black line) fairly well, but with some pretty obvious shortcomings. It often didn’t pick up on the peak heart rate of an interval, and sometimes zigzagged below the gold-standard chest strap reading. It wasn’t as accurate as the readings I’ve gotten from good smartwatches, like the Pixel Watch 3 or the Garmin Forerunner 265s, but it’s OK enough to do the job as long as you don’t need surgical precision. (And if you do: get a chest strap.)