Review: Oura Ring 3 and Whoop 4.0 are two ambitious wearables, but hard to sell

Recently, some wearables have begun to focus more on recovery between workouts, rather than just tracking the more common activity metrics. For example, the recently launched Fitbit Daily Readiness Score measures your sleep quality, activity levels, and heart rate variability (HRV) to quantify whether your body is ready for an intense workout or needs a break. Like other features of this type, it’s blocked by paywalls — in this case, a $10/month Fitbit Premium subscription.

Oura Ring (Gen 3) and Whoop 4.0 are two trendy, celebrity-approved fitness wearables built with this sort of “health and performance optimization”idea. They are completely different from each other – the first is a ring, and the second is a modest little module on the wrist. Whoop’s marketing focuses on optimizing athlete training, while Oura uses a wider network.

But both focus more on recovery assessment than regular activity tracking, and aim to tell you how your activity, sleep, and recovery rate are intertwined. Both do not have any kind of screen and require a subscription to their data, and neither is cheap. And they’re both owned by fast-growing companies – while not entirely known, Oura was reportedly valued at $800 million in 2021, while Whoop was valued at $3.6 billion.

Without built-in GPS and the ability to track your activities without a phone, neither device is ideal as a traditional fitness tracker. But to get past the Instagram-fueled hype and see if recovery-focused wearables are worth your time (and monthly subscription fees), we’ve spent weeks testing these odd little devices. Here’s what we found.

Membership fees and fees

Both Oura and Whoop require a monthly subscription. This is a new strategy for Oura and I hope they drop it, but Whoop has been using a subscription model with their past devices.

Whoop markets version 4.0 as “free”but with a mandatory $30 monthly subscription. You can pay for one or two years up front and get a discount, but it will still cost $240 or $300 for each year of use. Membership is key to everything the Whoop app has to offer, including all metrics, trends, reports, and community posts. That means you’ll have to pay the price of a moderately expensive smartwatch – and much more than many traditional fitness trackers – to keep using the device.

The Oura ring is $300 by default, or $400 for the invisibility and gold coloring. Unlike the previous Oura Ring model, this third generation model requires a $6/month subscription. Similar to Fitbit Premium, which is often free for six months or a year for new Fitbit owners, Oura offers the first six months free for new customers. Without a membership, you can only see some basic data for the current day, while further information, contextual information, and trends are hidden. The subscription also gives you access to a small library of step-by-step content. Compared to the $10/month Fitbit Premium, this library is slightly smaller and mostly offers “mindfulness”rather than exercise videos or recipe content like Fitbit does.

No other fitness trackers hide basic data behind paywalls to this extent. While Fitbit is withholding some longer trending analyzes from non-premium users, most of its trackers are much cheaper and offer more in the hardware department. Garmin fitness watches, meanwhile, tend to provide tons of detailed metrics and analysis for serious athletes at no extra cost. So both Oura and Whoop are likely to be a challenge for any buyers on a budget.