Corey Gaskin
Recently, some wearables have started to place more emphasis on recovery and recovery between exercises rather than just tracking more general activity stats. For example, Fitbit’s recently launched Daily Readiness Score measures your sleep quality, activity levels and heart rate variability (HRV) to quantify whether your body is prepared for an intense workout session or whether it needs a break. Like other features of this type, it’s behind a paywall, in this case the Fitbit Premium subscription service at $10 per month.
The Oura Ring (Gen 3) and Whoop 4.0 are two effervescent celebrity-approved fitness wearables built using these kinds of “health and performance optimization” insights. They look nothing alike – the former is, well, a ring, while the latter is a modest wrist module. Whoop’s marketing focuses more closely on optimizing training for athletes, while Oura casts a wider net.
But both focus more on recovery assessment than typical activity logging and aim to tell you how your activity, sleep, and recovery rates are intertwined. Both have no screen and require subscriptions for their data, and neither is cheap. And both come from fast-growing companies — while not exactly household names, Oura was reportedly valued at $800 million in 2021, while Whoop was valued at $3.6 billion.
With no built-in GPS and no way to track your activity without a phone, neither device is ideal as a traditional fitness tracker. But to cut through the Instagram-fueled hype and see if the recovery-focused wearables are worth your time (and monthly subscription fee), we spent several weeks testing these odd little devices. This is 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 it diverges from that – but Whoop has used a subscription model with its previous devices.
Whoop markets the 4.0 as “free” but with a mandatory $30 monthly subscription. You can prepay for one or two years and get a discount, but it still comes out at $240 or $300 for each year of use . Membership is key to everything the Whoop app has to offer, including all stats, trends, reports, and community posts. This means you’ll have to pay the price of a fairly expensive smartwatch — and a lot more than many traditional fitness trackers — to keep using the device.
The Oura Ring costs $300 as standard, or $400 for its “stealth” and gold colorways. Unlike the previous Oura Ring, this third-generation model requires a $6 per month subscription. Like Fitbit Premium, which often comes bundled free for six months to a year for new Fitbit owners, Oura offers the first six months free to new customers. Without a membership, you can only see some basic data for the current day, while withholding further insights, contextual information, and trends. The subscription also gives you access to a small library of guided content. Compared to the $10-per-month Fitbit Premium, this library is slightly smaller and offers mostly “mindfulness” media, not workout videos or recipe content, like Fitbit does.
No other fitness tracker hides basic data behind paywalls to this extent. While Fitbit withholds some longer trend analysis from non-Premium users, most trackers are much cheaper and offer more in the hardware department. Garmin fitness watches, meanwhile, provide tons of in-depth statistics and analytics for serious athletes at no extra cost. So both Oura and Whoop will likely be a tough sell for budget-conscious buyers.
