The best sleep tracker | TechRadar
There’s a lot of variety on offer when it comes to the best sleep tracker: almost any health and fitness wearable with half-decent battery life has some sort of sleep tracking functionality these days. Of course, this market saturation means that it’s very hard to choose.
The best sleep tracker for you could be a smart ring, a smartwatch or wrist-based fitness, tracker, a headband, or even a dedicated piece of sleep hardware like a pad under your mattress. Regardless of your chosen form factor, sleep trackers will give you data and insight into the quality and length of your sleep, tracking biomarkers like heart rate to give you insight into how well you sleep at night.
Sleep is a cornerstone of great health, and while these devices on their own might not improve your rest, they’ll give you valuable, actionable information you can use to get a better night’s rest.
As our top pick, we recommend the best smart ring, the Samsung Galaxy Ring, thanks to its great health-tracking, AI features, and very discreet design. However, you could also try something more specialized like a headband, some earbuds, a specialized sleep analyzer. If none of these fit the bill, you might consider one of the best Apple Watches or best smartwatches.
All of our picks have been reviewed by our tech and health experts. We grade each pick for value, design, performance, and features, marking them out of five. We collate that data to bring the best picks in each guide together, so you won’t find anything on this list that we haven’t extensively tested and reviewed.
We’re in the process of reviewing the new Whoop MG, so check back for an update to this guide once we’ve finished the review.
The quick list
Want to get straight to the best sleep tracker for you? Here’s our quick round-up of our six top picks. You can read more about each one by clinking the links below.
The best sleep tracker for most people
The Samsung Galaxy Ring is a brilliantly well-rounded health tracker with AI and cutting-edge features. It’s got seven days of battery life and crucially doesn’t require a subscription to use. The Galaxy Ring specifically excels when it comes to sleep because of its form factor.
The best sleep tracker on a budget
If you want some great sleep insight but don’t want to spend the earth, the Withings Sleep Analyzer is a great pick. It doesn’t require any wearable technology and provides you with lots of sleeping data, powered by the Withings Health Mate app. You’ll need to plug it in, but otherwise, it just hides under your mattress.
Best sleep tracker with a subscription
If you don’t mind paying a subscription fee, the Oura Ring 4 is new and brings a more elegant, updated design to the popular wearable. It’s a discreet tracker like the Galaxy Ring and the data it offers is the gold standard.
Best headphones for sleep tracking
Not only can the Kokoon nightbuds track your sleep with basic analysis, they also provide music and meditation to help you drift off. The sleep tracking isn’t as advanced, and they’re quite pricy, but this is a great way to enjoy music or podcasts in bed without disturbing anyone.
Best headband for sleep tracking
The Muse S headband comes with a brilliant suite of mindfulness tools and a wealth of sleep tracking data. The soft headband monitors brain activity, and there are even soundscapes and spoken-word journeys to help lull you to sleep.
Best sleep tracking earbuds
If you want a pair of discrete earbuds for sleep, you can’t go wrong with Amazfit’s Zenbuds. They’re small, comfortable, and come with an array of sleep sounds. They can also track your sleep, and also double as a set of earplugs.
Best sleep tracker overall
The Samsung Galaxy Ring is a brilliant, well-rounded health and fitness tracker powered by AI. It boasts up to 7-day battery life, and there’s no subscription fee like you’d find with the Oura ring. You do need the Samsung Health app, and it’s a bit more expensive than the Oura in terms of initial outlay. But once you’ve bought one, there are no monthly or hidden costs to speak of.
Samsung touts its ring as a “set and forget” experience, you can simply slip it on and then forget about it. Long battery life and its low-profile form factor ensure it’s not as intrusive as a watch, and certainly not as in-your-face as a headband or even a smartwatch.
For when you’re not asleep there’s water resistance and a rugged titanium chassis. Sensors include PPG and an accelerometer, as well as skin temperature measurements. There’s also a nifty earbuds-style charging case that will get you up to six charges before you need to plug it into the wall. Connectivity is powered by Bluetooth 5.4.
While the Samsung ring is compatible with other Android phones, you’ll get the best experience on a Samsung device. iPhone users, beware! This is not compatible with iOS, so won’t work with your device.
Read our full Samsung Galaxy Ring Review
Best sleep tracker on a budget
Even the best mattress doesn’t guarantee a great night’s sleep. The Withings Sleep Analyzer is a pad you can slip underneath to keep track of your sleep quality without having to wear anything on your wrist.
It means you can just jump into bed and you don’t have to worry about putting on an extra sleep tracker, and if you do own a fitness tracker or smartwatch you can rest assured that it will be possible to charge it while you doze.
The Withings Sleep will monitor lots of stats too, including your sleep phases, your heart rate, the amount of time you’ve been snoring, and the duration of your sleep.
If you just want to crawl into bed and have all of your sleep quality recorded and ready for you to digest in an easy-to-use app, the Withings Sleep is the perfect sleep tracker for you.
Read our full Withings Sleep Analyzer review
The best sleep tracker with a subscription
The Oura Ring 4 is the latest iteration of Oura’s popular, discreet smart wearable. It builds on the successful formula of its forebears but comes with a new updated design for 2024 and beyond.
As such it’s more comfortable to wear than the previous version, and comes in more sizes. There’s also a redesigned app to go with it.
All the usual sleep, activity, and readiness scores are there, and there’s also Oura Advisor, an AI health tool where you can ask questions. In our review we found its sleep tracking to be highly accurate, and Oura remains a mainstay when it comes to accurate sleep tracking.
Oura still requires its $5.99 subscription to use, so bear that cost in mind when you’re buying one. It’s cheaper to buy upfront than the Samsung Galaxy Ring, but only slightly, and that subscription will soon eat into your savings.
Read our full Oura 4 review
Best sleep tracking headphones
The Kokoon Nightbuds are a set of lightweight headphones packed with all the sleep tech you could ask for. Like the Bose Sleepbuds II they can play soothing sounds to help you drift off, but they also work like regular Bluetooth headphones to stream any audio from your phone, and (like the Amazfit Zenbuds) have an optical heart rate monitor built into one earpiece tracks your sleep patterns overnight.
Sleep tracking data is quite simple; you can see the duration of your sleep and how long you spent in each sleep stage, but there’s no deep analysis of exactly what this means, or personalized advice on how to improve your sleep in the future. Accuracy is impressive, though; your ear is an excellent place for an optical heart rate sensor as it’s less susceptible to light leakage, and blood circulation isn’t going to be disturbed by your sleeping position.
The audio is the main feature here; the app doesn’t just feature a wide array of white noise and nature sounds but also contains a library of guided meditations and abstract music that you can combine with ambient sounds to create a personal soundtrack. The Nightbuds are comfortable too and stay firmly in place even if you’re a side-sleeper thanks to their stretchy headband and the soft ‘prongs’ on their silicone earpieces.
Read our full Kokoon Nightbuds review
Best sleep tracking headband
The Muse S is a soft headband that monitors brain activity through your skin, as well as tracking movement, heart rate, and skin temperature. It uses that cocktail of data to help guide you through meditation sessions during the day and to provide detailed sleep tracking at night.
The band sits comfortably around your head, with the central pod in the middle of your forehead, and is an interesting option for anyone who struggles to wear a watch at night. It connects to the Muse app on your phone via Bluetooth and eases you off to sleep with gentle soundscapes or spoken-word ‘journeys’ (essentially gentle bedtime stories to help you relax).
Once you’re settled down, the Muse S will monitor your sleep, including restlessness and which side you sleep on. In the morning, all the information is ready to review in the app, which gives you an extremely detailed breakdown of your nocturnal activity and well-being.
What we enjoyed most about the Muse S was its meditation training, but it’s also an excellent sleep tracker and a good option if you want to incorporate mindfulness into your daily routine.
Read our full Muse S review
Best sleep tracking earbuds
The Amazfit Zenbuds might look like true wireless headphones, but they’re something quite different, sitting somewhere between a sleep tracker and a white noise machine. Rather than streaming music from your phone, these tiny sleep earplugs play gentle sounds (ranging from soft rainfall to a kitten’s snores), which are uploaded from the accompanying mobile app. If you’re thinking that sounds quite similar to the Bose Sleepbuds, you’d be right, but that’s not all.
Once you’ve drifted off to sleep, the Zenbuds begin monitoring your heart rate and movement, detecting when you move between sleep stages and any disturbances overnight. They can even detect when you’ve rolled over, and how long you spent lying on each side, your front, and your back. As we found in our tests, the results may be surprising.
The Amazfit Zenbuds are impressive, comfortable to wear (even for side sleepers) and are surprisingly affordable too. If you suffer from poor sleep, they come highly recommended.
Read our full Amazfit Zenbuds review
How to choose the best sleep tracker for you
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First off, it’s worth taking a look at your budget. If money’s no object, you may as well go for the best overall fitness tracker in the Oura ring, which provides incredible sleep metrics in great detail as well as generic daily wellness and fitness statistics, at the cost of an expensive unit plus membership to the Oura service.
It doesn’t track your workouts in the same way a watch might, but rumors point to features such as workout tracking coming down the line for the next generation of Oura devices, or possibly being added as a patch to the current gen.
If your budget is more restrictive, or you don’t like wearables, you might opt for the under-mattress pad the Withings Sleep Analyzer, which is far more affordable and will still do a great job monitoring your sleep. Best of all, you can plug it in and then more or less forget about it – no removing it from your finger, ears or wrist to recharge, just leave it under your bed. Alternatively, you may prefer a middle ground, which is where earbuds such as the Amazfit and Kokoon nightbuds come in. These aren’t quite wearables, but don’t run up to the same price as the Oura ring, with gentle sounds lulling you to sleep in addition to monitoring your vitals.
How we test
All our sleep trackers are tested for at least several days and sometimes over a week, long enough for the tracker to build up a longitudinal picture of our sleep. We look for accuracy, testing them against other devices, whether they need to be charged and if so, how long the battery lasts compared to the figure on the box. We also access the advice the product gives when it comes to improving sleep.
Finally, we’ll check all the above and examine whether the product is worth parting with your hard-earned cash. Sleeping better is one of the simplest ways to improve your health and happiness, but it’s also one of the most difficult things to improve. That’s why you can be sure we take sleep health tech seriously!
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