Best smart ring 2024: compact, lightweight health-tracking wearables

The best smart rings are gaining popularity thanks to their compact and lightweight design, making it much easier to wear them continuously than wrist wearables. Thanks to sensor and battery technology advancements in recent years, you can now access features previously only available in larger devices using a smart ring.

Smart rings have several benefits over the best smartwatches. First and foremost, they are more compact and feel less cumbersome to wear, enabling you to wear them 24/7, which is how you should wear all your wearables so that they can collect health data all day long, providing better estimations.

Secondly, they circumvent the problem many have with wrist wearables by not looking like smart devices. Smart rings weigh grams and have no displays or buttons, which is perfect for those who can't stand the design of health wearables such as running watches.

Finally, smart rings are comfortable to wear overnight – a significant issue people have with wrist-based sleep trackers. By not wanting to take them off, these clever gadgets can help analyse your slumber in incognito, as well as suggest ways to improve it via the apps and AI coaching they offer.

Without further ado, please find below the selection of the best smart rings, tested, reviewed, and ranked by T3's wearable experts. Expect to see more models added to the guide in the coming month, with companies like Apple and Samsung working on their own take on the concept.

Best smart rings to buy today

Best overall

The Oura Ring Gen 3 has impressive sleep-tracking, activity-monitoring, and resilience-tracking capabilities. It has a sleek design, durable build quality, and accurate health data collection. In short, it's the best smart ring on the market today.

The ring automatically detects activities and illnesses, providing valuable insights into the user's health status. Despite the premium price and membership fee for accessing full health data, the Oura Ring Gen 3 is a worthwhile investment for those seeking detailed health insights in a discreet and stylish wearable.

Key features include comprehensive sleep tracking with a Sleep Score, automatic illness detection, and activity monitoring with a variety of supported exercises. The Resilience Score is a new feature that evaluates your ability to withstand and recover from physiological stress over time.

While the subscription fee may be a consideration, it's cheaper than most streaming service fees, and in return, you get a reliable health companion, which is not something you can say about subscribing to Netflix or Disney+.

Read our full Oura Ring Gen 3 review.

Best for sleep tracking

The Ultrahuman Ring Air is a unique fitness wearable concept, not just because of its lightweight, compact design. Through the accompanying app, this smart ring can help you optimise your life to improve your health and general well-being, as long as you are happy to adhere to the algorithm's recommendations.

Thanks to its many metrics and suggestions, the Ultrahuman Ring Air is the best smart ring for sleep tracking. It monitors your circadian rhythm and suggests a daily window during which you should consume all your stimulants (e.g., tea, coffee) so as not to disturb your sleep.

If you're more interested in keeping a keen eye on your sleep trend and gradual health improvements, you should check out the Ultrahuman Ring Air. Sure, there is an initial cost to buy the ring, but thanks to the lack of subscription fees, you can access any and all future software upgrades – for free.

Read our full Ultrahuman Ring Air review.

Best affordable

It's probably not fair to call Ringconn a new player in the smart ring market, where most companies are only a few years old. The company's smart ring, aptly called Ringconn Smart Ring, is one of the most affordable models and offers basic health metrics coupled with an easy-to-understand app.

The Ringconn Smart Ring connects to smartphones easily and better still, it collects data and provides insights and suggestions as soon as you start wearing it. For comparison, Oura's wearable requires around four weeks of use before it starts suggesting anything.

On the flip side, Ringconn's wearable provides less personalised suggestions on how to improve your health and fitness, similar to some fitness trackers that use general assumptions based on your age, weight, sex, etc., to offer guidance, as opposed to truly personalised insights.

That said, Ringconn is said to be working on adding more features to its Smart Ring, including menstrual cycle sleep apnea and blood pressure monitoring. As long as they can provide free access to this data, we can't wait to see them materialising in the near future.

Read our full RingConn Smart ring review.

Most lightweight

Touted as the 'world's thinnest smart ring', the Circular Ring Slim combines sleek design with advanced features. With no screen or buttons, it discreetly collects health data using PPG sensors, a temperature sensor, and a three-axis accelerometer. Notably, it introduces Kira+, an AI wellness assistant for personalised insights.

Despite its promising features, the Circular Ring Slim faces challenges, most notably occasional connectivity issues and synchronisation delays with its accompanying app. Moreover, its battery life falls short of expectations, with many struggling to achieve even two days of operation despite claims of six days.

Nevertheless, the Circular Ring Slim offers a compelling option for those seeking a subtle and comfortable health-tracking solution. Its intuitive app layout provides comprehensive health and wellness data, albeit with occasional setbacks.

While improvements are needed to address connectivity and battery concerns, its sleek design and advanced features, including Kira+, position it as a promising contender in the wearable technology landscape, appealing to users seeking discrete yet effective health monitoring options.

Read our full Circular Ring Slim review.

How to choose the best smart ring for you

Smart rings are a new phenomenon, and as such, they aren't often specialised in terms of feature sets. That said, there are a few things to bear in mind before you buy your first smart ring.

Sizing is one of these. Smart rings often come only in a few sizes, which, to be fair, usually covers the most popular finger circumferences (apart from the upcoming Amazfiot Helio Ring, which only comes in two sizes, 10 and 12). If your hand size is on the extreme end of the spectrum (either way), it's worth requesting a sizing kit.

Although most smart rings have similar features, there are minor differences. Some, like the Ultrahuman Ring Air, are better at optimising sleep, while others, such as Oura Ring, are best suited as an overall health tracker. Yet others focus on essential sleep and fitness tracking, e.g. RingConn Smart Ring.

Finally, it's worth considering the capabilities of companion apps and potential subscription fees. Oura only grants access to basic stats for free, while Ultrahuman offers a subscription-based extension of its service called Ultrahuman X. Yet others, like Amazfit, will charge you for accessing AI coaching and more.

How we test the best smart rings

There is no way around testing smart rings than wearing them continuously for weeks on end. Similar to wrist wearables, most smart rings need at least a couple of weeks to establish a baseline and provide more accurate estimations and suggestions.

Thankfully, smart rings weigh next to nothing, meaning prolonged wear doesn't irritate you. We tend to test smart rings for a month to ensure all systems are fully functional and have enough time to do all the different health and fitness activities these clever wearables can track.

For more info about testing, check out this explainer: How we test at T3.

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