My three: Fitbit Charge 5, Oura Heritage, and Apple Watch 7

I recently compared 3 devices for sleep and exercise tracking: Apple Watch ($800+), Fitbit Charge 5 (now Charge 6) ($160+), and Oura Ring (300+). I have long been an Apple watch and Fitbit user–I have used both ever since they started making them over a decade ago. They each have their pros and cons. I was never happy with each alone, but combined they made a pretty good pair, mostly reliable, though on some days they still left me baffled.

Recently the question came up in my Facebook Migraine Group: which tracker is the best and why? I decided to invest in Oura, since I didn’t yet have that one, and wear all three devices for sleep as well as workout for several days at once, and see which is best and why.

To Be Fair

Of course, the Apple Watch’s quality for fitness and sleep tracking is greatly dependent on the quality of the apps that are available. Nearly all good apps are based on a fee, most on an annual fee. Fitbit and Oura ring have their own proprietary software and app that work with iPhone or other phones, so there are no options or extra costs there.

Fitbit does have an optional membership fee, meaning the function of your device and what you see in your app depends on this membership to some degree. You get slightly more information under the membership, which last time I subscribed to it was $9.99 a month.

Oura has a similar setup to Fitbit: monthly membership is $5.99 a month and I am not sure what information I would lose if I don’t have it since the first year this membership is free.

A fair trial really would only vary the product and not also the apps one can get from the company or elsewhere. Alas such comparison is impossible. Worse yet. Fitbit was bought by Google in 2021, although I have not seen any improvement or any changes at the level of the client, aka: me.

Exercise

For exercise Fitbit really sucks… don’t ever consider getting it if you want to monitor your exercise. It is sluggish, may not notice that you are working out until you are more than halfway into your workout. The heart rate notification seriously lags behind and often gets stuck at whatever level. It is also often in wonderland. The other day I was jogging, wearing all three devices, and Fitbit showed my heart rate at 174! I started laughing at that since at age 70, my heart rate max is 150 or so and I was still able to hold a conversation, so my heart rate was more in the 120’s range, in zone 2 somewhere. Fitbit was stuck at 174 for the length of my jog–about an hour. And, to make it worse, Fitbit is really only good for endurance type sports. Forget about measuring anything if you do weight lifting or sprints! It has no idea that you are exercising.

Apple Watch is awesome for workouts of any kind. You can customize what workout you do and based on the app you have, it is pretty accurate with heart rate and since it has a built in GPS and altimeter, it gives you an accurate account of where you were with map. It also allows live tracking where you are with various apps. Of course, while all of these apps work on the tiny screen of the Apple Watch, it is best looked at on the phone, so saying it is all Apple Watch is a bit of cheating. Great workout summary with breakdown–based on the apps you use. The Apple Watch is comfortable to wear.

Cons in the case of he Apple Watch for exercise: If the weather is cold to the point that your arm gets cold as well, the watch doesn’t update too well. I got into the habit that if it is windy or cool, I pull my sleeve over the watch to keep it from the wind and cold and that way it continues to function. This is an interesting weakness, which makes sense: in cold temperatures the blood vessels constrict and move deeper inside the muscles in order to preserve heat. Still, this is not an excuse for a watch to stop working.

Oura Ring for exercise is awesome. I can start the Oura exercise app function on my iPhone, which is a timer to start monitoring my heart rate, and when I finished the workout, I hit “end workout”. While during my workout I don’t see any feedback from Oura ring, after my workout I can see what I did. If knowing your heart rate zones while working out is important for you, as it is important for me, this is a weakness. However, after the workout, the Oura Ring gives a pretty elegant summary of what I did. It is not as detailed as what I get with the Apple Watch, but for the price, it’s pretty darn good.

To be fair, I have only had Oura Ring for too short a time to have been able to test it in cold weather… we have only had a heatwave ever since it arrived. I suspect that in cold weather I will face a similar scenario with Oura ring as well as with the Apple Watch, and maybe even facing the trouble of the ring falling off my finger, though I just use a different finger… so that’s not an issue.

Sleep

I absolutely used to worship Fitbit for sleep. It has a most elegant and comprehensive report on many details about my sleep. However, every now and then it would not notice that I slept. And the manual entry of sleeping time won’t give me any specifics on my sleep, no sleep score either. These missed nights would frustrate the heck out of me. And sometimes I would feel amazingly rested but Fitbit would tell me that I had a bad night of sleep and the converse was also true. On some days I would feel worse than a wet rag but it would tell me I slept great. So clearly it was off. It used to also give me really high resting heart rates, low HRV, and high O2–incorrectly.

I must add here that since I had the Wuhan strain of Covid in January 2020, my oxygen had been in the depth I never thought possible. And while I have been making huge recovery and my O2 is completely normal during the day, at night I still need to use oxygen to get my O2 up to normal levels. So I grew into the habit of sleeping with an O2 recording device, which records my O2 sat and pulse every 2 seconds, wakes me with a buzz/vibration is my O2 is below the minimum I set, and I can export my data to excel or just see a summary on my phone. So I know what my resting heart rate and O2 sat is very well! And I know that Fitbit gave me a bunch of gibberish.

Apple Watch for sleep is acceptable. With the watch you have to find the right app to get it to work right. My app is SleepWatch, and it is definitely not free. I think it is $39.99 (or something similar) annually. I have had this app for many years and spent that many years sending complaints and requests to the app designers to make changes. These days I find no problems–I hope I am not jinxing my luck with this sentence… It too time to time doesn’t discover that I sleep. It is much more accurate with the resting heart rate and the HRV than Fitbit but it doesn’t check O2 frequently enough to get a good general average, though usually the O2 number it reports is at least within the O2 ranges of my O2 recording device.

Oura Ring for sleep is the winner. So far it has never missed a beat. In fact, when I sit and watch TV at night, it often asks me if what it noticed was a nap. I can choose yes or no, and I love that! It doesn’t just automatically think I napped and that’s that. I rarely, if ever, nap. It also get the start and ending time of my sleep amazingly correct, the average heart rate and HRV are great and it offers similar features, such as body temperature and restedness, similarly to Fitbit. It is also way easier to wear than a watch or Fitbit on the arm. It makes it very easy that the Oura ring is water proof as well, so when waking, I can wash my hand with soap and water without concern to the ring. Although both the Apple Watch and Fitbit are water resistant, since they both come with a band, of the band gets wet, it remains uncomfortable for some time. No such bad stuff with the ring.

If I Could Only Have One

If I could only have one of these three devices, I would choose Oura Ring. It is sufficient for exercise and excellent for sleep tracking. I wear it all day long without any issues. It is much less expensive than the Apple Watch, and to be honest, if you have an iPhone, you pretty much have all of the functionalities you need just from the phone without the watch. I would definitely recommend you not getting the Fitbit. It is definitely a waste of money between these three.

Charging is very simple–drop it on the charger every day if you wish. Without daily charging, the battery is good for about 3-4 days, depending on how active you are. The comfort: It is better than a watch, provided you are used to wearing a ring. I am not a ring wearer and so it is taking some time to get used to wearing this one, but the good thing is that I can move it between 3 of my fingers, which it perfectly fits.

Comments are welcomed, as always, and are scrutinized for appropriateness.

Angela