the new Oura 5 Ring is available, and its smaller profile is definitely turning heads among current and potential Oura users, myself included. However, in addition to the $50 price increase over the Oura 4 RingThere is another cost to consider: Oura Membership.
Oura membership is not required to use Oura Ring, but the functionality of the companion app will be quite limited without it. The $5.99 membership brings a number of features to the app and unlocks a number of capabilities you wouldn’t otherwise get.
If you don’t subscribe, you won’t get all the information that comes with it. You open the Oura app and see just three things: your readiness score, your sleep score, and your activity score.
For some people, this may be appropriate. I don’t fully utilize all the benefits of membership, and the additional insights and features that come with Oura membership may not be worth the extra cost on top of the one-time hardware cost. That being said, there are still some important reasons why I still subscribe to Oura.
What you get with membership
For $5.99 a month, an Oura membership offers a ton of extra features and information that you won’t get without it. Features include the following, by Oura:
- Detailed sleep analysis
- 24/7 heart rate tracking (day, night, activity)
- Integration with third-party health and wellness apps like Strava
- Advanced temperature monitoring
- Detection of blood oxygen (SpO2)
- daytime stress
- Dynamic activity goals with automatic activity detection
- Heart health (cardiovascular age, cardiovascular capacity (VO2 max))
- Metabolic health (glucose tracking, meals)
- Oura Laboratories
- Resilience
- Weekly, monthly, quarterly, annual and anniversary reports.
- Women’s Health (Cycle Information, Pregnancy Information)
1. Get the most out of your ring
It’s foolish to expect all Oura Ring owners to use all the features included in the membership, and I definitely don’t. For example, none of the Women’s Health features are useful to me, but I do use some of the other features almost daily.
As someone who absolutely hates wearing smartwatches to sleep, I’ve found the Oura ring to be a vital part of my sleep routine. While you can get your sleep score without the membership, the subscription provides a deeper look at my sleep, including sleep efficiency, restlessness, and how long it took me to fall asleep. As someone who struggles with sleep, I find this information very helpful in identifying ways I can improve.
But beyond sleeping alone, a combination of these features gives you a comprehensive view of your overall health and well-being. The Oura ring is so easy to wear throughout the day that it makes it easy to measure your heart rate throughout the day, automatically track activities, and monitor possible symptoms that may indicate illness or stress in your body.
What’s more, you can try out the features Oura is testing before they are fully integrated into the Oura experience. The AI Advisor was one of those features that I tested before its release and has become a core part of the Oura app.
2. Automatic activity detection is pretty good
Automatic activity detection It is perhaps one of my favorite features of the Oura Ring and one of the most impressive. While I prefer to manually track workouts, Oura Ring is actually very good at detecting various activities, both inside and outside of exercise.
As a member, you will be able to use the ring to detect and analyze various activities, such as workouts and walks. The more you manually track workouts, the more accurate the Oura Ring will be, to the point that it’s pretty good at recognizing when I’m doing HIIT or Pilates.
Even better, the Oura Ring can detect more everyday activities and even random things like dancing and yard work, something my other wearables, like my Garmin Venu 4 (my wearable fitness device of choice), I can’t do it. Every time I go out, I’m always surprised to see that the Oura Ring detects when I was dancing and for how long.
Additionally, when the ring detects activity, it can include heart rate data and calorie calculations, making automatic tracking a valuable asset for your daily activity and health assessment.
2. Oura Advisor Logs
Virtually every tech company is diving into AI in some form, and before Google unveiled its Personal health trainerOura launched the Advisor. With Oura Advisor, you can chat with the AI about your health and goals, and the AI will take into account what it knows about you.
What I like is that the Advisor checks on you from time to time, based on your daily activity and other metrics, to make sure you’re on track. And you can even change the frequency of the Advisor’s logs so that it sends you a ping weekly, daily, or somewhere in between. Additionally, you can choose the Advisor’s tone, which can be more direct or more conversational.
Oura Highlights Advisor is powered by a state-of-the-art large language model (LLM) and was recently enhanced with a new proprietary LLM designed for women’s health. This gives Oura extensive knowledge of medical standards, research, and more, ensuring it’s uniquely positioned to answer questions about your health and provide recommendations, especially with the added context of your data in the app.
Of course, you should always take everything Oura Advisor says with a grain of salt, as it’s not a medical product designed to diagnose or treat you, but I found that it provides some pretty solid advice in an easy-to-understand way.
4. Sync with third-party apps
Oura is great, but the ring doesn’t always get all the information. Also, not everyone likes to wear the ring while lifting weights and I often track my workouts on a smartwatch. That’s where third-party app integrations come into play.
By connecting with Health Connect, the Oura app can pull workout data from my smartwatches and even weight data from my Withings scale to give me a complete view of my day. The timeline feature helps me see my day in moments, including when I wake up, exercise, and go to sleep.
Oura is basically a one-stop shop where you can get a pretty comprehensive look at your daily health and well-being, and it all contributes to your long-term health prospects.
And when I track my activities using the ring, the Oura app can send workouts to the Strava app, including location data (from the phone).
5. Oura puts its money where its products are
Considering the benefits, I think $5.99 per month is a pretty reasonable price to pay, especially considering Oura is still a relatively new and small company. We’ve constantly asked why Oura has retained its subscription model when other smart ring companies have gone subscription-free, and the answer is always the same: Oura uses membership to help improve the product.
There’s a reason Oura continues to produce the best smart rings on the market, even as competition intensifies with new players and advancements. Even Samsung felt compelled to enter the smart ring market, only to seemingly fall short of Oura, despite not charging a subscription fee.
“We really feel the pressure from our members to continually drive research and pioneer what the smart ring can be and invest it back into our product,” Oura told us after launching the Oura Ring 4.
After seeing the growth of Oura Gen 3 Ring For Oura Ring 5, it’s clear to me that Oura is doing exactly that, expanding the value of each model by continually adding new features throughout its lifecycle. To me, that seems well worth the $6 a month.
An alternative way to pay for Oura Membership
If you’re hesitant about purchasing an Oura ring and membership, it may be helpful to know that you can purchase both using your FSA or HSA. For many, that money is just sitting there, unused, so this might give you a reason to dip into those funds.
