Oura Ring 5 In-Depth Review: Smaller yes, but still worth it? – DC Rainmaker

The new Oura Ring 5 is a genuinely and significantly smaller ring than the previous Oura Ring 4 that was on my finger. That part isn’t really debatable. And the real-world battery life seems to be a *slight* improvement over the past, though most of the time Oura rings seem to slowly and quickly lose their battery life, so this could just be a case of new unit vs well-worn unit. And finally, indeed, there are some new features – but those too are available to all recent Oura ring owners, and aren’t specific to the Oura Ring 5.

Nonetheless, I’ve been putting it through its paces over the last near-month across everything from swimming to cycling to running to strength workouts, and of course, simply sleeping and daily life. After all, that’s frankly what the Oura Ring is best at: Things other than sports. In fact, to be really clear upfront, I’d argue that even with some minor new features in the sports realm, the Oura Ring 5 is now woefully behind even the most basic wearables when it comes to sports tracking. So much so that as I tried to do accuracy comparisons, I’d forgotten just how far behind they are in this realm (and that’s aside from the accuracy itself).

Still, there are reasons you want a ring (from any company), which is most simply summed up: You don’t want to wear a watch/smart band. If you already have one of those watch/band devices, there’s literally no reason to get an Oura Ring in 2026, everyone else is too good – even the budget ones.

With that, let’s dive into the details. Note that I purchased this unit myself, along with the previous few versions, and I pay for my own subscription to the Oura Ring service.

Oura Ring 5 vs Ring 4:

So, what’s different? Size: this is almost entirely about size – and size-related things (though surprisingly, not reduced battery life). Here are the core differences:

– Reduced width: From 7.9mm down to 6.1mm
– Reduced thickness: From 2.8mm down to 2.28mm
– Reduced weight: From 3.3-5.2g down to 2g
– Reduced size options: From size 4-15 to size 6-13
– Increased battery life claim: From 5-8 days to 6-9 days
– The Sensors: They’ve decreased from 18 to 12 light paths, but 4x’d the strength of the lights, otherwise
– Pricing: Increased by $50 from $349 to $399 (base price, other options)
– Subscription: Still remains the same at $5.99/month

With the sensor changes, the company says that despite reducing the number of light pathways from 18 to 12, it’s increased the light brightness by 4x, which in turn has resulted in a 12% increase in nighttime HRV accuracy, and up to a 19% increase in workout accuracy.

As for the size, the company claims it’s up to 40% smaller than the previous edition, and likely that depends on precisely which model they’re talking about. Here’s my Oura 3 vs 4 vs 5 (all size 10):

For the model types, here’s the full range of colors:

And the pricing is:

Base models – $399/429EUR: Silver, and Black (mine is the base silver one)
Premium models – $499/529EUR: Gold, Stealth, Brushed Silver, and Deep Rose

Ok, got all that? Let’s dive into the box.

In the Box(es):

One thing to remember is that before you get ‘The Box’, you get ‘Another Box’. Specifically, when you order an Oura ring, you first get a sizing kit box. That box is a package of fake Oura rings, simply sizing rings for each size. They recommend you wear the ring for 24 hours prior to ordering your actual ring. They also note that their ring sizes might not match other ring sizes, hence the sizing kit.

In my case, I’ve consistently worn a Size 10 Oura ring since many versions ago. Also, in my case, I wear it on my ring finger. Oura has noted over the years that you can technically wear it on any finger you want, as long as it doesn’t rotate/move around by itself (mine doesn’t). Their general suggestion is the index finger; however, I personally don’t like the look of the ring on that finger for myself. To each their own.

In any case, once you validate the size you want, you go onto their site and simply choose the ring size, and it’ll ship out the actual ring to you in the final ring box. Below are the bits inside:

In short, you’ve got:

1) The Oura 5 ring itself
2) The Oura 5 charging dock with USB-C port (note: this dock is different than the Oura 4 charging dock)
3) USB-C to USB-C cable
4) Some paper stuff you probably won’t read

It’s all pretty straightforward.

Daily Life Tracking:

The thing Oura does best is quietly and discreetly tracking your daily activity, without having to wear a connected watch or band on your wrist. And given the even smaller size of the Oura Ring 5, it arguably does this better than ever. Of course, since there’s no external lights, vibration motor, or other display on the ring, everything it collects ends up in the Oura app.

The Oura app has been redesigned over the past year, and for the most part you’re either gonna love it or hate it. The app design essentially splits your information into two pieces: A row of scores along the top (readiness, sleep, activity, etc…), and then a never-ending scroll of larger display information down below it. Personally, I find it dilutes the information too much, and doesn’t really make your actual data very clear, but hey, that’s where we are today.

Starting with the top row, you’ve got a lightly customizable row of scores including: Readiness Score, Sleep Score, Activity Score, Heart Rate (Current), Stress (minutes), and then the ability to add Resilience (or, to remove the others):

Tapping on any of those individual scores brings you to more details about that particular metric/score. For example, if we tap on the ‘Readiness’ Score, it’ll bring us to a timeline showing readiness over the past week, plus the contributors to today’s score:

Generally speaking for wearables, including Oura, the Readiness Score attempts to bring in all the factors that define how ready you are for the day (including workouts or other demanding tasks). This includes looking at trends like resting heart rate, HRV (heart rate variability), Sleep, and Activity. These trends are specific to you and your historical data, not the overall population (especially for things like HRV). For example, in the case of HRV within Oura, it’s trending that over a 3-month period, and comparing the last two weeks to that value. That’s a bit high compared to most wearables that trend the last 7 days versus the 3-month (90-day) period, but I don’t have any real issues there (you can debate both sides of that coin).

However, this is why most wearables, again including Oura, really require at a minimum 2-3 weeks of data to be useful for these types of scores, and realistically require 2-3 months to have a solid baseline to work from. After which, each of the 9 different metrics that make up the Readiness score will have differing trending lengths.

In any case, heading onwards there’s sleep tracking. You can simply tap the ‘Sleep’ score at the top of the main dashboard to access it. This is an area that Oura really developed its name on, back at its beginnings in the 2015-2018 era. It did a lot of work to be a leader in sleep data during that time, especially as other early sleep tracking wearables struggled to get accurate data. However, fast-forwarding a decade, and frankly, there’s no meaningful difference between Oura and other wearables for core sleep stats. It’s an advantage that has largely faded away, as others have gotten really good as well.

As an example, here’s how a few day time-slices of tracking compared:

The gist of things? Scores roughly trend, but how each one decides awake/sleep time (especially during the middle of the night) is kinda all over the place.

Of course, more challenging is the exact times I woke up each day. Let’s look at this morning (Friday the 3rd):

Reality/Actual Went to sleep at ~1:45AM, woke up at 7:50AM, and snoozed twice till ~8:09AM
Oura Ring 5: Asleep at 1:48AM, woke up at 8:12AM
Whoop 5.0/MG: Asleep at 1:48AM, woke up at 7:59AM
Amazfit Helio: Asleep at 2:11AM, woke up at 8:10AM
Polar Loop: Asleep at 1:54AM, woke up at 8:12AM
Fitbit Air: Asleep at 1:48AM, woke up at 8:07AM
Garmin Fenix 8 Pro: Asleep at 1:37AM, woke up at 8:08AM

In any case, here’s what you’ll see on Oura’s page. Below you can see my sleep score, as well as its attempts to quantify sleep stages. Keeping in mind that most so-called gold-standard medical-grade sleep-scoring devices only hit about 80% accuracy rates, and this is at best below that. So I wouldn’t overthink sleep stage/phase components/accuracy.

Instead, focus on total sleep, sleep debt, and the sleep consistency metrics (roughly what they refer to as ‘Body Clock’). These are ultimately what will matter. Simply put: If you’re only getting 5 hours of sleep per night, no amount of supposed deep sleep phase/stage data is going to be getting you out of that hole. You can see these key metrics down below:

I actually really like Oura’s Sleep Debt feature (even if I’m probably constantly in debt), I think it’s honestly a better way of showing sleep needs than what most of their competitors show. Whoop also has sleep debt, but most other wearables don’t.

Anyways, below that you’ll find nighttime breathing, lowest heart rate values, and HRV trends. Generally speaking, I find HRV trending to be one of the best ways to predict upcoming sickness, especially 1-2 days out. My HRV values will drop considerably, just a night or two prior to visible symptoms of a cold. Keeping in mind, however, that significant evening drinking (or a massive workout/race) can also drive the same result, thus, it’s somewhat important to know if those other factors occurred.

In fact, you can even tag activities here, so you can see how they impact HRV. For example, I talked about alcohol and workouts, but even other factors like certain drugs (good or bad), can impact it. The same obviously goes for a red-eye flight, and many more factors. This helps you figure out those factors long term. The Sleep Health text you see above simply trends your sleep scores over time, which I’ll cover in the next section around ‘Vitals’.

Now, if we just glance at the lower bar, you’ll see it’s broken out from the original home dashboard bar with three buttons (Today/Vitals/My Health), to four buttons (Readiness/Sleep/Activity/Heart Rate + Stress). So, we’ll go with activity next. Here, it shows us total ‘activity’, where activity is defined as basically movement, including steps, workouts (confusingly also called ‘Activity’), and movement. You’ll also see training volume/frequency/recovery time, but as I’ll cover in the next section…umm…just ignore those.

As we scroll down, we can see activities pulled in from Strava. You can enable Strava sync (which is bidirectional, whether you like it or not), which in theory helps Oura classify activities (or, understand workouts you didn’t do with the Oura ring).

Now, that’s the end of the activity overview section there, but I’ll cover workouts in the next major section. For now, let’s wrap up with the ‘Heart Rate & Stress’ section:

This doesn’t really show a lot of new information, but rather, just summarizes existing information we’ve already seen at this point, and shows your heart rate values over the course of the day.

Meanwhile, looking at stress, it’ll plot that over the course of the day. You’ll notice how just after 18:00, it doesn’t have any white dots; that’s because during that timeframe I was doing a trail run. Oura puts these as high-stress events, rather than nullifying them like Garmin does. Yet concurrently, Oura doesn’t include this time in the ‘Stressed’ category. It’s kind of a weird halfsies decision. While from a medical standpoint, workouts are a ‘stressor’, they aren’t typically what most people would align to being ‘Stressed’. Especially since most people will do a workout to reduce stress (and most medical folks would recommend the same). Ideally, they’d just zero out that section of the chart, but I appreciate at least not plotting those points in the totals seen at the bottom.

Oh, and in terms of battery life, as a data point, on June 9th at 6PM, I was at 100% battery, and then by June 16th at 9PM, I was down to 7% and needing to recharge. So basically, 7 days of battery life for the size 10 unit, with roughly 1-2 hours of workout time per day (on average). On a second battery charge, it started that June 16th at 11PM on a full charge, but by the morning of June 22nd, it was down to 8% again and needed to be charged, putting it at 6 days this time. Then further again, the next charge after that also lasted 6 days before it was down to 10% and needed a charge before bed.

My Real World Battery Testing:
Week 1: 7 Days
Week 2: 6 Days
Week 3: 6 Days
Week 4: On track for 6 days again

That’s technically within the 6-9 day spec, but definitely not 9 days.

Vitals & My Health Sections:

Next, we’ve got two sections that essentially summarize all the other sections, and trend them a bit. Having a ‘Vitals’ section is the trendy thing to do the last few years, which basically looks at your stats in the other section and gives you a trend line. Here you can see this occurring for readiness, sleep, and others:

And yet more tiles:

Each of those tiles simply links back to one of the other previously discussed data points in the section prior. That said, I do need to draw your attention to that VO2Max score of 38, which is hilariously wrong/low. Most devices have my VO2Max in the 56-58ish realm these days. I was tested last year around 58 again, where I tend to float. The kicker here being I was even taking the time/effort to ensure all my multi-hour daily workouts were properly logged with Oura, and atop that, it has *YEARS* of my data to go on. Whatever they are doing here is just hard wrong.

Meanwhile, ‘My Health ’ is again more of the same, but now with color-coded trending for each section:

There is however, a Sleep Chronotype at the bottom, though that was already displayed in the Sleep section:

Now, the challenge with Oura’s sleep chronotype classification is that it’s not actually detecting my chronotype, but rather, forcing it. In my case, it shows my ‘Awake’ time each day at 8:03AM, and then simply adding 8 hours earlier to make it midnight. But in my case, I’m virtually never in bed by midnight (more like 1-2AM), and the 8:03AM? That’s simply me setting an alarm each day for the 7:50AM kids morning school rush, snoozing it once before finally getting up. On the weekend, it’s much later, and if there’s no school rush, it’s definitely not 8:03AM.

The point is, this is at best a useless categorization of your daily trends, but is definitely not your actual chronotype. Never mind the fact that since when did going to bed at 12AM classify as an “early evening type”? I mean, jokingly I’ll say midnight is ‘early evening’, but most rational people would classify an “early evening” bedtime as probably 9-10PM.

Sports Tracking:

Let’s be upfront about this: The Oura ring is not at all great for sports tracking. While the company did add some new features around activity tracking at the same time they announced the Oura Ring 5, they are pretty minimal in the grand scheme of things.

Specifically, new app updates now allow you to see *slightly* more data than in the past when you start a manual workout. However, that does not actually include the ability to see the ring’s heart rate data during the workout itself, only afterward in a highly smoothed manner. Further, they don’t push that data to 3rd party platforms such as Strava.

In any case, when it comes to sports tracking, you’ve actually got three main options:

1) Let the unit automatically detect the exercise, and you manually tweak the classification (sport type) if need be
2) Manually start a workout on the run to get that counted as a workout
3) Sync in the data from some other wearable/device, to get it counted as a workout

There’s some solid irony in the fact that the best way to work out with an Oura ring…is to wear another company’s device. Technically speaking, there’s also a third option:

For the automatic exercise bits, it virtually never gets those right for me (except sometimes cycling), and that’s with years of Oura ring experience. So instead, I’d rely on the manual activity creation.

To begin, you’ll tap in the lower-right to start a Live Activity, which opens up the menu to select the sport type as well as heart rate source.

We’ll get to the sport type in a second. But as you can see above, there are two options for the heart rate. The first is ‘Live Heart Rate Source’, where you choose another brand/unit to act as your heart rate sensors. In this scenario, you can pair to not just any Bluetooth HR sensor, but also anything through Apple Health (such as AirPod Pro 3 or PowerBeats Pro 2). It’s important to note that if you don’t have such a device, you can’t see your heart rate data during the workout live.

I can see how Oura likely convinced themselves that by allowing pairing to a heart rate strap, it ‘solved’ their sports-tracking problem. I can totally imagine how that conference room conversation went, but in reality, it just exposes the gap to other wearables even more. After all, Oura is basically saying you need another $60-$100 heart rate strap (plus your $400 ring) to do what the $99 Fitbit Air can do. And that still doesn’t solve for the basics of not including heart rate data in the activity file to platforms like Strava and others, which is simply baffling (more on that in a second).

In any case, we’ll choose the ring itself for now, since this is a review of a ring, not devices you should buy instead of the ring. Likewise, we’ll choose our sport. To Oura’s credit, there are a gazillion sport profiles to choose. I never knew Finnish baseball was a thing, but…umm…here we are (Oura is a Finnish company).

With all that settled, we’ll start our run. At this point, this is the only data screen you’ll see:

It shows your pace (or speed, if cycling), as well as your distance and time. That’s it. No map pages, no heart rate data, no heart rate zone pages, no training load, or anything else that virtually all of its competitors show. It’s really, really, really basic.

If you were to pair a heart rate strap with it, then you’d see one additional data metric, your heart rate:

But there are so many inconsistencies here. If you do an indoor workout (with an external HR sensor), you’ll see a nifty HR zone gauge with full page zone coloring behind it. But, if you do an outdoor workout, you don’t get that gauge, you just get a value, and small text for the zone. Also, sometimes it’ll just randomly lose GPS too (as seen above briefly). Oura, you have all the space in the world on that page, there’s no need to skip the zone indicator/gauge when outdoors.

No matter with or without an HR sensor, once your workout is complete, you can see a summary of the workout, including the map page if you did track an outdoor GPS activity, such as my run.

But here’s where things get baffling: Despite Oura’s long-standing integration with Strava, they don’t send any heart rate data to Strava in the file. Mind you, apps that leverage the Oura API can access it, so this is just Oura being super-lazy with not putting that data in the completed workout file they send to Strava.

Here, we can see this same run over on Strava, missing all heart rate data (the first screenshot shows from Oura, the second shows Oura as the device type, and the third shows missing HR data):

How the heck is this even remotely possible in 2026? C’mon Oura, wake up. You added this nifty feature, yet didn’t add the one point of data that you actually collect from the ring: Heart rate.

But wait – it gets worse! If you took the step of connecting a HR sensor to the Oura app to record your heart rate data live, then Oura won’t even send the workout file to 3rd party apps (Strava or otherwise). Yes, you read that right: not only do you not get the HR data, but it won’t send *anything* (the whole workout is missing) to 3rd party apps. It’s baffling. I’ve tried both indoor and outdoor workouts, the latest app update, multiple 3rd party apps, etc… How Oura, how?!?

Sigh.

All of which simply solidifies my earlier statement: If you want something to track your workouts, the Oura Ring definitely isn’t it.

Heart Rate Accuracy:

Now, setting aside my lack of recommendation for using the Oura Ring 5 for workouts, I will go ahead and at least briefly look at accuracy during said workouts. In this case, I pulled the heart rate data using a 3rd party app (Athalyze), which receives the data from Oura’s API. From there, I can compare it to other heart rate sensors that I wore during those workouts.

Note that Oura doesn’t offer any meaningful workout export feature otherwise. You can request to export your overall Oura data here, but that doesn’t include the underlying heart rate data; rather, it’s just a simple one-line-item summary of each workout in a CSV file. Again, I don’t really understand how a company full of really smart data scientists has fallen so far behind in data basics here. Also, somehow this takes up to 10 business days for that export to be completed.

In any case, let’s look at a few workouts…

First up, an indoor trainer workout (cycling). This had basically five intervals in it, but wasn’t super high-intensity. Here, you can see the Oura ring listed in hot NEON GREEN, and for the most part it was basically close enough to the chest strap and other sensors. But the second interval it did get lost for a bit, upwards of 24bpm offset (which is quite a bit):

If we look at another indoor trainer workout, you can see it’s basically spot-on. Note here it’s in ORANGE, though that doesn’t matter much as it’s nearly identical. There are only a few minor variations for a few seconds that are just a couple bpm away. Good stuff.

Next, let’s look at some runs. The first one is a road run, and the Oura is in BLUE. In this case, there’s one brief moment it drops out, but otherwise it’s very similar to the chest strap and other sensors, with only minor deviations. Good stuff again.

Next, I head out for a trail run. This is where you start to see a few more variations as I descend. In this case, we’re still in BLUE for the Oura ring, but you can see it struggles a bit as I descend down one section. And then likewise, it skips a hard effort back up a hill around the 30-minute marker, just totally missing it. But the rest of the run, it’s pretty good.

Next, another trail run, this one quite a bit more challenging in terrain. It’s basically 40 minutes of climbing at 10-20% gradient, and then a steep descent back down from there. The terrain is sometimes smooth, and sometimes super rocky requiring jumps/leaps. The point being you can see that on that descent, the HR accuracy basically falls apart for the entire rest of the run:

For fun, here’s that elevation graph, matched to the HR graph. Somewhat notable that the HR lock was ‘good’ again around the 1hr12m marker, when I had a slight ascent again, and then lost the plot promptly after that.

I had also done some strength workouts, though with automatic exercise recognition, it won’t send those off to 3rd-party apps. And then equally, the one time I did a manual strength workout, it failed to save anything (appeared the app crashed). Sigh.

Still, setting that aside, what’s notable here is that the heart rate accuracy for workouts for me is largely pretty good actually. Really good in some cases. There are places where it struggles, such as descents while running (due to cadence lock likely, a common issue in watch optical HR sensors on the wrist). It’s really too bad that despite reasonably good heart rate accuracy for workouts, Oura doesn’t send this data to Strava, and then even worse being when you pair a HR sensor to it (to address these shortcomings), it doesn’t send that workout data anywhere at all.

Wrap-Up:

In a quirky way, I wonder if the Oura Ring 5 is ‘peak Oura’? Which is to say that it’s clearly the best Oura to date (in terms of size, and also some small accuracy gains according to Oura). But equally, if you’ve already got an existing Oura ring, the only tangible gain you’re likely to notice is the size. It’s very difficult to notice a 12% increase in HRV accuracy, and the claimed 19% increase in workout HR accuracy isn’t super functional given how limited the sports/workout features are (not even passable for 2008 phone workout apps).

In fact, I’d argue that Oura’s failure to figure out how to move the product forward from a workout standpoint actually helps to solidify its core reason for existing in life: General life/sleep tracking in a super-discreet form factor. Meaning, Oura really got its start with sleep tracking, in an era when other wearables struggled. But fast-forward a decade, and as I showed above, and have shown repeatedly over the last few years, the major brands are all mostly a wash for sleep tracking. They’re all getting the sleep times and HRV scores correct, and with roughly consistent sleep scores. But again, Oura does this in a tiny ring, with no other watch or band required. If you don’t want to wear a watch or band, this becomes a solved problem for you. And being smaller is certainly nice – I’ve got no complaints there.

That said, I feel like 80% of the app is basically just recycled trending charts of other parts of the app. I couldn’t even begin to count the number of times they re-display readiness, sleep score, or activity score trend lines on different sections of the app. It all begins to feel rather circular. Certainly, other companies re-display attributes in other areas (including Garmin & Whoop), but those companies have vastly more unique metrics than they do duplicated metrics. It feels like they’ve kinda given up on innovating with actual new features, and just instead keep creating new charts of the same data they’ve had for nearly a decade. Yes, they’ve added new integrations to a variety of 3rd party platforms (with more planned), but the things within their own house haven’t really changed (if you don’t believe me, go back and look at my Oura Ring 3 review from 5 years ago).

To wrap up, I think the Oura Ring 5 has value for folks that want some of the core sleep/activity metrics in a simplified way, but don’t want to wear a watch/band. It’s quite good at doing that – really good. However, if you’re already wearing a watch/band (or care about fitness/sports tracking), the Oura Ring probably isn’t what you’re after.

With that, thanks for reading!