The best sleep tracker 2024: From smart rings and watches to earbuds
The best sleep trackers to monitor and understand your sleep
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The best sleep trackers are all about getting you the best night’s sleep possible. By themselves, they can’t help you sleep better, but they’ll give you valuable insight to help you understand the length and quality of your sleep. They’ll help track your heart rate and breathing, even helping you get ahead of potential health issues like sleep apnea.
They’ll provide digestible, actionable information that can help you get the most out of your sleep, which is one of the most important facets of a healthy lifestyle. You might have considered thebest smartwatchesorbest fitness trackersfor sleep tracking, but if you really want to level up your kip, you’ll want a specialized sleep-tracking device.
While those devices are often limited to wrist wearables, our best sleep tracker guide features headphones, headbands, rings, and even under-mattress hardware, all designed to be as unintrusive as possible. We’ve tried and tested every single one of them, and can confidently recommend them all for a variety of use cases and budgets. Here are our top picks!
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.
Best Overall
The best sleep tracker for most people
The new 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.
Best budget
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 subscription
Best sleep tracker with a subscription
If you want a small wearable sleep tracker and don’t mind paying for a subscription, the Oura is probably the way to go. The sleep data is highly accurate, it’s very comfortable wear, and you’ll get personalized advice. It’s also cheaper than the Samsung offering, but this saving is offset by the subscription.
Best headphones
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 heaband
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 earbuds
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
1. Samsung Galaxy Ring
Our expert review:
New for 2024, theSamsungGalaxy 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 fullSamsung Galaxy Ring Review
Best sleep tracker on a budget
2. Withings Sleep Analyzer
Our expert review:
Even thebest mattressdoesn’t guarantee a great night’s sleep. TheWithings Sleep Analyzeris a pad you can slip underneath to keep a 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 fullWithings Sleep Analyzer review
The best sleep tracker with a subscription
3. Oura (Generation 3)
Our expert review:
Oura is a smart ring designed to help you balance rest and activity, prompting you to meet goals for daily movement while also getting enough sleep to fully recover. It really comes into its own at night, and the new third-generation model has an improved sleep staging algorithm that allows it to more accurately detect whether you’re in light, deep, or REM sleep. In our tests, it was the best sleep tracker for detecting the difference between settling down for the night and actually drifting off.
The ring also has an improved optical heart rate monitor, which now tracks your heart rate constantly throughout the day and night, allowing for more accurate comparisons and analysis. It also contains a SpO2 sensor plus seven temperature sensors, and after a few nights, the Oura app will establish a baseline and let you know about any deviations from the norm, which could be indications of things like illness, your menstrual cycle, or stress.
It also detects whether you’re an early bird, a night owl, or somewhere in between - what’s known in the sleep industry as chronotypes - and offers actionable advice to optimize your sleep schedule. It even measures and provides sleep scores on days you get only broken or infrequent sleep, which is perfect for shift workers or those who get irregular, biphasic sleep.
All the data is clearly presented in the Oura smartphone app, with detailed explanations and analysis only a finger tap away. The only downside of the ring as a sleep tracker is its price; at $299 (about £230 / AU$420) it’s one of the most expensive tools around, and there’s an additional monthly subscription fee if you want access to the most detailed insights.
Read our fullOura (Generation 3) review
Best sleep tracking headphones
4. Kokoon Nightbuds
Our expert review:
The Kokoon Nightbuds are a set of lightweight headphones packed with all the sleep tech you could ask for. Like theBose Sleepbuds IIthey 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 theAmazfit 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 the 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 fullKokoon Nightbuds review
Best sleep tracking headband
5. Muse S
Our expert review:
TheMuse Sis 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 wellbeing.
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 fullMuse S review
Best sleep tracking earbuds
6. Amazfit Zenbuds
Our expert review:
The Amazfit Zenbuds might look like truewireless headphones, but they’re something quite different, sitting somewhere between a sleep tracker and awhite noise machine. Rather than streaming music from your phone, these tinysleep earplugsplay 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 fullAmazfit Zenbuds review
How to choose the best sleep tracker for you
Why you can trust TechRadarWe spend hours testing every product or service we review, so you can be sure you’re buying the best.Find out more about how we test.
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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Cat is TechRadar’s Homes Editor specializing in kitchen appliances and smart home technology. She’s been a tech journalist for 15 years, and is here to help you choose the right devices for your home and do more with them. When not working she’s a keen home baker, and makes a pretty mean macaron.
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