Garmin and Oura represent two premier options for tracking health, sleep, and fitness, but they have distinct strengths and weaknesses.
As such, picking between them can be difficult. Do you opt for Garmin’s superior fitness tracking or Oura’s pedigree in health and wellness insights? Smart ring or watch? Monthly subscription or one-and-done?
These are the key considerations when picking between the pair, but there are also plenty of finer points here that make up both of these ecosystems. We’ll use this guide to discuss as many as possible and help you discover which is best for your tracking needs.
Read our full Oura Ring 4 review.
How we tested for this comparison
Conor has tested and reviewed all major Garmin watches from the past three years, wearing the flagship Fenix 8 full-time to track running, cycling, swimming, strength training, and everything else.
He’s also lived with Oura Ring (Gen 3 Horizon and Gen 4), using them to compare hundreds of nights of sleep data, stress summaries, and readiness insights with other wearables.
Price comparison
With Garmin boasting such an extensive range, comparing prices head-to-head is fruitless. However, it is important to understand the broad pricing philosophies here.
Oura, for example, requires users to pay a monthly (or annual) $5.99/£5.99 fee — a subscription it’s consistently told Wareable underpins its continued feature development and research.
Subscriptions also exist for Garmin—but in a different way. If you’re looking at gaining extra features over the top of the usual Garmin Connect app experience – say, green contours for golf course maps – that’s when you’ll have to shell out extra.
Typically, though, you’re done when you pay for a Garmin watch. And, as we say, the watches can range anywhere from $200-ish for a Vivoactive, Instinct, entry-level Forerunner or Lily to well over $1,000 for a Fenix 8 or MARQ (Gen 2).
The pricing range for Oura’s rings is more narrow. Gen 3 (Horizon) rings start at $299, while the latest Gen 4 model is available for $350-$500.
Device overview: Smart ring vs. watch
At the risk of ignoring the most obvious point of comparison here: Garmin only makes watches and Oura only makes rings. From what Garmin has told us, it doesn’t envisage that changing any time soon – and Oura already integrates pretty nicely with watches from Apple and platforms like Strava.
Which form factor is better will depend entirely on what you’ll be tracking. However, both platforms are geared around 24/7 wear — particularly Oura. You’ll limit insights dramatically if you only plan to wear sporadically.
The basic consideration here is placement. An Oura ring will encounter more day-to-day wear, especially on your index finger (which you’re advised to do for maximum accuracy). And even if you’re not bashing it up in the gym or on DIY projects, we’ve found Gen 3 and Gen 4 rings (and practically every smart ring we’ve tested long-term) are liable to scratches.
An Oura Ring is more discreet than a Garmin watch, though don’t be fooled into thinking it can pass for a ‘regular’ ring. Even the latest model – the Oura Ring 4 – is chunky compared to rival options like the RingConn Gen 2 and Samsung Galaxy Ring.
There are, at least, lots of finishes to help you blend it among other rings or jewelry.
Garmin, meanwhile, has watches that suit every wrist size and style. The top-end MARQ watches can pass for luxury timepieces, while the Fenix and Forerunner lines are unapologetically sporty. Those who prefer G-SHOCK-looking watches have the Instinct range to consider, while the Venu and Vivoactive lines are the brand’s answer to smartwatches like the Apple Watch.
There are dedicated design features and styles for the outdoors, ultra-endurance, swimming, running, golf, diving, aviation, and kids. If you have a defining feature you want to show off, Garmin probably has a watch for you.
The form factor, of course, also lends itself to a more hands-on experience. You’ll be able to triage notifications, experience live tracking, check stats instantly, and – perhaps most obviously – use it to tell the time.
Then there are the wares outside of watches: golf rangefinders, cycling computers and power meters, HRM chest straps, and much more. It’s an ecosystem brimming with choice, and (as you would expect) it all plays nicely together.
- Draw: Garmin for choice and smarts; Oura for discreet tracking
Full reviews we recommend reading:
- Garmin Fenix 8
- Garmin Forerunner 265
- Garmin Venu 3
- Oura Ring 4
- Oura Ring 3 Horizon (long-term test after two years)
Health, sleep, and stress tracking
The core of the Oura experience is geared towards health and wellness insights, so it may not surprise it’s an option we recommend over Garmin.
Sleep tracking
Its sleep-tracking insights are well-focused and true to feel. Oura is more concerned than most with tracking the markers that inform behavioral change: chronotypes, consistency, sleep contributors like timing and activity, and HRV.
Typical insights like sleep stages (notoriously limited in accuracy, Oura is about as good as it gets in this aspect), sleep scores, and blood oxygen monitoring during the night (improved greatly for the Ring 4) are also here, but this is a much fuller picture than what you get with Garmin.
Garmin has improved over the last couple of years, adding context to its sleep scores and a sleep coach that dynamically adjusts suggested hours based on recent sleep history and HRV Status. Yet, it still reports minimal awake time during the night which can skew overall sleep hours, and scores don’t feel as aligned with our subjective reporting (or other trackers).
Stress tracking
Oura also outlasts Garmin in stress tracking, with the wider context playing a crucial role again here. It has two core features in this area – Resilience and Daytime Stress (shown above). The former crunches recovery and sleep data together to deliver a digestible, constantly evolving grade on your ability to handle stress, and the latter plots points throughout the day to assess whether your day leaned more toward restorative or stress.
They’re exceptional tools to help you understand what behaviors trigger different body responses, with Garmin’s tracking limited to a 0-100 assessment of your day. It’s not that this interpretation isn’t true to feel, and context is okay, but we don’t grade the presentation as highly as Oura’s.
Health features
It’s a little more tit-for-tat in health. Garmin and Oura offer interpretations of daily readiness, sleep temperature to inform cycle tracking, in-depth HRV monitoring, and heart health features like VO2 max. Both brands also have their exclusives.
Garmin can integrate with its smart scales to offer more useful and accurate weight and calorie insights, and features like Body Battery (a constantly updating 0-100 figure of your energy levels), Fitness Age, and Pulse Ox Acclimation are all incredibly handy. In certain regions, some Garmin watches also offer ECG readings.
Oura can’t offer that level of information. Yet, its women’s health features are a bit more complete (thanks to pregnancy tracking), and ones like cardiovascular age (a rolling pulse wave velocity measurement) are very neat to monitor.
- Winner: Oura
Activity tracking
Oura has made strides in this area over the last year, adding improved workout detection and integrations that shoulder some of the burden. Still, we’re unsure if it could ever come close to matching the might of Garmin’s sports and activity tracking experience.
Heart rate tracking during exercise is still a bit of a mixed bag (though it can generally understand the intensity of a workout), there’s no GPS tracking, and training insights are limited to VO2 max, step tracking, calorie burn estimates, and views of your inactivity time.
If exercise and workouts play a smaller role than others in your overall health, it’s a holistic and passive approach that will suit you. But it isn’t a workout tracker you should rely on.
Garmin, on the other hand, is built around sports tracking. Not only does it best Oura here, but it also offers a more in-depth fitness experience than any other brand. Its GNSS tracking is industry-leading, and optical heart rate tech is in the top tier alongside Apple.
Depending on which Garmin watch you favor, there are also bespoke tracking features for practically every workout profile you can think of (and tons you’ve never even considered tracking). Once you’re done tracking, Garmin also does a solid job presenting your workouts in Connect.
Running and cycling profiles are still prioritized, with more in-depth features like Endurance Score, Hill Score, Cycling Ability, and Race Predictor. Yet, its more modern flagship watches offer a better all-around focus than ever, with features like mapping, preloaded golf courses, and personalized strength plans all included.
If you’re serious about training, there’s no better platform to run it all through.
Winner: Garmin
Battery life
Neither Oura nor Garmin shortchanges users in battery life, but the breadth of the latter’s lineup is the key separator here. Depending on the Garmin you select, you can have a tracker logging your activity, sleep, and health for a few days or a few months.
The brand also boasts class-leading numbers for watches with AMOLED displays (even if they’re not quite as eye-popping as Apple’s or Samsung’s equivalents), offers solar charging models of some watch types, and even has a literal watch built around lasting long (the Enduro 3).
There’s no Garmin watch you’ll have to charge up daily like a (admittedly more feature-packed) smartwatch, making them great fits for those who want to forego any battery anxiety.
Oura can’t compete with that, but it’s still a multi-day device.
Our testing shows Ring 4 will generally last around five days with all tracking features turned on, roughly similar to the Ring 3. But there’s no charging case (like you see from rival smart rings), which means it’s limited to cable power-ups, like Garmin.
Winner: Garmin
Verdict: Which should you choose?
With very different strengths and weaknesses, you could pick up a device from each of Garmin and Oura’s ecosystems and have a well-complemented wearable array.
That isn’t practical (or affordable) for many users, though, so what kind of user is each best for?
If you have a more holistic view of activity tracking or crave a discreet health and wellness tracker that can inform behavioral change, nobody does it better than Oura. We’re sure the subscription fee will be a sticking point for some, and the ring form factor can have its negatives, but the experience is relatively unrivaled in non-activity insights.
Where it falters slightly – in battery life and activity tracking – Garmin is an industry leader. Accuracy is among the best for GPS and heart rate monitoring, there are countless options to suit your budget and style, and almost all watches can last longer than comparable options from rivals.
