Price: A question of longevity
Both the Aura Ring 4 and the Hope 5.0 are expensive trackers. Aura starts at $349 and requires a $69.99 annual membership fee. It’s available in a variety of sizes and colors, mostly at the same price, though extra-durable ceramic models start at $499.
Whoop has no standard pricing structure. You can’t just buy the device outright. Instead, you need to sign up for a Hope membership, and the tracker is included with your membership. The brand offers three subscription options, but as I concluded in my Whoop 5.0 review, the middle tier, called Peak, is the choice of the Goldilocks group. This tier costs $239 per year and includes the Whoop 5.0 with a black SuperCut band and a wireless power pack that lets you recharge the tracker while it’s on your wrist.
Whoop’s pricing tiers (Credit: Whoop)
While Whoop’s hefty subscription price gives more sticker shock, the comparative cost between the two depends on how long you plan to keep your gadget before upgrading. If you like to trade in new gadgets every year, the Whoop 5.0 will be less expensive at $239 compared to $418.99 for the Ora.
After two years, Scale Balance, with Whoop 5.0 fees total $478 compared to $488.98 for the Ora Ring 4. After three years, Oura is more affordable at $558.97, compared to $717 for Whoop. The more the scales move towards Aura, the more you will own the device.
For reference, it took nearly three years for the Woop to upgrade from the fourth to the fifth generation, while the Aura waited four years to go from version three to four. With both devices, you can still use the previous generation model to access most current features.
Since I would imagine that most people are looking to buy a device that will last for years, Aura tops this category.
Winner: Aura Ring 4
Sensors and features: Similar capabilities
Since both Oura Ring 4 and Whoop 5.0 specialize in overall health tracking, they have similar sensors built into their different frames. The Aura Ring 4 has red and green infrared LEDs to measure blood oxygen saturation (SpO2), heart rate, heart rate variability, and respiration rate, plus a skin temperature sensor and an accelerometer. It can track 40 different types of exercise, your movements throughout the day, your sleep duration and stages, as well as your stress levels.
At the bottom of the tracker are the hoop sensors (Credit: Andrew Gebart)
Whoop 5.0 has a built-in accelerometer for motion tracking, a photoplethysmography (PPG) sensor for heart rate tracking, and a skin temperature sensor. It can also measure heart rate variability, respiration rate, sleep, SpO2, and stress. It supports a wide range of exercises, including recovery and home activities, in addition to a standard mix of gym machines and sports. It also lets you log specific strength training exercises, like the back squat and bench press.
Since both devices have the same set of sensors, the Hope wins with its wide variety of trackable activities.
Winner: Op 5.0
Design: Fashion vs. Utility
Obviously, this is a highly subjective category, but the battle isn’t particularly close for me. Aura Ring 4 looks stylish enough to wear on any occasion. The Whoop 5.0’s useful strap blends in at the gym, but will detract from a good outfit for a night on the town. Whoop offers a variety of band styles and accessories with a pouch you can slip the sensor into, but those accessories are sold separately, while the Aura looks good to begin with.
I love the look of the aura color (Credit: Andrew Gabbert)
Both devices are comfortable. I wore them in my daily life, at the gym, while sleeping, and on some nice occasions. No one physically harassed me. The Hoop 5.0 doesn’t quite match the Aura’s attractive look, though, and the ring isn’t so revealing that it feels out of place during casual occasions or at the gym.
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Winner: Aura Ring 4
Battery life: A week or two?
Since both devices measure your fitness over time, battery life is an important factor. Both Oura Ring 4 and Whoop 5.0 work better the more you wear them. On this front, Whoop is the clear winner, because you never actually have to take it off. Even without factoring in a portable battery pack, this doubles the Aura’s battery capacity. The Whoop 5.0 lasted 16.5 days in my battery rundown test. The battery pack only adds unparalleled convenience, as you can click it into place and keep wearing the strap while it recharges.
The Aura Ring 4 only lasted 7 days in my testing, and that’s a pretty good total. You only have to remove the ring once a week, so you can recharge it for a few hours on a lazy Sunday afternoon and leave it on the rest of the time. While respectable compared to other fitness trackers, the Aura’s battery is no match for the Hoop.
Winner: Op 5.0
Activity and exercise tracking: Accurate, but basic
Whoop translates your health metrics into three holistic scores: sleep (a measure of how much you get shut-eye), stress (which combines activity and stress), and recovery (based on your stress, sleep, and resting heart rates). You can tap on any of these scores for details, including how each one was calculated.
Aura also offers three scores. The activity and sleep scores are self-explanatory, and the readiness score sums up the rest of your data on a scale of one to 100. Over time, Aura also measures your cardiovascular capacity, cardiovascular age, and sleep regularity, while Hope tracks physical age (which may differ from your chronological age) and speed.
Whoop measures activity and uses it to generate its overall score (Credit: Whoop/PCmag)
Both trackers accurately measure daily activity and basic workout metrics. They can automatically detect and track certain exercises, or you can log your workouts manually. During exercise, both track your heart rate and other important stats like heart rate zones, pace and time. However, none offer the level of detail you’ll find with dedicated GPS fitness wearables, which typically measure exercise-specific stats like cadence, cadence, and power for running.
Winner: Tie
Sleep and stress tracking: prescriptive versus descriptive
Both the Aura Ring 4 and Hope 5.0 excel as sleep trackers. Oura specifically monitors sleep duration, efficiency, latency, rest, time you wake up in bed, time, and time you spend in each sleep stage, as well as health metrics like average heart rate variability, breathing regularity, resting heart rate, and SpO2.
Hope’s sleep data is more prescriptive than descriptive. It also tracks sleep duration, time in each stage, your rest efficiency, and your sleep stress, but then uses those metrics to calculate sleep debt and recommend bedtimes to help you catch up. Her recommendations and reviews of your desired rest take up the bulk of her sleep page. It doesn’t show individual values for your overnight breathing, skin temperature, or even your average heart rate on its sleep page, though it monitors all three.
I prefer the way Oura’s app shows sleep and stress information (Credit: Oura/PCmag)
Aura makes it easy to find granular sleep details that might interest you by offering its own recommendations. Both also track stress, but again, Aura presents the information in a more helpful way, graphing your stress against recent activity so you can clearly see why it’s increasing.
Both the Aura Ring 4 and the Hope 5.0 proved accurate when measuring sleep and stress, but I found the way the Aura presented its information more helpful.
Winner: Aura Ring 4
