Both the RISE app and Oura Ring can track your sleep. But can they help you sleep better each night and feel and perform better each day?
Below, we’ll lay out what each sleep tracker does to help you decide.
The RISE app tracks your sleep debt. Oura Ring doesn’t track your sleep debt.
Sleep debt is the amount of sleep you owe your body. Most sleep scientists agree sleep debt is the most important factor determining how you feel and function each day — more than sleep quality, number of sleep cycles, or time spent in different sleep stages (more on those soon).
If you’re looking for more energy, better focus, less brain fog, improved athletic performance, clearer skin, or a more stable mood, sleep debt is the metric to work on. Reducing sleep debt as much as possible is key to reaching your full potential.
Yes, RISE tracks sleep debt over your last 14 nights and gives you a clear number front and center in the app. You can check your sleep debt (and other RISE data) on your Apple Watch, iPad, or a widget on your iPhone home screen.
RISE tracks sleep debt by measuring how much sleep you get and comparing it to your sleep need — the genetically determined amount of sleep you need.
RISE doesn’t compare your sleep data against the generic seven to nine hours of sleep guideline. This guideline is based on self-reported data (which can be inaccurate) and data showing how much sleep people get, not what they need.
Instead, RISE uses a year’s worth of your phone use data and proprietary sleep-science-based models to work out your unique sleep need down to the minute.
RISE can use motion-based sleep detection to track when you fall asleep, wake up in the night, and wake up each morning. You’ll then see how much sleep you get each night, and you can add any naps you take during the day. RISE can also use data from Oura Ring, another sleep tracking app like Sleep Cycle, or another wearable device, like Fitbit or Garmin.
Sleep debt is calculated by subtracting the amount of sleep you get from the amount you need. But not all nights of sleep are equal.
We put more weight on last night’s sleep — 15% per the RISE algorithm — as last night has the biggest impact on how you feel and perform today. Then 85% of your sleep debt comes from the previous 13 nights of sleep, with more recent nights having more weighting.
All this gives you a scientific sleep debt measure boiled down into one simple number.
You can learn more about sleep debt here.
Don’t settle for a tracker that compares the sleep you get to generic guidelines. When we looked at the sleep needs of 1.95 million RISE users aged 24 and over, we found it ranged from five hours to 11 hours 30 minutes.
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Yes, the RISE app helps you catch up on sleep by showing you the best times to get more sleep and helping you fall asleep so you actually get this extra shut-eye.
You can lower your sleep debt by oversleeping your sleep need. As well as being a sleep calculator, RISE guides you through 20+ sleep habits that help you fall asleep faster and wake up less often in the night. You’ll get personalized recommendations for when to do these habits based on your own body clock.
RISE will also show you the best time for you to go to bed, wake up, and take a nap to help you catch up on sleep. All this will help to boost your energy, health, and performance.
Learn how to use RISE as a personal energy tracker here.
No, Oura Ring doesn’t track sleep debt. Instead, you’ll get an Oura Sleep Score on a scale of one to 100, which you can view in the Oura app.
This score is based on metrics like your heart rate, body temperature, and how long you spend in each sleep stage (more on whether or not that’s a useful measure to track soon).
To help determine the score, the device also tracks metrics like:
This is then compared against an estimate of how much sleep a person your age needs. This estimate is based on general guidelines, which provide a seven-to-nine-hour range. As mentioned, these guidelines are based on how much sleep people say they typically get, not what they need. They also suggest older adults need less sleep than younger adults, but that may not be the case. Sleep is just harder to come by as we age.
Oura suggests how you could improve your sleep — by giving you a recommended bedtime, for example. You’ll see how any changes you make impact Oura’s Sleep Score but not your sleep debt (Oura’s Sleep Score is made up of multiple metrics).
Instead of focusing on sleep debt, Oura gives you other sleep data, including sleep efficiency (how long you spend asleep in bed), restfulness (how much you toss and turn), and your nightly heart rate variability (HRV, the amount of time between heartbeats).
This data is interesting, but having one sleep debt number to focus on may be more useful — low sleep debt makes the biggest difference to how you feel and function.
Focusing on multiple metrics also has the potential to be overwhelming. For some, it could lead to orthosomnia, which is when you become obsessed with perfecting sleep tracker data. This can be particularly demoralizing if you’re trying to perfect scores that require guesswork to change and may ultimately not improve the daytime metrics that matter to you.
With RISE, you can just focus on sleep debt.
We’ve covered more on sleep debt tracking apps here, including why RISE is the most accurate.
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Neither Oura Ring or the RISE app track your sleep quality, per se.
Sleep quality is what most people think of when they think about tracking their sleep. But in sleep science, there’s actually no set definition for sleep quality.
Sleep quality means different things to different sleepers. You may think of sleep quality as sleeping soundly through the night, while your partner doesn’t care about restless sleep as long as they fall asleep fast.
For this reason and others we’ll get into, it’s ultimately not a helpful metric.
No, RISE doesn’t track your sleep quality. We show you the metric that matters and the one you have the most control over: sleep debt.
Sleep debt is the better metric to focus on if you want to improve your days.
The good news is metrics typically used to determine sleep quality — like time awake at night or regularity of sleep — are also reflected in sleep debt. The more time you’re awake at night, the less sleep you likely get. And the more regular your sleep schedule, the more likely you get enough sleep.
However, you can track your sleep quality yourself in RISE to track how you feel about your sleep. The app can send you a reminder 90 minutes after you wake up asking you to rate your sleep quality.
Why track how you feel about your sleep? How you feel about your sleep may give you more insight into your daily energy levels than a poorly defined metric like sleep quality. Research from 2021 shows how you feel about your sleep may be a more significant predictor of how tired you feel than sleep duration. And 2023 research found how well you felt you slept may make a bigger difference to your well-being the next day than how you actually slept.
Why 90 minutes? We all experience sleep inertia, or grogginess, when we first wake up. By waiting 90 minutes, you’ll have time to shake off this grogginess and more accurately assess how you feel.
No, Oura doesn’t track your sleep quality. Instead, Oura tracks your Oura Sleep Score, which combines metrics like total sleep time, heart rate, and time spent in different sleep stages.
Scientific research doesn’t usually include sleep stages in measures of sleep quality (unless the study is focusing on that). Time spent in different sleep stages is hard to track outside of a sleep lab, after all (more on this soon).
The Oura Sleep Score evaluates your sleep on a scale from 0-100. Oura says scores above 85 are optimal, 70-84 good, and below 70 suggests the need for lifestyle changes to improve sleep.
Whereas sleep debt is an objective, scientifically agreed upon metric that directly impacts your health and wellbeing, there’s less indication an abstracted sleep score does the same.
In that way, a sleep score may introduce problems common to a sleep quality rating – those of the placebo and nocebo effects. Research shows that if you're told you had better sleep quality, you're more likely to perform well, even if you slept badly. The opposite is also true. You’re more likely to perform poorly if you're told you slept poorly — even when you slept well.
Oura Ring tracks sleep stages. The RISE app doesn’t track sleep stages.
It’s interesting to see how long you spend in deep, light, and REM sleep each night. But, it’s not helpful to know.
You can’t control how your brain moves through sleep stages, and stressing over sleep will only make it harder to get.
Research from Dr. Jamie Zeitzer — co-director of the Center for Sleep and Circadian Sciences at Stanford University and one of our advisors — and others shows sleep staging variables are only weakly linked to subjective sleep quality.
Plus, even if it were helpful, research shows sleep stage tracking by wearable devices isn’t that accurate.
A 2022 study found four wearable devices (including the second-generation Oura Ring) could track when you’re awake and asleep, but they weren’t accurate at tracking sleep stages. Other 2022 studies have similar findings. Even in a sleep lab, experts only agree on test results about 80% of the time!
What’s more, the amount of time you need in light sleep, deep sleep, and REM sleep can change from night to night and it’ll all depend on how much sleep you need individually (not on generic guidelines) and how much sleep debt you have.
To illustrate, you spend about 10% to 25% of your sleep time in deep sleep. That means if you need eight hours of sleep, you could need 48 minutes to two hours of deep sleep — quite a range.
Focus on getting enough sleep overall and your brain will take care of the rest.
Learn more about why you shouldn’t worry too much about time spent in deep sleep and REM sleep here.
Both the RISE app and Oura Ring track your circadian rhythm.
Your circadian rhythm is your body’s roughly 24-hour internal clock. Along with sleep debt, how in sync you are with your circadian rhythm is the other main factor determining how you feel and function each day.
Oura uses circadian rhythm tracking in its Body Clock feature — a 24-hour color-coded clock face that shows how your sleep aligns with your optimal sleep window, determined by their estimate of your chronotype. Accurate assessment requires data from at least 30 significant sleep sessions over 90 days, consistent ring usage, and avoiding disruptions like travel across more than one time zone.
To predict the timing of your circadian rhythm, RISE uses your inferred light exposure, recent sleep times, and algorithms built on the SAFTE model, developed by the US Department of Transportation and the Department of Defense.
All of the science happens in the background of the RISE app, and you’ll get a simple visual of what your energy levels will look like each day. RISE tells you, down to the minute, when your energy is expected to rise and fall, and you’ll get conveniently timed reminders so you can be one step ahead.
With this data, you can:
You can learn more about how RISE predicts your circadian rhythm here, including how it calculates your Melatonin Window, which is your ideal biological bedtime.
The ring itself costs $299 or $349 USD, depending on which design you go for.
A monthly subscription costs $5.99 a month. This gives you access to all of the sleep, activity, and health data tracked by Oura.
No, RISE doesn’t have a monthly subscription. RISE has a yearly subscription that costs $69.99, which is equivalent to $5.83 a month.
For $69.99, you’ll get access to all of RISE’s features, no additional membership required.
You can try RISE for free for seven days. You’ll find out your sleep need, how much sleep debt you have, and see your energy predictions across the day. Plus, you’ll have several days to see how timed sleep hygiene reminders and relaxing sleep content can improve your sleep and energy before the free trial ends.
You can get an Oura Ring without a subscription. Without a subscription, you’ll get limited data — just Oura’s daily scores. On the Oura app, there’s a free library of sleep content, including soothing sounds, guided meditations, and sleep stories.
Yes, RISE works with Oura Ring.
RISE will pull your sleep tracking data from Oura to calculate your sleep debt number. You can then use RISE’s personalized reminders and Oura’s extensive library of content and see whether any changes you make impact your sleep debt and energy levels.
Plus, you can check other metrics, like sleep stages, if you wish, with Oura, or use Oura for its additional health tracking features, like tracking workouts or heart rate monitoring.
Here’s a taste of what users love about using RISE and Oura Ring together.
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Here’s a quick-fire list of some of the other features you might be interested in.
RISE:
Oura Ring:
And here are some quick-fire pros and cons to consider:
If you want to sleep better, have more energy, and improve your overall well-being, choose a tracker that helps you lower your sleep debt and keep it low.
Oura Ring tracks over 20 metrics like overnight oxygen saturation, heart rate, and body temperature. The RISE app is an Oura Ring alternative that focuses on metrics like sleep debt and circadian rhythm. Those who want extra data can combine the two.
If RISE is in your sleep tracking mix, you could get a good night’s sleep sooner than you think. We found 80% of RISE users get better sleep and more energy within five days!
Learn more about Rise for sales teams.
RISE makes it easy to improve your sleep and daily energy to reach your potential
