You want to track your sleep, but you don’t want to use Oura Ring — or perhaps any smart ring for that matter. We’ve got the answer: the RISE app.
With RISE, you don’t have to wear anything at all. The app tracks metrics that make the biggest difference to your energy levels, health, and performance, and gives you actionable advice based on your own biology for better sleep and more energy.
Here’s a rundown of what the RISE app and other Oura Ring alternatives can do for your sleep.
The RISE app tracks your sleep debt. Most other sleep trackers don’t. Whoop and the Sleepon Go2Sleep ring do, but they don’t put as much focus on it as RISE.
Sleep debt is the running total of sleep you’ve missed out on recently. Most sleep researchers agree it’s one of the biggest factors determining your energy levels and performance each day — not to mention your long-term health.
That’s why we place sleep debt front and center in the RISE app.
RISE tracks your sleep debt over 14 nights. It acts as a sleep calculator tracking how much sleep you get and comparing it to how much sleep you need — known as your sleep need.
Instead of working with generic sleep need guidelines (i.e. the very wide seven-to-nine-hour recommendation for adults), RISE works out how much sleep you need individually.
The app uses a year’s worth of your phone use data and sleep science algorithms to calculate your sleep need in hours and minutes.
Heads-up: Some sleep trackers use generic guidelines. These guidelines are too broad to be helpful (seven to nine hours is a huge window) and are also misleading; guidelines are based on how much sleep people claim they get, not what they need.
In reality, your sleep need is unique to you. When we looked at how much sleep 1.95 million RISE users aged 24 and up need, we found it ranged from five hours to 11 hours 30 minutes.
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Once you know your sleep need, you know what to aim for each night. When you don’t meet this number, you’ll start building up sleep debt.
But not every night is equal. The RISE algorithm puts more weight on last night's sleep — 15% to be exact — as this makes the biggest difference to how you feel today. Then 85% of your sleep debt comes from the previous 13 nights of sleep, with more recent nights having more weighting.
There’s a lot of science behind the scenes, but RISE will give you one clear sleep debt number.
You’ll also get personalized advice to help you lower your sleep debt and keep it low. This comes in the form of:
Expert tip: Eliminating sleep debt entirely may not be achievable for many of us, but reducing it as much as possible can help you feel and perform your best. is key to reaching your full potential. Check your sleep debt at a glance in the RISE app, on your Apple Watch, iPad, or from a widget on your iPhone home screen.
You can learn more about sleep debt here.
We’ve covered more on sleep debt tracking apps here, including why RISE is the most accurate.
RISE users on iOS 1.202 and above can view their sleep debt here.
The RISE app doesn’t track sleep quality. Non-watch sleep trackers (like Whoop), non-ring wearables (like Fitbit and Garmin), non-wearables (like the Withings sleep mat or Eight Sleep mattress cover), and non-Oura smart rings (like Ultrahuman Ring AIR and Go2sleep) don’t exactly track your sleep quality, either.
Many give you a sleep score based on the brand’s proprietary scoring system — like Eight Sleep’s Sleep Fitness Score or Ultrahuman Ring AIR’s Sleep Index. These scores are made up of different metrics in an effort to assign a score to sleep quality, which lacks a consensus definition and is quantified or qualified in many different ways, both in the sleep science world as well as in real life.
We prefer to focus on consensus metrics, like sleep debt, which is proven to make a difference to how you feel day to day.
Metrics that usually go into sleep quality-like scores — like time awake at night or how regular your sleep pattern is — are reflected in sleep debt. And you can’t use good quality sleep to get the amount of sleep you need in less time (you need the right quantity of quality sleep to feel and function your best).
The best sleep trackers focus on, and help you improve, metrics that make the biggest difference to your daily life.
You can track sleep quality yourself in RISE, however. RISE waits 90 minutes for morning grogginess to pass and then asks you to rate your sleep quality.
Why? Recent studies (like this 2023 one) point to the strong influence how you feel about your sleep has on how you feel when you’re awake. So tracking your own self-rated sleep quality can give you insights into why you feel the way you do each day.
Learn more about sleep tracking and why sleep quality is hard to track here.
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The RISE app doesn’t track sleep cycles or the time spent in sleep stages. Non-ring alternatives like the Apple Watch, Whoop, Garmin, Fitbit, and Samsung Galaxy do. As do non-Oura Ring ring alternatives like RingConn, Go2Sleep, and Circul.
Seeing the time spent in deep sleep, light sleep, and REM sleep is interesting, but it’s not that useful. You can’t control it and we all need different amounts of sleep, and therefore different amounts of each sleep stage (and this can change from night to night).
Plus, wearables and sleep trackers can only estimate time in sleep stages. And they’re not that good at it.
A 2022 study compared four fitness trackers: Fatigue Science Readiband, Fitbit Inspire HR, Oura Ring, and Polar Vantage V Titan. Results showed the wearables do a good job at telling when you’re awake and asleep, but they can’t track sleep phases as accurately. More 2022 research backs this up. Even in a sleep lab, experts only agree on test results about 80% of the time.
If you’re getting enough sleep overall, your brain can self-optimize and spend the right amount of time in each sleep stage for you.
We dive into why you shouldn’t worry too much about deep sleep and REM sleep here.
The RISE app tracks your circadian rhythm. Most smartwatches and smart rings don’t. Some, like Whoop, monitor your circadian rhythm in the background and use it to recommend a bedtime, but they don’t foreground it as RISE does, or offer insights you can use to plan your day. Some non-Oura rings like the Ultrahuman Ring AIR track your circadian rhythm.
Your circadian rhythm is your internal body clock. It helps to determine your sleep-wake cycle and when you feel alert and sleepy.
RISE predicts your circadian rhythm using your recent sleep times, inferred light exposure, and algorithms built on the SAFTE model, which was developed by the US Department of Transportation and the Department of Defense.
You’ll get a prediction, down to the minute, of when your energy levels will rise and fall each day.
With this, you can:
Learn more about how RISE predicts your circadian rhythm here.
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RISE users on iOS 1.202 and above can see their circadian rhythm on the Energy screen here.
The RISE app costs $69.99 a year, which works out to $5.83 a month.
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.
Prices vary depending on where you shop, but here’s what other Oura Ring alternatives cost at the time of writing:
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Yes, RISE works with wearable devices. You can pair RISE with wearables like Apple Watch, Garmin, or Fitbit (or the Oura Ring, if you’re still considering it).
RISE will pull sleep data from your wearable device to help calculate your sleep debt number. Wearables can use skin-touching sensors to more accurately track your sleep. You can use RISE’s circadian rhythm tracking and personalized sleep hygiene reminders, plus insights and data from your wearable, to improve your sleep and energy.
You’ll be able to see if any changes you make affect your sleep debt in RISE, and, with your wearable, dive into other sleep metrics or track workouts and health data, like body temperature, blood oxygen levels (SpO2), and heart rate variability (HRV).
Here’s what RISE users have to say about using RISE with another health-tracking device:
If you want to improve your energy, productivity, and overall health and wellness, focus on metrics that make the biggest difference: sleep debt and your circadian rhythm.
There are plenty of Oura Ring alternatives, including Apple Watch, Whoop, and other smart rings like Ultrahuman Ring AIR. These wearables track a long list of health metrics like oxygen saturation, resting heart rate monitoring, and even skin temperature.
The RISE app is an Oura Ring alternative that tracks — and, most importantly, helps you improve — your sleep and energy. The proof? 80% of RISE users feel more energy within five days.
If you don’t want to wear a tracking device or worry about the battery life of another gadget, RISE can do it all from your phone.
If you don’t mind wearables, you can use RISE with a wearable device to get a more accurate sleep debt number and added activity tracking and health data.
RISE makes it easy to improve your sleep and daily energy to reach your potential
RISE makes it easy to improve your sleep and daily energy to reach your potential
