Looking for a sleep tracker can feel overwhelming. There are thousands on the market all claiming to improve your sleep. But if you want better sleep and energy — probably why you’re looking for a sleep tracker in the first place — the decision is easy.
You need a sleep tracker that tracks your sleep duration, of course, but also one that works out how much sleep you personally need, so you know if you’re getting enough of it. Plus, you’ll want a sleep tracker that gives you personalized guidance to improve your sleep and energy levels.
There’s only one tracker that truly does that: the RISE app.
Below, we’ll dive into what to look for in a sleep tracker, what the RISE app does, and how it compares to other sleep trackers out there.
Here’s what to ask yourself when comparing sleep trackers:
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Sleep tracking is only truly effective when you’re tracking the right metrics and improving them to get a good night’s sleep, more energy, and better physical and mental health.
Here’s how RISE and alternative sleep trackers compare on the metrics they focus on.
Tracking sleep duration is probably the first thing that comes to mind when you think about sleep trackers. Most sleep monitors track this basic metric giving you an estimation of how much sleep you get each night.
RISE does too, tracking your sleep duration in one of four ways:
RISE then gives you a detailed breakdown of your night. You’ll see how much sleep you got, when you fell asleep and woke up, and if and when you woke up in the night.
You won’t see how long you spent in different sleep stages (we’ll explain why soon), but if you have an Apple Watch, RISE can pull this data across to the app.
Heads-up: Research shows tappigraphy can be more accurate than tracking movement for some sleepers. That’s because many of us lay motionless in bed scrolling on our phones or watching TV. If a sleep tracker is tracking your movement, this motionless awake time can be misclassified as sleep. Apps like RISE that can track your phone use may give you a more accurate sleep duration.
Did you know apps make great sleep trackers? We’ve covered how you can track your sleep with just your phone here.
Knowing how much sleep you’re getting is important as sleep deprivation affects everything else in life — your health, performance, energy, and mood, just to name a few things. But if you don’t know how much sleep you personally need, knowing how much you get isn’t all that helpful.
This is where finding out your sleep need comes in.
Sleep need is how much sleep you personally need. It’s based on genetics and can vary from person to person.
For example, among 1.95 million RISE users aged 24 and over, sleep needs ranged from five hours to 11 hours 30 minutes.
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Most sleep trackers don’t work out your sleep need. They may use generic sleep guidelines — which are often inaccurate and misleading — or ask you to set your sleep need yourself despite most of us not knowing how much sleep we need. Alternatively, they may not even work out your sleep need at all.
RISE works out your sleep need in hours and minutes. The app uses a year’s worth of your phone use behavior and sleep science algorithms to calculate how much sleep you personally need.
Once you know your sleep need, you’ll want to know if you’re hitting that each night. If you’re not, you’ll be building up sleep debt, which is the amount of sleep you owe your body.
Lowering your sleep debt can help improve your energy, mood, focus, and mental and physical health, making it one of the most important metrics to track.
Many sleep monitors either don’t track your sleep debt at all — like Sleep Cycle and Fitbit — or they track it using generic or self-set sleep goals — like Whoop and AutoSleep. This probably makes their sleep debt tracking inaccurate.
RISE gives you an accurate sleep debt number. The app compares how much sleep you get to how much sleep you need and calculates your sleep debt over the course of 14 nights.
You won’t get confusing sleep reports or a hundred data points to go through. You’ll get one clear number to focus on.
Learn more about the best sleep debt trackers here.
RISE users on iOS 1.202 and above can view their sleep need here and view their sleep debt here.
Alongside accurately working out your sleep duration, sleep need, and sleep debt, you’ll want a sleep tracker that gives you insights about your circadian alignment.
Circadian alignment is when you synchronize your daily routine and behaviors, like sleeping, eating, and activity, with your circadian rhythm or internal body clock.
Being in sync, means the sleep you get will be at the right time for you on a regular schedule. This will lead to more energy, better performance and health, and an easier time falling and staying asleep. In a virtuous cycle, being in sync with your circadian rhythm will make it easier to keep your sleep debt low, and in turn, low sleep debt can help you stay in sync.
That means the best sleep tracker will need to track your sleep debt and your circadian rhythm to help you feel and function your best.
Many sleep-tracking apps and wearables — like Sleep Cycle — don’t give you any information about your circadian rhythm.
Others — like Apple Watch, Fitbit, Whoop, Oura Ring, and AutoSleep — give you limited information to work with. This might come in the form of a recommended bedtime or sleep consistency score (how regular your sleep schedule is). These insights appear to be helpful but are often based on those generic or self-set sleep goals, limiting their usefulness.
RISE gives you accurate insights you can use all day and night.
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 — RISE predicts the timing of your circadian rhythm.
You’ll see:
You’ll also get an Energy Potential score from zero to 100. Instead of the opaque readiness or recovery scores other sleep trackers offer, this score is based on your sleep debt. Lower your sleep debt to get more energy.
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RISE users on iOS 1.202 and above can see their circadian rhythm on the Energy screen here.
Garmin, Apple Watch, Sleep++, Pillow, AutoSleep, and others track the quality of your sleep.
This is a metric RISE doesn’t track per se. But there are good reasons for that.
Sleep quality doesn’t have a set definition, so trackers use different metrics to give you a sleep score based on their own scoring system instead. This could include sleep duration, deep sleep, and perhaps how many sleep disturbances you had. It varies from one sleep tracker to the next.
Despite their prevalence, there isn’t evidence these sleep scores correlate with how you feel and function (with the significant exception of the placebo effect).
And even if they did, it would be hard to improve them as so many metrics go into the score and the relative importance of each metric in determining the overall score is not clear.
Research shows how you feel about your sleep can make a difference to your well-being though. You can self-rate your sleep quality in RISE to track this.
We’ve covered more on sleep quality vs. sleep quantity here.
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Many sleep trackers tell you the amount of time you spend in the sleep stages of light sleep (called core sleep on the Apple Watch), deep sleep, and rapid-eye-movement (REM) sleep. This includes trackers like Apple Watch, Garmin, Samsung Galaxy, the Pillow app, and Eight Sleep mattress cover.
RISE doesn’t track your sleep stages. Here’s why:
You don’t need to track the time you spend in different stages of sleep. You just need to focus on getting enough sleep for you on a regular schedule with the help of good sleep hygiene. This will ensure your brain can get the right amount of each sleep stage for you.
Heads-up: Metrics like time spent in sleep stages and sleep quality can’t help diagnose sleep disorders. RISE’s sleep debt tracking can be useful to share with a healthcare provider to show recent sleep loss. Blood oxygen levels from trackers like Apple Watch and snore detection from trackers like Fitbit could help a doctor detect signs of sleep apnea.
Look for a sleep tracker with features that will help you lower your sleep debt and get in circadian alignment. This is what will make the most difference to your sleep and energy levels.
Trackers like Oura Ring, Whoop, and Apple Watch may help with features like bedtime consistency tracking or the ability to manually log activities that could impact your sleep to look for patterns.
RISE is the only sleep tracker with purpose-built features designed especially to help you lower your sleep debt and get in circadian alignment.
These features include:
You can decide on a sleep tracker by comparing the additional features it offers.
Popular features include tracking your snoring, respiratory rate, and body temperature. If you go for a fitness tracker like the Apple Watch, Oura Ring, or Whoop, you’ll get workout tracking, fertility tracking, and information about blood oxygen saturation and heart rate variability (HRV).
Here’s what RISE offers:
You don’t need to wear a watch — or any other wearable — to bed to track sleep. We’ve covered the best sleep tracker app without a watch here.
Here’s how the most popular sleep-tracking devices and apps compare on cost.
Beyond the price tag, look at free trial periods so you can try before you buy. For example, Whoop, Sleep Cycle, and RISE offer free trials.
RISE offers a seven-day free trial in which you can:
A lot can happen in one week — 80% of RISE users feel more energy within just five days.
There are free sleep trackers such as PrimeNap (only available on Android), SleepWatch (the basic version is free, but you’ll have to pay to access all the features), and Pillow (you’ll also have to pay to access all the features — the app records your snoring, for example, but you can’t listen to the recordings unless you upgrade).
You can access all of RISE’s features for free for seven days to see if you think it’s worth paying for.
We can’t compare reviews for every sleep tracker on the market, but here’s what users have to say about RISE:
As well as thousands of five-star reviews, RISE has gained attention from some big names in the industry. Apple nominated RISE for a design award and named it an Editor’s Choice App and both Sleep Foundation and Sleep Doctor named RISE one of their best sleep apps for 2024.
You’ve made the decision to track your sleep, now you just need to find the best sleep tracker for you. We believe it’s RISE.
Other sleep trackers can tell you how much sleep you get or give you generic information about certain metrics, but there’s only so much they can do to help you get more sleep and better energy.
RISE is different. RISE works out how much sleep you personally need. It acts as a sleep coach, giving you daily guidance tailored to you to help you improve the key metrics of sleep debt and circadian alignment.
In real terms, you’ll get better sleep, more energy, and notice a real difference in your health, mood, and productivity.
Learn more about Rise for sales teams.
RISE makes it easy to improve your sleep and daily energy to reach your potential
