We spend about a third of our lives asleep, yet for many of us, sleep is a mystery. Are we sleeping well and waking refreshed? Is the sleep we’re getting keeping us healthy and alert during the day? Until the last decade or so, there were few tools available to measure the quality of your nightly sleep short of spending the night in a sleep laboratory.
Now, though, sleep tracking is built into all sorts of gadgets, and the best sleep trackers can generate detailed reports about the length and quality of your sleep, and in some cases make recommendations for how to do better. The world of sleep tracking has matured a lot in the last few years. No longer a novelty, sleep tracking features are now built into most smart watches and fitness bands.
There are also stand-alone sleep trackers, such as sensors you place under the your mattress. And what these devices can measure has improved substantially, right down to when you were in REM sleep. Just about the only thing they can’t do is record your dreams, and we wouldn’t bet against that in the future, either.
We’ve rounded up the six best sleep trackers you can buy today. Read on to find the device that’s right for you.
- Best Fitness Watch with Sleep Tracking: Fitbit Sense
- Best Smart Watch with Sleep Tracking: Apple Watch Series 6
- Best Standalone Sleep Tracker: Withings Sleep Tracking Pad
- Best Budget Band with Sleep Tracking: Xiaomi Mi Band 5
- Best Sleep Tracker in a Ring: Oura Ring
- Best Fitness Band with Sleep Tracking: Garmin Vivosmart 4
Best Fitness Watch with Sleep Tracking
Fitbit Sense
Fitbit pioneered the entire genre of wearable fitness trackers and was among the first companies to perform sleep tracking in consumer devices as well. The Fitbit Sense is Fitbit’s most advanced fitness watch, bristling with sensors that can measure heart rate, temperature, stress, blood oxygen levels and sleep quality as well as perform an electrocardiogram. The Sense is designed to collect all this information to give you a picture not just of your fitness, but also your overall wellness.
The Fitbit Sense delivers detailed sleep reporting, including when you experienced light and heavy sleep along with when you were in REM. It combines all of that with new data you might not be able to find in other sleep trackers, like your stress level and blood oxygen levels, which it measures during the night. You can view some of these stats on the watch and get more detailed info on the mobile app.
Best Smart Watch with Sleep Tracking
Apple Watch Series 6
It’s only recently that Apple has finally started to catch up with most other brands by offering sleep tracking on the Apple Watch. Apple waited years before adding sleep tracking to the watch, in part because of the watch’s abysmal one-day battery life. While the battery life problem persists, the watch now reminds you when you need to throw it on the charger before bedtime so it can work through the night.
Battery limitations aside, Apple’s sleep tracking software is very good. Apple integrated the sleep software in the watch with the Apple Health and alarm apps for a seamless experience—you can use your iPhone to set your sleep goals and wake time, and the watch will gently wake you if you’re wearing it; if not, the phone automatically takes over alarm duties.
The Health app maintains your sleep history, but it’s less detailed than what you get with many other sleep trackers—you can follow your heart rate through the night and see how consistent your sleep is, but you don’t get an analysis of your sleep cycle or REM state. Even so, the Apple watch’s sleep software will no doubt continue to evolve, and you can pair the watch with third-party sleep apps if you prefer.
Best Standalone Sleep Tracker
Withings Sleep Tracking Pad
Not everyone wants to wear a fitness watch or fitness band—especially to bed. If you’d rather de-gadget yourself at bedtime, perhaps you’d rather try the Withings Sleep, a pad that slips under your mattress and doesn’t require you to wear anything for it to do its magic.
The pad has sensors that can detect heart rate, snoring and sleep cycles, so it can graphically show you your light, heavy and REM sleep cycles, as well as note when you wake and are disturbed during the night. All the results are sent to the Withings app on your phone. It’s also compatible with the IFTTT automation app, so you can configure it to automatically turn off the bedroom light when you climb into bed or change the thermostat when you wake.
Best Budget Wearable with Sleep Tracking
Xiaomi Mi Band 5
While you can easily spend $300 or more on a fitness wearable, you certainly don’t have to. The Xiaomi Mi Band 5 is a full-featured fitness band that costs as little as $30. Despite the low cost, it has a colorful AMOLED display, heart rate monitor, oxygen sensor and 14-day battery life. The latest in a successful family of fitness monitors, the Xiaomi Mi Band 5 does a great job of tracking activity and exercise along with displaying notifications from your smartphone.
As a sleep tracker, it’s arguably smarter than the Apple Watch at a tenth the price; in addition to continuous heart rate monitoring while you sleep, it can track your sleep cycles through the night and even senses and records naps during the day. And unlike some trackers that only offer the raw data, Xiaomi makes an effort to synthesize the data and offer actionable feedback to improve your sleep.
Best Sleep Tracker in a Ring
Oura Ring
The Oura might be unusual today—a tiny ring packed with just about as many sensors as the fitness bands that wrap around your wrist—but there’s little doubt that this is a preview of the future. Tech is getting smaller, more discreet, and fading into the background. While it looks like jewelry, the Oura ring is packed with sensors to measure your heart rate, body temperature, respiration and motion, which means it’s equipped to be a fitness monitor that lives on your finger with a five-day battery life.
Because it has no interface, you need to refer to your smartphone for everything—to track workouts, configure the ring and check your stats and history. But the fact that it’s so small, light and unobtrusive means it’s much more comfortable to sleep with than a smart watch or fitness band, and Oura does surprisingly well as a sleep tracker. It tracks your sleep cycles, including when you’re in REM sleep, as well as your respiration rate, heart rate and and more. Oura’s ability to measure body temperature and heart rate variability while you sleep makes its dashboard of your body’s sleep performance more thorough than most other devices, despite the ring’s unusual form factor.
Best Fitness Band with Sleep Tracking
Garmin Vivosmart 4
Garmin’s Vivosmart 4 is for people who don’t want to wear a large fitness watch or smart watch on their wrist; much more discreet (though not nearly as discreet as the Oura ring), it is a full-featured, accurate fitness tracker with a small touchscreen display and long battery life. Garmin takes workout tracking seriously, so this band has a full suite of sensors—heart rate, barometer, accelerometer, blood oxygen and more—and it can connect to gym equipment wirelessly with ANT+. That’s pretty rare among fitness bands.
And Garmin doesn’t mess around when it comes to sleep tracking, either. The Vivosmart 4 measures your sleep cycle, blood oxygen level, stress level and body recovery from workouts, and even features Garmin’s “body battery” dashboard that estimates how much energy you have left as the day goes on based on your workload and exercise. If one could level a criticism at Garmin’s detailed sleep reporting, though, it might just be that there’s not much analysis done for you, so you’ll need to interpret everything yourself.
