My new favourite affordable smart ring

Design

• Chunky but very comfortable
• Silver or blue options
• Sizes 6-14

If you are familiar with smart ring design, the Leep Ring’s look will not be a surprise. It comes in blue or silver titanium, and I tested the latter. It’s a chunky ring in width but is only 2.22mm at its thinnest point thickness wise, which results in a very good fit.

Ring comfort is very subjective, but I found the Leep Ring the most comfortable of any of the smart rings I’ve tested, which are the Oura Ring 3, Oura Ring 4, Oura Ring 5, Ultrahuman Ring Air and the Samsung Galaxy Ring. 

This is down to the sizing – I’ve tried Oura in an 11, and it’s a smidge too small on my index finger, but the 12 is too big (Oura uses different sizing across generations and does not use standard ring sizes). The Leep Ring in a 12 is a perfect fit for me, which has meant this is also the first time I’ve tested a smart ring and been able to forget I was wearing it, which is a huge bonus.

When you buy the Leep, you’ll be first sent a free sizing kit with plastic rings sizes 6 to 14 in it. I wore a couple of sizes for a couple of days to decide which one was best for me, and then Leep sent over the size I requested, as it will do with customers. Leep recommends you wear the Leep Ring on your index, middle or ring finger, but the most accurate readings will be on the index finger, so I went for that.

On the inside of the ring is some branding along with the sensors that track sleep, heart rate, heart rate variability (HRV), temperature, and activity, and on the outside is a diagonal recessed line that indicates the orientation of the ring by sight and touch – you make sure it’s on the underside of your finger to give the heart rate sensor its most optimal position. 

Overall the design is quite conspicuous and unremarkable, but that’s what I want from a smart ring. It’s meant to masquerade as jewellery. Unfortunately, the game is given away in the dark, when the ring blasts green or red light out. These lights are necessary to capture metrics like heart rate, but the translucent plastic that covers them means they shine out visibility in the dark, more than any other smart ring I’ve tested. 

When I wore it in bed, it shone brightly in my face to an annoying extent when my hand was near my face. A minor downside to an otherwise accomplished, comfortable design.

Leep manages to best competitors by including a charging case, rather than other rings’ preferred charging puck. These pucks need the ring placed on them and left on a table with a charger plugged in, whereas the Leep charging case lets you place the Ring inside and charge it up on the go, as the case holds charge.

A fully charged case will give the ring up to 60 days of total battery life according to Leep, which is enough for a long holiday away. Oura charges £99 for its optional charging cases, so Leep is offering a lot of value for its ring and case for £199 total.

You also get IP68 dust and water resistance, so you can wear the ring in the shower or while swimming, with water resistance up to 50m.

Features and app

• App for iOS and Android
• No subscription required
• Some app issues

For several months, the Leep Ring only had an iPhone app, but I tested it with the recently released Android app. 

The best part of either version is that it requires no subscription fee to use all its features. This is unusual in the smart ring world. Oura charges a monthly fee, Ultrahuman is free to use but charges for add-ons, and the Galaxy Ring only works with Samsung phones.

Leep is saying you shouldn’t have to pay more once you’ve bought the Leep Ring, which is refreshing. I can only hope this doesn’t change in future, as many tech firms have succumbed to the business model of seeking recurring revenue from customers to boost their bottom line.

The app is quite simple in how it presents data on its home screen, with a quick summary of how you are doing that day, with scores out of 100 for sleep and activity next to your recent heart rate.

There’s also a daily insight tile with a brief but seemingly not tailored tip. There are also articles from experts in the app you can read on relevant topics.

Oura has leaned into AI in its app, which takes your data and attempts to give you personalised advice with its Advisor tool. Leep is gentler in its advice because it is not connected to AI or cloud services – in fact, Leep says all data is processed on-device, and it even offers an optional encrypted backup tool for your data, so even Leep can’t see it. That’s a great option if you want a smart ring and want to keep your health data private.

If that’s the case, you should opt not to share Leep data with either Apple Health or Google Health Connect, iOS and Android’s health platforms respectively. 

I attempted to log in to my Leep account on an iPhone to see if I could load my data collected from the Android version, but I came across login errors. 

It appears you can’t sign in to the iPhone version of the app using your Android app login details, something I expected would work. To switch to a new Android phone, I needed to unpair the ring and then pair it with a new phone, which brought all my data over. I had opted in to cloud backups to facilitate this, but that is optional.

Health and fitness tracking

• Tracks activity, stress, temperature and sleep
• Can’t use connected GPS for runs
• Can’t track menstrual cycles

Though Leep markets its ring on sleep, the Leep Ring can track most of the metric is rivals can. That means you get sleep with duration, heart rate variability (HRV), consistency and quality, plus stress via the temperature sensor, activity including steps and distance, plus heart rate. It uses the movement sensor to determine time and quality of sleep.

The app has four tabs to cycle through on top of the home screen and is not too overwhelming. It has a clean look and doesn’t split out reams of data at you.

If you want to track runs, you can’t do that on the Leep Ring, which doesn’t have built-in GPS. The Oura Ring, and other screenless trackers like the Fitbit Air, can connect to your phone’s GPS to track run routes while pairing that data with heart rate and steps.

I didn’t miss this, but I did miss the lack of automatic activity detection. The Leep Ring couldn’t tell when I’d been on a long walk and categorise it, and it didn’t count my long, pacy pram walks with my young son as active minutes, which other smart rings and activity trackers have done.

It’s not a dealbreaker, but it means the app thinks I’m much lazier than I feel I currently am! The Leep Ring also cannot track menstrual cycles, a key feature Oura and others can track.

I like how sleep results are displayed, with phrases like “not to worry” and “ideal” next to things like duration and metrics, so you can get a quick idea of where you’re at. Tapping these results often takes you into deeper data, which is welcome rather than presenting the user with it all upfront.

Leep’s tracking was also in line with the Oura Ring 5’s results as well as the Apple Watch Series 11 when it came to sleep tracking. I trusted the step count less than a wrist-based wearable, as the count seems a little off, but as a ballpark figure it is acceptable.

Battery life

• Lasts about seven days with daily use
• Charging case is great
• Charges quickly

I found the Leep Ring lasted a full seven days of use before it completely ran out of battery. To stop it from doing so, you’ll have to charge it every five or six days. Leep claims the ring can last for eight days, and it nearly made it that far in my testing.

As mentioned, the included charging case is a major perk here and makes the Leep Ring package exceptionally good value. Being able to pop the ring in the case for a quick charge on the go, no cables required, is a boon.

The Oura Ring 5 can last between six and nine days between charges, so for the Leep Ring to match this with a product that is half the price is impressive.

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Should you buy it?