Amazon Halo vs Whoop: Which is better? Brands like Apple, Fitbit, Fossil, and Garmin are some of the key players in the smart wearable market, but they now also compete with the likes of Amazon’s Halo and Whoop. Both track your health and fitness metrics and help you achieve your fitness goals. In fact, the two trackers are so similar in nature that buyers often find it hard to make a purchase.
This head-to-head comparison guide between the Amazon Halo Band and Whoop 4.0 highlights the common characteristics and differences between the two. We’ll compare them in a few key areas where it matters the most.
Amazon Halo vs Whoop: Comparison Chart
Amazon Halo Band | Whoop 4.0 | |
Display | No | No |
Steps Counter | Yes | No |
SpO2 Monitoring | No | Yes |
Sleep Tracking | Yes | Yes |
Body Composition Analysis | Yes | No |
GPS | No | No |
Water Resistance | Up to 50 meters | Up to 10 meters |
Battery Life | Up to 7 Days | Up to 5 Days |
Subscription | $3.99/mo | $30/mo |
Amazon Halo vs Whoop: Design
The Amazon Halo and Whoop are different from most other fitness trackers. They don’t have a screen and look like fancy wristbands made of tight-knitted fabric. Despite being quite similar, a few design elements differentiate the two trackers.
Amazon Halo
Firstly, unlike Whoop, the Amazon Halo Band doesn’t have a clip above the dial and features a velcro clasp. It uses a textured knitted fabric strap that feels durable and comfortable and doesn’t cause skin irritation. The band is also water and sweat-resistant. And thanks to its minimal and slender design, the Halo suits both male and female wrists.
Weighing only about 23 grams, the Amazon Halo is light enough to provide all-day comfort. The tracker also has a 5 ATM water resistance rating, meaning you can wear it to the shower, pool, beach, and beyond.
As stated earlier, the Halo Band doesn’t have a screen. However, it does have a side button that lets you reconnect the tracker to the app, toggle on/off the built-in microphones for tone analysis, and more.
Whoop
The Whoop Strap is slightly thicker and wider than Amazon Halo. It features a clip mechanism to keep the tracker in place. The strap uses a thicker fabric, which is aesthetically less pleasing but offers more comfort and is suitable for outdoor sports. The clasp allows you to adjust the band’s tightness on your wrist.
The best thing is that you can opt for Whoop’s Any-Wear Arm Sleeve, Bicep Band, or Body apparel to place the tracker away from your wrist, which can be beneficial for certain workout styles and outdoor activities.
The new Whoop 4.0 tracker has an IP68 rating and is water-resistant to depths of 10 meters for two hours. Like Halo, it doesn’t have a screen, meaning users will need to start and stop tracking particular activities through the companion app. The tracker is also devoid of any buttons.
One clever design of Whoop 4.0 is the unique battery pack that slides over the tracker, allowing users to charge it without taking it off. The battery pack itself charges over USB-C.
Amazon Halo vs Whoop: Fitness and Health Tracking
Fitness and health tracking are the key capabilities of any fitness tracker, monitoring your daily activities and offering a detailed analysis at the end of the day. Thankfully, Amazon Halo and Whoop provide a wide range of wellness and activity stats that encourage users to maintain an active, healthy lifestyle.
Amazon Halo
Amazon Halo comes with most of the vital fitness and health tracking features, including steps, heart rate, and sleep analysis. It also tracks active and sedentary time, movement intensity, and calories burned, then uses the data to estimate an easy-to-understand activity score.
It’s also worth noting Halo’s sleep tracking features, which include sleep stages, time awake and asleep, and sleep temperature. The app analyzes all the sleep data in co-relation with other health metrics to calculate a nightly sleep score.
Amazon Halo offers a body composition feature that uses your phone’s camera to measure your body fat percentage, which is a better measure of health than BMI (Body Mass Index) or weight alone. It provides a personalized 3D body model to help you track progress over time alongside detailed nutrition insights (e.g., recipes, weekly menus) and recommended workouts.
The Halo tracker can auto-capture your activities and categorize them into three activity groups: Intense, Moderate, and Light. The app includes heart rate throughout the entire duration of the activities.
From the app, you can also follow hundreds of home workout programs, daily meditations, and sleep support guides from Halo Fitness experts and partners like 8fit, Aaptive, Exhale, Lifesum, SWEAT, Orangetheory, and more.
Another neat feature of the Amazon Halo Band is tone analysis, which uses the two microphones in the tracker to analyze your tone of voice, detect your emotional state, and tell how you sound to others. While it also creates some privacy concerns, users can disable the mics at any time with the side button on the tracker.
Unlike Whoop, Halo’s heart rate monitoring is quite rudimentary. The app doesn’t show advanced cardiac metrics like resting heart rate, heart rate variability (HRV), and respiratory rate, which is somewhat disappointing.
Another major caveat is the absence of SpO2 or blood oxygen saturation monitoring, a feature found even on entry-level fitness trackers. Plus, it doesn’t have an ECG sensor, meaning it can’t pick up irregular heart rhythm patterns.
And lastly, most of the following health and fitness features require users to pay for the Halo membership. Without it, you’ll have limited access to only the most basic stats like steps and heart rate, a handful of workout programs, and sleep metrics.
Whoop
As far as wellness tracking features are concerned, Whoop does it better than Halo. It collects a wide variety of biometric data, including heart rate, heart rate variability, blood oxygen saturation levels, breathing rates, sleep REM cycles, and skin temperature, to estimate strain, recovery, and sleep scores. Such metrics can help you physically and mentally prepare for your daily training regimen.
Compared to the Amazon Halo Band, Whoop 4.0 provides more accurate data with its impressive array of 5 LEDs and 4 photodiodes. However, it lacks a step counter, which Whoop considers irrelevant to one’s physiological performance.
Whoop takes about fifteen days to calculate a personal baseline of your health and fitness stats and notifies you when you’re not at your full potential. It can also provide early warning signs of common illnesses by analyzing changes in your respiratory rate and other body metrics. And as you rest and recover, the tracker can analyze your health and conclude whether you still need more rest before engaging in intensive activities.
The Whoop companion app can also give you personalized insights on your sleep and recovery metrics. In fact, sleep tracking is one area where the Whoop excels over its competition, offering a detailed breakdown of your nightly activities. Moreover, the in-app virtual coach can provide monthly performance assessments highlighting your progress and offers personalized workout, exercise, and nutrition recommendations.
All in all, Whoop offers more detailed and focused health and fitness insights than Amazon Halo. However, all the following features are subscription-bound, just like the device.
Related – Whoop Membership Explained
Amazon Halo vs Whoop: Apps & Integration
Like every fitness wearable, Amazon Halo and Whoop make their companion mobile apps available for users to view their wellness at a glance. Both offer a variety of tools, tailored fitness recommendations, and an ever-growing on-demand library of premium workout and meditation guides. Both apps are available on the Google Play Store for Android and Apple App Store for iPhones and iPads.
Based on our experience, the Amazon Halo app presents user data more straightforwardly and offers intuitive navigation. It also shows basic health metrics without the Halo membership, a plus point over the Whoop.
The Whoop app provides both a simplified and advanced view of the user’s wellness data and allows users to compare their metrics in detailed weekly and monthly graphs. It also has a journal dashboard where you can log and view your daily activities.
In addition, the Whoop Live feature lets you put an overlay of real-time heart rate, recovery, sleep, and strain data onto your videos. Membership services like virtual coaching, workout videos, and AMA are too accessible from the app.
Unlike Amazon Halo, Whoop integrates with Apple Health and Strava to sync your activities and personalize your experience. At the time of writing, Whoop is also working on Google Fit integration. Amazon Halo doesn’t connect with any third-party apps.
What To Do If I Lost My Whoop Strap?
Amazon Halo vs Whoop: Battery
The two wearables have a similar runtime of almost a week between charges. However, if you keep the “Tone Analysis” feature turned on, the Amazon Halo Band will only make it around two days. Apart from being a privacy nightmare (given Amazon’s reputation), it’s also a battery hog, so turning it off is probably the best idea.
The charging clip shipped with the Halo Band charges it fully in less than 90 minutes. In contrast, the Whoop 4.0 comes with a water-resistant battery pack that slides over the tracker and tops it up while you wear it.
Amazon Halo vs Whoop: Verdict
In a nutshell, the Amazon Halo Band and Whoop 4.0 are similarly screenless fitness bands with slight differences in feature sets. Pricing is one of the major aspects that separate them from one another, alongside health and sleep-tracking capabilities.
The Amazon Halo Band, with its initial one-time purchase and reasonably-priced optional membership, will likely be a more cost-effective choice than Whoop’s full subscription-based model for most people in the long run.
That said, the Whoop 4.0 is a marginally better choice for athletes and fitness enthusiasts who’re overly obsessed with every little health and fitness metric. And unlike the Halo Band, you get additional body placement options.
The purchase decision ultimately boils down to your budget, concerns, preferences, and usage patterns, so you have to make the personal call. Alternatively, you can opt for an Apple Watch or a Fitbit for your fitness tracking and health monitoring needs, both of which are a one-time purchase and make the subscription requirement optional.