Wearable Review
Quick Verdict
The Amazfit Helio is still the honest pick for recovery and sleep tracking you do not rent monthly, but "the Helio" is no longer one product and the shelf looks nothing like the one most reviews describe. Checked on Amazfit's US store on October 4, 2026: the Helio Strap Pro is $199.99 and in stock, the original $99.99 Helio Strap is sold out, and the Helio Core sensor module, from $69.99, is sold out too. The Helio Ring has no product page on the US store at all. Both of its obvious URLs return a 404 and it does not appear in the Helio collection, though Amazfit's global marketing page for it is still live.
Now the catch, which is the thing the marketing buries. Amazfit's own Helio Ring page carries the headline "No Subscriptions Required" and, further down that same page, the line "Readiness insights require subscription to Zepp Aura." Zepp Aura is a paid tier that Amazfit lists at $11.99 a month or $69.99 a year. The no-subscription promise holds up for the Strap and the Strap Pro, where Amazfit states plainly that no subscription is required. On the Ring, the readiness number that is the whole reason to buy a recovery wearable sits behind a footnote. If readiness is why you are shopping, read the subscription section below before you spend anything.
What You Can Actually Buy, Checked October 4, 2026
This is the part that changed since this page first ran, and it is why a lot of Helio advice online is now wrong. The prices and stock states below come from Amazfit's own US store on the date above. Stock moves, so treat the status column as a snapshot rather than a permanent fact.
| Product | US price | Status on Amazfit's US store |
|---|---|---|
| Helio Strap Pro | $199.99 | In stock |
| Helio Strap | $99.99 | Sold out |
| Helio Core sensor module | $69.99, or $104.00 bundled with an armband and charging base | Sold out |
| Helio Armband accessory | $19.99 | In stock |
| Helio Ring | Not listed | No US product page, and absent from the Helio collection |
The practical read: in the US right now, the Helio you can order new from Amazfit is the Strap Pro, at twice the price that made the original Strap famous. A second ring is coming. The5krunner reported in June 2026 that Amazfit executives confirmed a Helio Ring 2 in development and on course for the second half of 2026, with no price, specs or launch date announced. Between the missing US listing and that pending launch, buying a first-generation Helio Ring today means paying for a device at the end of its life.
Does the Amazfit Helio Require a Subscription?
Short answer: no for the Strap, the Strap Pro and the Core. Mostly no for the Ring, with one carve-out that matters more than its size suggests.
Amazfit's Helio Strap page states "No required subscription" and says the band works with the Zepp app and gives access to training, recovery, health and performance insights without a required monthly subscription. The Helio Strap Pro page says "No subscription required". The Helio Core page says the same. For those three, the one-time price is the whole price.
The Helio Ring page is where it gets slippery. The page that says "No Subscriptions Required" also states "Readiness insights require subscription to Zepp Aura." Amazfit separately describes Zepp Fitness as "totally free for Amazfit Helio Ring users", so the two services are not interchangeable and only one of them is included.
Zepp Aura is Amazfit's sleep and relaxation service inside the Zepp app. Amazfit lists the premium tier at "$11.99/month" or "$69.99/year", with a 14-day free trial, and describes it as unlimited sleep and meditation content, detailed sleep reports, AI-powered recommendations for rest and recovery, and unlimited use of the AI sleep assistant, against one message a day on the free tier. At $69.99 a year, two years of Aura adds about $140 to a ring that listed at $199. That is a different total cost of ownership from the one the no-subscription headline implies.
One more wrinkle: Amazfit notes that Zepp Aura and Zepp Fitness are only available to Zepp accounts registered in certain countries. So the honest answer to "is a subscription required" partly depends on where your account lives.
Helio Strap vs Helio Strap Pro vs Helio Ring
| Spec | Helio Strap | Helio Strap Pro | Helio Ring |
|---|---|---|---|
| US price | $99.99 | $199.99 | Not listed on the US store |
| Battery, typical use | Up to 10 days | Up to 11 days | Up to 4 days |
| Water resistance | 5 ATM | 5 ATM, per ISO 22810:2010 | 10 ATM |
| Weight | 20 g without the sensor | 11.4 g for the Helio Core Motion HR module | 3.65 g to 3.82 g by size |
| Optical sensor | BioTracker 6.0 PPG, 5PD plus 2LED | BioTracker 6.0 PPG | BioTracker PPG, dual-color LED plus 2PD |
| Other sensors | Accelerometer, gyroscope, temperature | Accelerometer, gyroscope, temperature, geomagnetic | Temperature, EDA, 3-axis accelerometer, 3-axis gyroscope |
| Screen | None | None | None |
| Subscription for core tracking | Not required | Not required | Not required, but readiness insights need Zepp Aura |
The honest summary of the Pro's extra $100 is that it buys a movement story, not a better heart story. Both straps use the same BioTracker 6.0 optical sensor. What the Pro adds, in Amazfit's own description, is advanced movement tracking through a multi-sensor system and what it calls Hybrid Training Dynamics, combining heart rate, movement quality and muscle load. Its page lists muscle load, movement quality and training load alongside the usual heart rate, blood oxygen, stress and sleep, and it adds a geomagnetic sensor the standard Strap does not have.
The standard Strap lists continuous per-second heart rate, heart rate variability, blood oxygen, stress, sleep stages including REM, daytime naps and breathing quality, BioCharge energy, and more than 50 sports modes with strength movement recognition across 25 exercises. The5krunner's spec sheet adds two details the store page does not lead with: a 232 mAh cell and up to 21 days of offline heart rate storage, with a magnetic charging head that uses a USB-C cable Amazfit does not supply.
So if you only want recovery and sleep numbers, the cheaper Strap was always the better value, which is awkward given it is the one that is sold out. If you lift and you want load and movement quality on top of heart rate, the Pro is the one with the sensors to do it.
Where the Helio Line Falls Short
- Availability is the biggest problem today. The two cheapest Helio products are sold out and the Ring has no US listing, so the line's value argument is hard to act on at all.
- The readiness footnote on the Ring. A recovery wearable that puts readiness behind a paid tier is not fully subscription free, whatever the headline above the footnote says.
- Lighter coaching. It shows you scores. It does not turn them into a plan the way a dedicated coaching system does.
- No published independent accuracy work on the Strap Pro. It is new, and we did not find an independent comparison against a chest strap or a sleep lab. Treat the Hybrid Training Dynamics numbers as useful trends, not validated measurements.
- Android data routing is unclear. Amazfit documents Google Fit, not Health Connect. The next section explains why that matters.
Who Should Buy Which
Buy the Helio Strap Pro if you train with weights, you want movement and load data sitting next to recovery, and you are done paying monthly. Buy the standard Helio Strap if you can find it in stock and you only want recovery, sleep and heart rate, because at $99.99 it does the core job for half the money.
Wait on the ring. Between the missing US listing, the confirmed but unannounced Helio Ring 2, and the Zepp Aura requirement for readiness insights, there is no version of the first-generation ring that is a confident buy this month. If a ring is what you want, weigh it against the alternative in Amazfit Helio Ring vs Oura.
Skip the line if you need the deepest recovery system or a long validation record. We work through that trade in Helio Strap vs WHOOP, and the wider no-fee category in the shift to no-subscription wearables.
Where Vora Fits
Start with the plumbing, because with a screenless band it decides whether your data is useful anywhere outside the Zepp app. Vora is our app. It connects directly to Oura, Garmin, Fitbit and WHOOP (beta) on iPhone and Android, plus Samsung Health on Android. There is no direct Amazfit connection, so Helio data reaches Vora the platform way: through Apple Health on iPhone, and through Health Connect on Android.
On iPhone that path is clean. Amazfit's own FAQ lists Apple Health among the apps the Zepp app syncs with, and Vora reads Apple Health, so Helio heart rate, sleep and activity can land in Vora the way any other Apple Health source does.
On Android, be careful. That same Amazfit FAQ says the Zepp app syncs with Strava, adidas Running, TrainingPeaks, komoot, Relive, Google Fit and Apple Health, and it does not name Health Connect. Health Connect is what Vora reads on Android, and Google Fit is not the same destination. We could not verify a Health Connect path in Amazfit's documentation, so confirm inside the Zepp app that your data is writing to Health Connect before you count on it. The same FAQ lists Samsung Health and MyFitnessPal as not supported.
Set expectations on one more thing: BioCharge stays in the Zepp app. Vora calculates its own Sleep and Recovery scores from the underlying data and does not import other companies' scores, so connecting a Helio gives Vora the heart rate, sleep and activity to work from, not Amazfit's readiness verdict. Our integrations page lists what we read on each platform, and recovery in Vora covers how those scores are built. Vora is free to download, with an optional Pro subscription that raises the AI allowance from 10 to 100 messages a day; health data connections are free on every plan.