Eight Sleep Pod 4 Review

Updated: 26 October 2024

This is my review of using Eight Sleep Pod 4 and Pod 3 for over a year. It’s one of my favourite sports and wellness products. Pod 4 offers significant new sleep management features that address its predecessor’s shortcomings but don’t warrant an upgrade from Pod 3.

Eight Sleep is a highly respected, high-end product many people use, from elite Tour de France athletes to those wanting improved sleep—and me! I’ve used it for over a year, love it, and recommend it for those who wish to optimise sleep quality without wearing a gadget to bed to capture sleep metrics.

Tl; DR – Dual-sided smart temperature control varies by preference and sleep stage: gadget-free sleep metrics and automated sleep management.

More: Eight Sleep.com

Eight Sleep Pod 4 – What’s the Same?

Eight Sleep smartly detects your sleep metrics. Based on this, it automatically optimises the bed temperature according to your sleep stage to improve the quality of each stage throughout the night. Each side of the bed does this independently.

The pod cover rejuvenates your existing mattress, prolonging its life by providing sustained comfort – Eight Sleep is a water bed. Whilst it remains expensive, it is argued that you save over £/$1000 by avoiding buying a new, high-quality mattress as the pod cover slips over your existing mattress.

Eight Sleep Pod 4 – What’s Changed?

The most significant change with Pod 4 Ultra is the addition of snoring detection and mitigation. This means that when one person is detected snoring, Pod 4 Ultra adjusts the position of one side of the bed to stop the snoring.

The following most significant change is silent operation. Pod 3 made a slight humming noise, which helped me sleep but would annoy others! With the addition of SILENT OPERATION, a new group of customers will be willing to move to the Eight Sleep Pod 4 models.

The feel of the Pod 4 cover is also different. While you might have felt a slight ridge effect in the older version, that’s no longer the case, and the water and heat are more evenly distributed.

Pod 4 offers a more powerful temperature control feature that can heat and cool quickly and better cope with room temperature extremes. Whilst this requires more energy, overall, it should lead to energy savings from turning down the heating/cooling of your house, effectively swapping that job with heating/cooling your much smaller bed. There’s also a handy new way to control the temperature by tapping the bed rather than going through the app, though I’m not sure of its usefulness as I prefer to know the exact temperature from the app.

Eight Sleep now claims 99% accurate sensor data. The earlier Pod 3 was also scientifically validated (here)

Finally, Pod 4 Ultra has an elevation mechanism that can be manually adjusted for reading and sleep. It’s also used to mitigate snoring automatically.

Q: Is the pod 4 cover compatible with POD 3

A: Yes, I believe so. But I don’t know how you would order just the pod 4 cover (unavailable in the UK)

My Experience

I’ve used Pod 3 and Pod 4 covers but not Pod 4 Ultra.

The pod Cover made my existing mattress firmer, which I preferred. However, my partner didn’t feel the same way.

Compared to my sleep stats from before 2023, I sleep slightly less. I believe I now sleep better and wake up feeling noticeably more refreshed. I assume the smart temperature regulation makes the difference. For example, previously, I would often wake up around 4 am feeling hot or sweaty, but that rarely happens with Eight Sleep.

Eight Sleep’s AUTOPILOT feature learned from my interactions with the app during the first week and analysed my biometrics to determine the best temperature protocols for me and my partner. However, Autopilot does not handle the two significant seasonal changes around March/November. For example, it needed a one-off tweak in March to lower temperatures by a couple of degrees.

The app is excellent. Its sleep statistics and overall trends were easier to understand than those from WHOOP, Oura, and other sleep platforms. It was easy to navigate, and I quickly found the data I needed. That said, my experience with managing the various settings of the app was NOT always intuitive, but the app recently improved in that area.

Eight Sleep Pod 4 History & Alternatives

Eight Sleep was formed almost a decade ago as a simple sleep tracker based on a mattress. Subsequent versions improved the technology and introduced smart temperature control. The latest iteration is a cover for your existing mattress, which gives the same features but at a lower entry price. This has significantly increased the product’s popularity, as buyers no longer need to wait until they want to replace their mattresses.

1. Gen 1:
   1. The Eight Smart Mattress (2015): Eight Sleep’s first product was the Eight Smart Mattress, which featured built-in sensors to track sleep patterns, including sleep duration, stages of sleep, and movements. It is connected to a smartphone app to provide users with personalised sleep data and insights.
   2. The Eight Sleep Tracker (2016): Eight Sleep expanded their product line with the release of the Eight Sleep Tracker. This device was designed to work with any mattress and was placed under the sheets to track sleep metrics. It connected wirelessly to the Eight Sleep mobile app and provided sleep-tracking capabilities similar to the Smart Mattress.
2. Gen 2: The Eight Sleep Pod (2018): The Eight Sleep Pod was a significant advancement for the company. It combines a high-quality foam mattress with advanced sleep-tracking capabilities and dual-zone temperature control. The Pod allowed users to adjust the temperature of their bed to their preference on each side of the mattress, promoting optimal sleep conditions for couples.
3. Gen 3:
   1. The Eight Sleep Pod Pro (2020): Building on the success of the Pod, Eight Sleep introduced the Pod Pro, an upgraded version with enhanced features. It included improved sleep tracking accuracy, faster temperature response, and a “Thermo Alarm” that gradually wakes users by adjusting the bed’s temperature.
   2. The Eight Sleep Pod Pro Cover (2021): Eight Sleep introduced the Pod Pro Cover, designed to work with an existing mattress. It featured a thin, breathable cover that could be placed on top of the mattress to provide sleep tracking and temperature control capabilities similar to the Pod Pro.
4. Gen 4:
   1. Eight Sleep Pod 4 (May 2024): More powerful heating/cooling range, silent operation, contoured surface and new clinical validations
   2. Eight Sleep Pod 4 Ultra (2024): snoring mitigation by automatically angling the mattress

Alternatives to Eight Sleep.

No directly equivalent products at the same price level give as complete a solution as Eight Sleep. Ghost SmartBed is a similar product to Eight Sleep, but it’s more than twice the price of an inferior app; it’s worth considering. Another alternative is the older Pod 3, which is a good product.

I have QS EMFIT, which has superior but highly technical sleep metrics but lacks temperature control. Then, there is a whole raft of temperature-controlled mattresses, which can be extremely expensive and still lack smart sleep temperature control. Products in this space include The Cube and OOLER by ChiliSleep—I wouldn’t recommend those products. Apple bought a company called Beddit, but the product was rubbish and was discontinued in 2022.

If you do not need smart temperature management and want sleep analytics, choose a ring like Ultrahuman Ring Air or Oura. Smart rings cannot provide sports analytics so I would suggest Whoop. Whoop has no screen, so the Apple Watch offers the best sleep data if you want a watch format. Most other smartwatch brands have sleep metrics covered, too.

Eight Sleep App

The app has two main parts. The first is simply a manual on/off button and thermostat control. Once AUTOPILOT is running, you won’t even need this screen.

Secondly, there’s the main dashboard. If you ever want to drill down, there’s quite a bit of data beneath this.

Here’s one example of all the nightly stats; perhaps most interesting is the sleep stage representation, which looks similar to that on Oura and other apps. The other individual stats are nicely presented, with each in the context of its normal range. The science points us towards interpretations along these lines where it’s best to compare to our usual self to detect trends or exceptions rather than to some mythical ‘perfect human’ that we will never become – you can see, for example, my schedule consistency has me going to bed and getting up at similar times. A routine is vital to good sleep hygiene and a good night’s sleep.

There’s more. Delve deeper and look at trends over extended periods such as the last week, month or year. Here, you see relatively consistent sleep but an increasing HR over the year, perhaps due to more training than usual. You see a schedule change consistently in the last month where I progressively went to bed earlier in preparation for a 200-mile bike ride with an early start. Time to fall asleep has also dropped over the year, which I am grateful for as I used to find going to sleep extremely difficult and debilitating. No more!

Sleep Outcomes and Scientific Validation

There are no guarantees, but the average Eight Sleep owner experiences these notable improvements.

Eight Sleep co-authored this scientific study with 54 sleepers. It’s one of the first studies of its kind and includes equal numbers of men and women (this is unusual). The study showed that variable sleep temperature regulation leads to positive outcomes.

…this is the first study to show that a continuously temperature-regulated bed can (1) modify sleep stages at specific points in the night, (2) improve thermal comfort and perceived sleep quality, and (3) enhance cardiovascular recovery during sleep.

Next, Rob Horst (Quantified Scientist) is one of the few scientifically-minded YouTubers I trust. Here, you see two of his charts, which agree with my less scientific observations. The first chart shows a clear correlation (R=0.94) between Oura Ring 3 and Eight Sleep. The second chart shows that sleep stage agreements for Eight Sleep are good and in line with results from Whoop, Apple Watch and Oura – note that Garmin and other watches (circled) are significantly less accurate. I firmly believe that Rob’s info is correct, but it contradicts what most other reviewers say about sports watch accuracy for sleep and wellness metrics.

Eight Sleep Pod 4 Reviews Across The Net

Eight Sleep’s website features numerous seemingly independent reviews from Twitter. Naturally, only the positive ones are displayed; even @elonmusk shares his positive reflection on the product.

There are several Eight Sleep reviews on Reddit, which are either highly positive or … less so! The negative reviews often express disappointment with the company’s previous generation of products and customer service experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Setting those concerns aside, Eight Sleep boasts an impressive client list of A-list sports stars and teams like these…

Tour de France teams use eight Sleep to maximise riders’ overnight recovery.

Eight Sleep Pod 4 Review Summary

Pod 4 is an expensive, market-leading sleep product, but it delivers where others fail.

It cannot address every factor that contributes to inadequate sleep, but its excellent management of temperature, comfort, snoring, and sleep position for you and your partner makes significant inroads.

Eight Sleep Pod 4 (Ultra) Discount, Review, Availability

Pod 4 is available globally and as an upgrade for existing Pod owners.

• Eight Sleep Pod 4 DOUBLE Discount – use the code THE5KRUNNER to get an additional discount of $/£100 plus the current promotional discounts automatically applied to prices on the Eight Sleep Site
• Pod 4 ULTRA might periodically attract a TRIPLE discount with the code ULTRA50 (should be automatically applied when available; try it anyway, but it might remove my discount code, so then add that back)
• Upgraders from Pod 3 (and maybe Pod 2) should receive a more significant discount: $/£500 off.

Pod 4 prices range from $2499 to $2699, depending on mattress size, and Pod 4 ULTRA from $4049 to $4149. If you are an existing member, you can get $500 off.