Best Basal Thermometer and Fertility Tracker App

You will never really understand how difficult it can be to get pregnant until you start actively trying. The most important thing about trying to conceive is understanding your cycle. You only get about three fertile days every month and getting to know your body will help you figure out when they are.

One of the best ways to do this is to keep track of your basal body temperature, or BBT. Your BBT is the temperature of your body at rest so it has to be recorded first thing in the morning. Once you get out of bed, shower, have coffee, and start moving around, your body temperature will rise because you’re making more heat from all that activity.

When you’re ovulating, your body releases more progesterone. This raises your BBT. So, if you’re keeping a daily record, you’ll see a spike in your temperature on ovulation days. This is an effective way to narrow down your fertile window.

Before smartphones, you would have to track your BBT with a bedside thermometer, a pen, and paper. This is not always easy to remember to do first thing in the morning when you’re still trying to wake up. But now that there’s an app for everything, you can find fertility trackers that can automatically record and analyze your BBT for you and generate an accurate chart showing you when you’re fertile.

Our our recommended buy is the Femometer Fertility Monitor, but read below if you would like further details and reviews.

Buying Guide

There are quite a few basal thermometers and fertility trackers available. Here are some things to look for when buying one:

1. Accuracy. Make sure the tracker you use has a reputation for being accurate. A thermometer that is unable to pick up slight shifts in temperature isn’t going to be a very good ovulation predictor.
2. Reliability. If you religiously take your temperature every morning and are expecting the thermometer to sync to the app, it better do it. Thermometers and apps that have trouble communicating with one another can cause you to miss readings, which is not ideal when you’re trying to figure out trends.
3. An alarm. Let’s face it, it’s not easy to remember to do anything when you first wake up. A tracker with an alarm can help you eliminate that problem. While you can always use a regular alarm clock or your cell phone, the alarms on these trackers are often softer and more pleasant. There’s a greater chance your partner won’t be woken up by it.
4. Extras. Some of these trackers come with really cool thermometers that look like tubes of lipstick and come in a lot of different colors. Some of the apps integrate a community feature where you can talk to other women who are also trying to conceive. These things are nice to have, but ultimately it’s more important that the tracker do with it was designed to. There’s no use having a pretty thermometer if it’s not going to get your readings into the app.

Reviews

1. Femometer Fertility Monitor

The Femometer Fertility Monitor (Amazon link) takes your BBT every morning and automatically updates a fertility chart in the app to help you figure out when your fertile days are. It can also help reassure you once you do get that positive pregnancy test. By continuing to monitor your BBT after pregnancy, you’ll see that it will remain elevated which most likely means your pregnancy is progressing normally. This can be a great reassurance in those early weeks before your OBGYN will see you!

This is a great tracker to have even if you’re not pregnant or not trying to get pregnant. You can monitor your menstrual cycle and get warnings when that time of the month is approaching. You can also learn when your fertile days are so you know when to avoid getting intimate and significantly lower your chances of pregnancy naturally.

The longer you track, the more accurate the app will be as it learns more about your cycle. You can also record dates of your periods, cervical mucous, sleep, weight, and sexual activity. All of this will help the app understand your body and help you while trying to conceive. Your BBT will be updated via Bluetooth when you use the thermometer. All other data must be put into the app manually. Data is synced to the cloud so you don’t have to worry about losing any of your information.

This is our winner for best basal thermometer and fertility tracker app. It’s capable of recording a lot of information and is even useful for women who are not trying to conceive. Plus, the app itself is user friendly and beautifully designed and, as an added bonus, it comes in five different shimmery colors.

2. iProven Basal Body Thermometer and Ovulation Predictor

Before you get out of bed in the morning, use the iProven Basal Body Thermometer (Amazon link) to take your temperature. It automatically syncs to the Kindara app and generates a chart showing you when the most fertile days of your cycle are.

As we’ve seen, understanding your cycle is the most important part to getting pregnant and the iProven app tracks a lot of data. In addition to temperature, you can also input cervical fluid, menstruation, sexual intercourse, and journal any other information you think is relevant.

A great thing that the iProven app also has it a built in community so you can connect with other women for support. Trying to get pregnant can be really frustrating and all consuming and it’s nice to be able to talk to women who can relate to you while you’re on your journey.

3. Easy@Home Smart Fertility Monitor

The Easy@Home Smart Fertility Monitor (Amazon link) is accurate to 1/100th of a degree. It uses bluetooth to automatically sync to the app, which then allows it to predict your fertile window, conception rate, and even date of next expected period. This thermometer takes about 1-3 minutes to get an accurate reading but claims that it gets faster over time.

The app and the thermometer both work well and syncing is simple, as long as you’re connected to Bluetooth before you start. It has a nice alarm that will wake you daily for your temperature without being overly intrusive so your partner can continue to sleep.

The design itself is great. The thermometer is small – about the size of a tube of lipstick – and comes in a few color options. It has an alarm to wake you and remind you to take your temperature and stores all your data in the cloud.

The thermometer itself does not give you a reading of your temperature so you’ll have to look in the app if you want to know. But that’s a small downside to a really great tracker.

4. OvaCue Fertility Monitor

The OvaCue Fertility Monitor (Amazon link) comes with an highly accurate thermometer with a built-in calendar system and software so that you don’t need to sync to an app. It’s an entirely self-contained fertility system.

The OvaCue is particularly useful for women with irregular cycles and polycystic ovarian syndrome. Many other fertility systems use set points, such as the level of a hormone, to determine your place in the fertility cycle. The OvaCue uses trends based on your past data. In other words, it looks for changes, rather than absolute levels, to predict your ovulation timing.

Note that this is a much more sophisticated monitor. There is a thermometer for your mouth, but the OvaCue also uses a vaginal mucus sensor, which none of the other thermometers listed here have. This is essentially a piece of medical equipment, so if you really need to be sure about what’s happening you may want the OvaCue. It does however come with a heftier price tag.

5. YONO Fertility Monitor

The YONO Fertility Monitor (Amazon link) is a little different than the others we reviewed. Rather than taking your temperature orally every morning, YONO features an earbud that you wear overnight to continuously record your temperature. This is a great idea because it eliminates the chance of missing a morning and makes the process of tracking your BBT almost automatic as long as you remember to put your earbud in before bed.

A good thing about taking your temperature in the ear is that it’s a closed environment. It won’t be affected by room temperature because it seals the heat in the ear providing really reliable results.

The earbud must be returned to its charging base every morning in order for the data to be synced to the app so it’s not continuously syncing as your sleep.

There are a lot of good things about the YONO, but sleeping with something in your ear isn’t always comfortable. The earbud is not specially made or contoured so it might make it hard for you to sleep, which can affect your BBT and possible cause some inaccuracies.

When the YONO is working properly, it’s great. But it’s a bit unreliable and it might take a cycle or two to gets the bugs worked out. Considering that it’s more than twice the price of the other trackers we reviewed, you might want to think twice before making this investment.

Conclusion

As you can see, there’s a variety of basal thermometer and fertility trackers to choose from. Our top recommendation is the Femometer Fertility Monitor. It’s reliable, accurate, and comes with a beautifully designed app that’s exceptionally user friendly. It can really help you understand your cycle and give you a greater chance of getting that positive pregnancy test you’ve been dreaming of. Of course, don’t forget to use an accurate pregnancy test to see if you succeeded!