The Best Open Earbuds for Everyone

Open earbuds are similar to regular wireless buds, but instead of plugging your ear canals for a good seal, they leave them open to exterior sounds. This means their audio performance won’t be as intimate or full-sounding as regular earbuds, particularly in the bass. They're also less versatile than buds with ambient audio features like noise canceling and transparency mode that can suppress or let in exterior sounds on demand. Their primary advantage is an unaltered path to exterior sounds, which makes them a perfect fit when you want to pepper in music and media with your natural environment.

As limited as open earbuds can be in situations like a loud office, a long flight, or a busy commute, they can slot in brilliantly when you want to multitask without missing out. They’re an obvious fit for workouts like hiking, jogging, the gym, or even biking/ebiking where wind resistance overpowers the tiny microphones in traditional earbuds. Beyond workouts, open earbuds can be a convenient solution anytime you want to stay aurally alert, from cooking dinner while keeping tabs on the kids to sneaking in some football on your phone while the family enjoys a Christmas movie.

Semi-open earbuds like Apple's standard AirPods give you a semblance of what open earbuds offer, but it’s not the same experience. I’d even argue that a semi-open fit can give you a worst-of-both-worlds scenario—you can’t get a good seal for a full representation of you’re music or media, and you’re not able to hear your environment as clearly as even sealed buds with transparency mode, let alone fully open earbuds. Some people who have trouble with regular ear tips swear by the standard AirPods design from a fit perspective, but if you want to keep in touch with the world around you, fully open earbuds are better.

Open earbuds support many of the same features found in traditional earbuds like multipoint pairing to connect to multiple devices at once, sensors for auto-pause, water-resistance, and even spatial audio. Most provide an app for extras like EQ or an earbuds finder, and you'll find onboard touch or push controls. Because of the limitations of their physical designs, open earbud controls are often more limited or less effective than those on traditional earbuds, but the best pairs work around these constraints for convenient control

One feature you shouldn't look for in open earbuds is noise canceling, which relies on a mix of passive sound isolation and microphones to measure your environment and reverse the polarity of exterior sound frequencies to “cancel” them out. The basic physics of the process requires a good seal to work effectively. While it’s true that some semi-open earbuds like the AirPods 4 and even some fully open earbuds offer noise canceling, it's generally very limited with only lower frequencies seeing any noise reduction. If you need noise canceling, you’re better off with options like the AirPods Pro, Bose’s top-ranked QuietComfort Ultra, or any of our other noise-canceling favorites.