Best Open Earbuds, Tested and Reviewed (2025): Bose and More

Open earbuds are similar to regular true wireless earbuds, but instead of plugging your ear canals for a good seal, they leave them open to exterior sounds for enhanced situational awareness. 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 your environment, which makes them a perfect fit when you want to naturally pepper in music and media with your 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 your 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 as a more comfortable fit, 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 connectivity for pairing with two devices at a time over Bluetooth, 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. Generally, all of the features in the open earbuds on our list should work equally well for Android and iOS devices.

One feature you shouldn’t look for in open earbuds is ANC (active 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 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.

We spend time listening to our favorite music and custom playlists both indoors and out, with a special focus on emulating the way everyone might use these headphones in the real world. With earbuds like these, we go on runs, bike rides, and take calls around town, in addition to just listening to the buds in our office spaces.