Best fitness trackers 2024: Apple Watch, Fitbit, Garmin and more
13 min read
Best fitness trackers: Quick menu
The best fitness trackers are a simple, accessible fitness tool that can give you plenty of information about your health, track your workouts, and nudge you towards a healthier lifestyle. If you’re looking to get fit in 2024, it’s one of the best investments you can make in yourself.
These bands track metrics such as sleep, steps, calories expended, and log your workouts. Once your data is measured they can start to give you a better picture of your overall health and fitness, allowing you to tweak your habits to more positive ones.
All fitness trackers are different: fitness bands, smartwatches, and even smart rings count as fitness trackers. All these different form factors count your steps, monitor your heart rate, and offer health and fitness guidance. There are some basic requirements to look for, including long battery life, on-wrist comfort, built-in GPS, and the ability to track your fitness and monitor your heart rate.
Of course, depending on your budget some fitness trackers may be more advanced than the cheaper versions, so you may find yourself picking which features are the most important to you. Most of the best smartwatches and all of the best running watches contain fitness tracking hardware, but are often more expensive than the simpler band-style trackers.
Check our fitness tracker vs smartwatch guide to find out the difference, while you can also check out best smart rings: a newer category becoming more popular.
The quick list
Do you want to quickly find the best fitness tracker for you? Take a look at this at-a-glance overview, which picks out the most important features of each device so you can quickly narrow down your options, then jump down the page for a more detailed look.
Best overall
This lovely-looking fitness tracker ticks all of the boxes for comfort, style, and accuracy with a bright AMOLED display and excellent heart rate tracking.
Read more below
2. Xiaomi Smart Band 8 Pro
Best budget
If you’re on a budget, you’ve got everything you need in this slick tracker from Xiaomi, including good fitness tracking, a big, beautiful color screen, and two weeks of battery.
Read more below
Best premium
A feature-packed fitness band that’s a solid companion for all kinds of activities – just stick to the indoors as we weren’t impressed by the GPS on offer here.
Read more below
Best for sleep
For incredibly accurate tracking, give the discreet Samsung Galaxy Ring a try. Sleep monitoring and heart rate tracking are excellent and data is presented on Samsung Health in a clear and accessible way.
Read more below
Best Apple Watch
If you want an Apple Watch to track your health and fitness, the Apple Watch SE 2 isn’t nearly as cheap as some of the other trackers on the list, but it’s the cheapest up-to-date Apple Watch you can get right now.
Read more below
Best Garmin fitness tracker
A solid option of when it comes to fitness-focused activity tracking, and offers access to the advanced features from the Garmin Connect app. A bit long in the tooth, but still a very good choice.
Read more below
Best fitness trackers: Specs comparison table
Why you can trust TechRadar
We spend hours testing every product or service we review, so you can be sure you’re buying the best. Find out more about how we test.
| Component | Fitbit Luxe | Xiaomi Smart Band 8 Pro | Fitbit Charge 6 | Samsung Galaxy Ring | Apple Watch SE 2 | Garmin Vivosmart 5 |
| Price | $98.99 / £99.99 / AU$169.99 | $79.99 / £59.99 / AU$95 | $159.99 / £139.99 / AU $259.99 | $399 / £399 / AU$750 | $249 / £259 / AU$399 | $149.99 / £129.99 / AU$229 |
| Dimensions | 36.3 x 17.5 x 10.2 (mm) | 48 x 22.5 x 10.99 (mm) | 38 x 18.5 x 11.6mm | Ring sizes 5-13 | 40 x 34 x 10.7 (mm) | 19.5 x 10.7 x 217 (mm) |
| Display | 0.75-in AMOLED display | 1.74-in AMOLED display | 1.4-inch full-color AMOLED | None | 40mm OLED display | 0.5″ OLED display |
| GPS? | No | Yes | Yes | None | Yes | Yes |
| Battery life | 5 days | 14 days | 7 days | Up to 7 days (10 days with Galaxy Watch) | 18 hours | 7 days |
The best fitness trackers of 2024
The best fitness tracker overall
The Fitbit Luxe is our number one fitness tracker thanks to its excellent health monitoring tools, stylish design, and the strength of the fantastic Fitbit app that works alongside it.
The Luxe tracks everyday activity, sleep, heart rate, respiration and workouts. When we put it to the test, we were particularly impressed by its heart rate monitoring accuracy, which was on par with much more expensive running watches. Your daily data is presented on a super-sharp color AMOLED display, which offers lots of detail in a very small space. That means less scrolling, which is always a win in our books.
The Luxe is also Fitbit’s best-looking fitness tracker to date, with a stainless steel case and buckle and a choice of either a soft silicone band or a gold-toned stainless steel bracelet. In our tests, it was comfortable to wear all day and night, allowing us to build a complete picture of our activity and sleeping habits.
Fitness trackers work best when worn every day, so they can build up a full picture of your habits and lifestyle, and the Luxe is one that you’ll genuinely want to. There’s no onboard GPS; instead, the Luxe needs a connection to your phone, which is its only real drawback. If that’s a deal-breaker for you, the slightly pricier Fitbit Charge 5 would be a better choice.
Read our full Fitbit Luxe review
The best budget fitness tracker
This is one of the best fitness trackers you can buy if you’re on a strict budget, and it has impressive specs considering how much it costs. The Xiaomi Smart Band 8 Pro comes with accurate GPS, making it a stellar choice for outdoor activities at this price, and it also has good fitness tracking that was comparable to an Apple Watch during our tests.
We found the big, bold color display easily readable, allowing you to check your workout stats at a glance, and the heart rate monitor proved accurate. The lack of physical buttons will be a drawback for some, but we moved through the watch’s interface easily enough.
The setup process isn’t perfect, sleep tracking is a bit basic and you’re missing some features common on more expensive devices, such as NFC payment and the use of third-party apps like Spotify for audio support. However, as a fitness tracker, it excels, and for this price point we can give it a ringing endorsement.
Read our full Xiaomi Smart Band 8 Pro review
The best premium fitness tracker
The Fitbit Charge 6 is the most advanced band-style fitness tracker you can buy from Fitbit these days, and it’s packed with more features than you’ll find from the Fitbit Luxe at the top of this list. This is why it’s our top pick if you’re looking for a tracker to suit a lot of different needs and workout types.
The Fitbit Charge 6 looks a bit like a smaller, and slightly simplified, Fitbit Sense 2. It has some impressive high-end features, including ECG heart health readings and the an EDA stress sensor.
It’s an impressive tracker, but it’s not the best Fitbit overall because we found the GPS tracking to be significantly lacking. If you run with a phone, that’s no big deal. But this tracker certainly won’t compete with the best running watches out there.
But if you’re just after a casual wearable tracker for a bunch of different purposes, the Fitbit Charge 6 is still great and, as ever, we find that Fitbit’s sleep tracking reliability here to be well above average.
Read our full Fitbit Charge 6 review
The best sleep tracker
The Samsung Galaxy Ring is just edging out Oura in the race for best smart ring, and by extension perhaps the best fitness tracker for sleep. The smallest fitness tracking form factor, smart rings are comfortable to sleep in and offer accurate measurement beyond your wrist, with heart rate, skin temperature and blood oxygen sensing allowing the ring to monitor sleep stages.
The Samsung Galaxy Ring offers sleep insights powered by AI too: not only giving you a Sleep score and Energy score each morning, but assigning you a “sleep animal” or chronotype, with each one offering a different set of actionable advice.
Outside of sleep, Samsung estimates steps, and automatically logs walks and runs. It doesn’t log workouts outside of these two profiles, and the ring’s form factor gets in the way during gym workouts. But it’s a great discreet set-and-forget tracker.
Read our full Samsung Galaxy Ring review
The best Apple Watch
The Apple Watch SE 2 is the best Apple Watch for most people. While the Apple Watch Ultra 2 is the overall best from a technical standpoint, we believe most people browsing this guide are unlikely to want to spend $799 / £799 / AU$1,399 on a premium adventure watch.
The SE 2 is Apple’s cheapest up-to-date offering, and unlike most of the entries on this list, it’s a true smartwatch. That means it pairs seamlessly with your iPhone to deliver a more complete communications experience, not just stripped-down notifications.
It’s not cheap compared to some of the fitness bands on this list, but it’s a powerful fitness tool with a smorgasbord of excellent third-party apps, such as AllTrails and Smartgym. Its own native Workout app is great, especially for running and cycling since the watchOS 10 update.
In our Apple Watch SE 2 review we did write “Apple’s cheaper smartwatch is all most people will need”. It’s also got neat safety features like Car Crash Detection, making it perhaps the best fitness tracker choice for iOS users.
Read our full Apple Watch SE 2 review
The best Garmin fitness tracker
The Garmin Vivosmart 5 review is Garmin’s band-shaped fitness tracker offering. It’s showing its age these days, but it’s still a good choice if you’re looking for a band-based activity tracker and want Garmin’s fantastic Garmin Connect app.
It’s old and it doesn’t have onboard GPS, but the Vivosmart 5 still manages to deliver an impressive set of features to monitor your everyday health and well-being. One of the most useful features is sleep tracking, which not only monitors your sleep stages throughout the night, as many fitness trackers do but also gives you practical advice to maximize your sleep time.
Unlike Fitbit devices, there are no additional paywalls here. The Garmin Connect app contains lots of deep insights, the ability to generate training plans, check out historic data, monitor your recovery and lots more. It’s just a shame there’s no onboard GPS for monitoring your location during outdoor cardio workouts, generally Garmin’s biggest strength.
Read our full Garmin Vivosmart 5 review
How to choose the best fitness tracker
When choosing a fitness tracker, you must consider what type of activity you enjoy most. If you’re primarily interested in getting outdoors and walking more, you can get away with picking up a more affordable watch that doesn’t offer GPS tracking. If, however, you’re getting into cycling or running, a device like the Fitbit Charge 6, with its built-in GPS module, would be a better choice to track your route and speed accurately.
Next, just how much detail do you want? Some fitness trackers (like the Charge 6) give you a vast array of stats with detailed analysis, while others (such as the Xiaomi Mi Smart Band 8 Pro) keep things uncomplicated.
Then there’s the matter of personal style. As we’ve already mentioned, a fitness tracker works best when you wear it all day and night, so it’s not frivolous to think about how it looks. If you already have a favorite watch that you don’t want to stop wearing, the Samsung Galaxy Ring is a good alternative and is so light and compact you’ll forget you’re even wearing it.
Screen size and resolution are a consideration too. If you sometimes struggle to make out the text on a small screen, it might be worth investing in a fitness tracker with an AMOLED display, which is clearer and emits more light than the typical memory-in-pixel (MiP) screen used by many cheaper devices.
What is a fitness tracker?
A fitness tracker is a device, typically a wristband, that monitors statistics such as your heart rate, the number of steps you take each day, and how long you spend working out. You might think of Fitbit bands as the quintessential tracker, but Apple Watches and other devices, such as smart rings, are fitness trackers too.
Most fitness trackers have several dedicated modes for recording different forms of exercise, and some also have GPS for tracking your location during runs, walks and bike rides. Most fitness trackers also monitor how long you spend sleeping, and in each sleep stage.
All this data is sent to an app on your smartphone, where you can track changes over time. Most apps give you virtual ‘awards’ for achieving particular goals, such as taking 10,000 steps per day or going to bed on time.
Why do you need a fitness tracker?
It can be tough to break old habits and develop new ones, and a fitness tracker can help give you the encouragement you need. Tracking the number of steps you take each day and aiming for a particular target might be simple, but it can push you to make simple changes (like getting off the bus a stop earlier, or walking short distances rather than driving), which can add up to make a significant difference over time.
Which fitness trackers are most accurate?
Most modern fitness trackers do an excellent job in tracking heart rate, stress and sleep accurately. Fitness trackers have optical heart rate sensors that can keep up with quick changes in heart rate.
Some have GPS to better track running, walking and cycling workouts outdoors. This is generally an estimation, but if you run, walk or cycle frequently and want to closely track those workouts, it’s best to choose a tracker with GPS as it can monitor your routes, distance travelled, and speed.
Check our full reviews for more information: we test fitness trackers against each other and industry gold standards, such as the Apple Watch Ultra 2, to determine whether there are significant differences in GPS and heart rate readings.
What makes a good fitness tracker?
A good fitness tracker is one that you’ll wear every day and will help you build up a complete picture of your health. With that knowledge, you can start to make small tweaks that will help you sleep better, lower your resting heart rate, improve your fitness, and generally feel better.
How we test the best fitness trackers
When we test fitness trackers, we wear them all day and night to see how much data they gather, how accurate this data is and how comfortable they are to live with. Do they get in the way while you’re writing, feel awkward while trying to sleep, or get itchy at the end of the day?
We also put them to the test with various workouts, including indoor cycling (to test the accuracy and responsiveness of each device’s heart rate monitor) and running (to check GPS accuracy, where appropriate). We compare the results to those gathered using a reliable high-end sports watch – and sometimes we’re pleasantly surprised. Visit TechRadar’s How We Test page for more.
Latest updates
01/08/2024: Added the Samsung Galaxy Ring.
link
:max_bytes(150000):strip_icc()/GettyImages-1475589930-be386137adbd41729459bfd8b72b8e95.jpg "10 Options Strategies Every Investor Should Know")
