The latest fitness trackers will help you track your exercise while monitoring your overall health. They do this by reporting on your steps, calories, activities, sleep, and a whole lot more. They are fantastic companions that will enable you to more easily achieve your fitness goals.
No two fitness trackers are the same, with different designs, shapes, and sizes to suit all types of people. You could even opt for one of the best smart rings should you prefer a tracker that blends into the background.
Fitness trackers are slightly different from the best smartwatches in that they usually have a paired-down set of features, especially in terms of notifications, NFC payments, and music streaming. As a result, they have better battery life and are often more affordable.
Our extensive guide includes trackers from the likes of Fitbit, Xiaomi, Samsung, and Apple. We’ve thoroughly tested all of them so you know you’re getting informed and impartial reviews. We’re also constantly reviewing the latest releases and updating this guide on a regular basis, so read on to find the best fitness tracker for you right now.
Black Friday fitness tracker deals: What to look for
We’re heading into Black Friday and Cyber Monday and there are deals popping up everywhere. That makes it an ideal time to buy your first fitness tracker or make the upgrade that you’ve wanted to for a while. We’d recommend keeping an eye out for last year’s models, as they’re more likely to be discounted.
Before making a purchase, make sure you buy a fitness tracker that you’ll actually want to wear on a daily basis. Take note of the product dimensions and see if it’ll fit comfortably on your wrist.
If you’ve found a great deal but aren’t sure whether it has the features you want, then you might find our fitness tracker vs smartwatch guide helpful.
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.
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Best budget
New for 2024, this is the cheapest fitness tracker you should consider buying. It’s a little rough around the edges but offers a great interface and reliable tracking at a stunningly low price.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Best fitness trackers: Specs comparison table
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| Component | Fitbit Luxe | Xiaomi Smart Band 9 | Fitbit Charge 6 | Samsung Galaxy Ring | Apple Watch SE 2 | Garmin Vivosmart 5 |
| Price | $98.99 / £99.99 / AU$169.99 | $60 / £34.99 / AU$79.99 | $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) | 46.5 x 21.6 x 10.9 (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 | 1.62-in AMOLED display | 1.4-inch full-color AMOLED | None | 40mm OLED display | 0.5″ OLED display |
| GPS? | No | No | Yes | None | Yes | Yes |
| Battery life | 5 days | 21 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
Xiaomi remains king of the cheap fitness trackers with its new Smart Band 9 for 2024. Building on the success of the 8 and the 8 Pro, the 9 sports the same excellent low pricing and ease of use as its forebears.
For a very reasonable price, you get a 1.62-inch AMOLED display, there’s no GPS, but you do get 21 days of battery life, meaning you can get three weeks on a single charge. That display refreshes at 60Hz and features 1200 nits of max brightness, a big upgrade over the previous models that makes it easier to read and see.
It’s a by-the-numbers fitness tracker and you’ll get a TPU band as standard. While the lack of GPS might be a turn-off for some, there are 155 fitness modes to track a range of different workouts. Battery life is extremely competitive (thanks in part to the lack of GPS), and your metrics are delivered by the Mi Fitness app.
It might not be the all-singing, all-dancing experience of the Fitbit Luxe or the Apple Watch, but you won’t find more bang for your buck anywhere else.
Read our full Xiaomi Smart Band 9 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
25/10/2024: Added the Xiaomi Smart Band 9.
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