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Fitness trackers do far more today than the rudimentary clip-on wearables Fitbit introduced in 2009. Now, it’s like wearing a personal trainer and life coach right on your wrist. The best fitness trackers count steps, recommend workouts, track sleep habits, and motivate you to keep active. Some even double as premium smartwatches.
Among the best fitness trackers on the market, our top pick is the Garmin Epix Gen 2. It tracks a range of activities, offers a battery life of up to a week, and has highly accurate GPS. For a budget pick, we recommend the Fitbit Inspire 3. It’s a no-frills but effective wearable with solid battery life and precise tracking for less than $100.
Picking out the right fitness tracker comes down to how you intend to use it. Some may not need the bells and whistles of Garmin’s Epix Gen 2, while others looking for a smartwatch may prefer the Apple Watch Series 9. To help, we’ve compiled the best fitness trackers across seven categories below.
Outdoor enthusiasts will love Garmin’s detail-oriented and full-featured Epix Gen 2, a robust fitness smartwatch that tracks, captures, and logs just about any activity you can think of.
When Garmin released the Epix Gen 2 in 2022, I was curious how it’d slot into the brand’s lineup alongside the Fenix, a wearable that does just about everything. After wearing the Epix Gen 2 as my daily driver for a month, it became clear it’s not only worthy of its own line but also happens to be the best fitness tracker you can buy.
From a feature standpoint, it has it all. There are the basics, like heart rate monitoring, sleep and step tracking, and advanced features like stress, hydration, and respiration tracking. It also uses Garmin’s unique Body Battery function, which can tell how well you rest each day and whether you should push for a PR or take it easy during your next workout.
In addition, it features an endless list of available activities to track, unique coaching insights and workout tips, recovery time estimates, visual race time predictors, and custom workouts.
The Garmin Epix Gen 2 is a comprehensive fitness tracker.
Rick Stella/Business Insider
But what I’ve been most impressed about while wearing the Epix Gen 2 is that all these features are legitimately useful. I find myself using so many of them in all facets of my day, too. I use the recovery time estimate to see what workout my body is ready for, the coaching insights for daily inspiration, the race time predictors to adjust my training schedule, and sleep tracking to see how well my body recovers each day.
What’s more, the Epix Gen 2 can go upwards of six full days without needing a recharge, even if I’m using things like the built-in GPS each day or wearing it to bed to track my sleep. I’ve gone on multi-day camping trips and still had more than enough battery left on my trip home.
Yes, the watch is on the expensive side, starting at $800, but it’s the same price as the $800 Apple Watch Ultra 2, a similarly rugged outdoor watch with far weaker battery life. Plus, you’re more likely to find a solid deal on the Epix Gen 2 than the Apple Watch Ultra 2.
Because of its laundry list of available features, it’s best used by those who are consistently active and enjoy getting outside. Anyone can buy one, but to get the most value out of it, you want to ensure you’re using it as intended.
The Inspire 3 may be one of Fitbit’s most basic watches, but it still packs a powerful fitness-tracking punch with tons of trackable activities, advanced health features like skin temperature sensing, and a comfortable, lightweight design.
The Inspire 3 is one of Fitbit’s latest wearables that blends advanced health and fitness tracking with a subtle, no-frills design. With features like skin temperature sensing and sleep tracking and a price tag that situates it under $100, the Inspire 3 is a budget fitness tracker that performs like something much more expensive.
What makes the Inspire 3 an especially great wearable is that it’s perfect for people of all fitness levels and skills. Beginners and first-time wearers will find it easy to navigate and it offers plenty of basics such as daily steps taken, calories burned, and several trackable activities.
Seasoned fitness enthusiasts will appreciate the Inspire 3’s advanced health features, including the new skin temperature sensor and in-depth sleep tracker. It’s not as comprehensive as our top pick, but the Inspire 3 still offers tons of useful features. It’s also compatible with a range of the best Inspire 3 bands.
The Inspire 3 offers exceptional budget value.
Shannon Ullman/Business Insider
The watch isn’t perfect, though. During our tests, we noted that the lack of built-in GPS may tarnish the experience for more hardcore athletes who don’t always want to work out with their phones. GPS syncing was quick when we brought our phone along, but it wasn’t always ideal. The other major drawback is its lack of downloadable apps.
Even when we factor those cons, we still feel the Inspire 3 is an excellent fitness tracker that punches above its weight. It’s the best fitness tracker for those on a budget, beginners, or first-time fitness tracker users. It’s even an adequate overall wearable for fitness veterans who seek an inexpensive, no-frills experience.
Fitbit’s Sense 2 combines the brand’s advanced health and fitness features with decent smartwatch capability, unique sleep tracking, and a clean design reminiscent of the Apple Watch.
The best Fitbit overall, the Fitbit Sense 2 is our favorite fitness tracker in Fitbit’s lineup and satisfies just about everything you look for in a quality active wearable.
It offers a wide variety of trackable activities and catalogs tons of unique insights into your sleep habits and fitness data while also monitoring your stress and menstrual cycles. It even has a built-in GPS and a battery that lasts around five days on a single charge.
We found the watch lived up to those ambitious expectations at almost every turn. It was highly accurate during workouts, both in terms of GPS syncing and the data it tracked. Its health insights were easy to access and actionable, and the battery life was superb.
It’s also an incredibly easy watch to navigate. The swipe controls are simple and intuitive and offer enough customization to make the experience personal.
The Sense 2 is Fitbit’s top wearable and an impressive activity tracker.
Rick Stella/Business Insider
But the biggest highlight of the Sense 2 is its advanced health and wellness tools. There’s a skin temperature sensor (similar to the Inspire 3 above), the ability to get heart rhythm (ECG) readings, and the aforementioned stress tracker, which monitors stress levels in real time.
The watch doesn’t come without a few drawbacks, though. The most apparent is that it’s just not that impressive of a smartwatch. Even though Fitbit calls it a smartwatch, it struggles to fit the bill because it doesn’t offer third-party app support and doesn’t allow access to tools like Google Assistant (even though Google is its parent company). There’s also no ability to store or play music.
Unless you need a fitness tracker that doubles as a premium smartwatch, don’t let those missing features preclude you from considering the Sense 2. Outside those cons, it offers a great fitness tracking experience. Plus, it’s still an adequate smartwatch with call, text, app, and email notifications. It’s just not the ideal smartwatch.
The Apple Watch has been one of the best smartwatches you can buy for several years and the Series 9 is yet another high-quality, full-featured wearable that’s a must-own for iPhone users.
The Apple Watch Series 9 doesn’t represent a huge upgrade over the prior-generation Series 8, but it remains the best fitness-tracking smartwatch you can buy. Thanks to its new S9 processor, the Series 9 functions faster than any Apple Watch before it, which greatly impacts the wearable’s overall performance. Navigating the interface is smooth, as is opening any of its apps or starting a workout.
As a fitness tracker, the Series line has always been one of the best on the market, offering a wide variety of trackable activities and accurate GPS. It’s also a highly motivating watch thanks to Apple’s gamification, which pushes users to close their fitness rings each day. These rings consist of burned calories (called the Move goal), minutes active (called the Exercise goal), and how many hours each day you’ve stood up and moved around (called the Stand goal).
Although the Series 9 debuted without significant new fitness tracking features, it’s still a highly refined version of the Apple Watches before it and offers the best Series line experience to date for smartwatch capability in terms of its new software and hardware.
The Apple Watch Series 9 is a remarkable smartwatch and fitness tracker.
Rick Stella/Business Insider
Hardware-wise, the Series 9 debuted the S9 chip, which impacts how the watch functions overall. It allows for fast navigation of the interface and a boost in the watch’s performance. The difference may not be noticeable to wearers of the Series 8 or Series 7, but users of older models will appreciate the uptick in speed.
The S9 is also a major player regarding the Series 9’s software updates, most notably led by the new double tap gesture. Now, users can tap their index finger and thumb together twice to interact with the central button in an app. For instance, this can answer or hang up a phone call or snooze an alarm. It’s a unique new feature powered by the latest chipset.
Other new software features, like the Smart Stack display and redesigned apps, are also great additions. However, these come packaged in the new WatchOS 10 operating system (compatible with Series 4 and newer).
There are also new cycling and hiking tracking features in WatchOS 10, including compatibility with Bluetooth cycling accessories, an updated Compass app, and new topographical map data.
So, while the Series 9 isn’t a revolutionary update over the Series 8, it’s still the best smartwatch for fitness tracking, especially for iOS users.
The Ultra 2 is Apple’s biggest smartwatch that features the highly useful Action Button, has multi-day battery life, and has a rugged design that’s perfect for athletes.
Although the Apple Watch Ultra 2 does many of the same things as the Series 9 above, it offers a few more advanced activity tracking features that make it the best pure fitness tracker for iPhone users. These features include a brighter screen, which is great for use in bright, sunny conditions, water resistance down to 100m, a wider range of altitudes, and a longer-lasting battery. The Series 9 offers 18 hours of battery life, while the Ultra 2 is rated at 36 hours.
These extra features make the Ultra 2 the best Apple Watch for advanced users like athletes, especially those who need the extra battery life. For instance, the Ultra 2 could comfortably make it through something like a marathon or even a multi-day backpacking trip.
The Apple Watch Ultra 2’s advanced features make it the best possible fitness tracker for iPhone users.
Antonio Villas-Boas/Business Insider
The Ultra 2 also now features an array of watersports features aimed at freedivers, scuba divers, wakeboarders, and kitesurfers. Its built-in Depth app can log diving sessions, GPS data, water temperature information, and time spent underwater. These features are certainly on the niche side, but they’re an example of Apple’s intent to aim the Ultra 2 at a subset of potential wearers.
Like the Series 9, the Ultra 2 also features the new S9 chipset and the useful double-tap gesture, which can be used to snooze alarms or answer a phone call, among other things. The new chipset is particularly impressive in how fast it navigates the interface and opens apps. Ultra 1 users may not notice a difference, but it is apparent for anyone coming over from a Series 6 or older.
Beyond those new features, the Ultra 2 is nearly identical to the original Ultra. It features a durable design, premium smartwatch functionality, and highly accurate GPS tracking. iPhone users who want a highly capable fitness tracker that seamlessly integrates into the Apple ecosystem should strongly consider the Ultra 2.
Samsung’s Galaxy Watch 5 Pro is the best fitness tracker for Android users thanks to its multi-day battery life, an intuitive operating system in WearOS, and a wide variety of advanced health and fitness tracking.
The competition for the best Android smartwatch is stiff as both Samsung and Google offer premium wearables worthy of the title. However, when it comes to tracking fitness, the Samsung Galaxy Watch 5 Pro is the clear choice. We recognize that the newer Galaxy Watch 6 is available, but it can’t beat the Galaxy Watch 5 Pro, especially when the latter has a price cut from being a previous-generation model.
Samsung’s Galaxy Watch 5 Pro aims to be a fitness and adventure version of the standard non-Pro models (like the Apple Watch Ultra to the standard Series models) with extended battery life and a titanium build. It has advanced health and fitness features and uses the WearOS operating system, which delivers a fluid, intuitive user experience.
For the fitness-focused crowd, the Watch 5 Pro is an exceptional activity tracker. During our tests, we found the watch to be highly accurate in terms of how quickly it synced its built-in GPS and how well it tracked activities like runs, bike rides, and hikes. It’s also compatible with a variety of the best Samsung Galaxy Watch bands, like canvas options for something more durable or nylon straps for working out.
There’s even a track-back function that leaves digital breadcrumbs, so you know your exact path on a hike. We do wish this was available for more activities (it’s only compatible with hikes and, oddly enough, bike rides), but perhaps this will be an update in the next release.
Android users can’t go wrong with the Galaxy Watch 5 Pro’s fitness tracking.
Rick Stella/Business Insider
Those looking for a smartwatch will also appreciate how well the Watch 5 Pro functions. The Google Play Store offers many downloadable apps, and navigating the watch is incredibly easy. You can even customize the watch face and its displayed data to fit how you prefer to use it. Additionally, all notifications from emails, texts, apps, and phone calls are simple to interact with.
But perhaps the Watch 5 Pro’s best feature is its expanded health tracking offering. It has comprehensive sleep tracking that charts your nightly sleep habits and a body composition scanner that tracks your muscle mass percentage, body fat, and water weight.
It’s worth pointing out that the Watch 5 Pro experience is more fully capable when using a Samsung phone. While it does work on something like the Google Pixel, a few features are missing, including the heart rhythm tracker (i.e., the ECG app). We also found some syncing issues when we initially set up the watch.
Despite those drawbacks, however, the Samsung Galaxy Watch 5 Pro is the best fitness tracker for Android users (and our top overall pick of the best Android smartwatches currently available). It functions incredibly well as a smartwatch, offers a wide variety of fitness-tracking capabilities, and provides tons of unique and actionable health insights.
The Forerunner 745 is the perfect representation of the power of Garmin’s ecosystem, offering wearers fine-tuned workout recommendations and valuable fitness insight in an easy-to-use package.
Garmin has long-made highly advanced fitness trackers that serve the needs of hardcore athletes. The Forerunner 745 brings that in-depth approach to a wider audience, providing highly valuable fitness insight and feedback to anyone, regardless of how active they are.
The beauty of this watch rests in the advanced data it provides. During workouts, the 745 displays everything from time active and heart rate to distance covered and pace. Each of these is highly useful if you’re interval training or aiming for a certain time on a run or bike ride. It’s also quite easy to customize this screen so you have exactly the features you want when you want it.
Though that in-the-moment data is great, what the watch offers after the activity (or between workouts) is even better. It provides challenging workout recommendations that adapt to your output, the ideal amount of rest you need between activities (which is highly important), and customized training plans. Neither of these is just tacked on, too, and I found myself gravitating toward them more and more as I tested the watch, even though I’ve always preferred my own custom workouts to anything pre-written for me.
The specificity of the Forerunner 745’s training features sets it apart.
Adam Molina/Business Insider
Its tracking accuracy is also highly precise, and I found it similar to that of Suunto’s 7 and the Apple Watch Series 6. It syncs with GPS rather quickly and consistently produces similar metrics (for distance and pace), regardless of whether I cycle or run.
If there were something to nitpick about the Forerunner 745, it’d be its clunky menu system. Like most Garmin watches, the OS isn’t exactly intuitive, though it does get easier the more you use it (as would anything). It’s not enough to be a dealbreaker, especially considering how much this watch does that’s superior to most fitness trackers currently available.
We test fitness trackers across standard criteria.
Rick Stella/Business Insider
Each of the best fitness trackers in this guide underwent a series of tests to determine their performance in four categories: fit and comfort, trackingaccuracy, features, and value.
Here’s how we considered each category while testing:
Fit and comfort: If a fitness tracker isn’t comfortable or doesn’t fit well, you’re far less likely to want to wear it — and if you don’t wear it often, what’s the point? Wearable brands know this, so many of the best fitness trackers have bands that not only stay comfortable for long periods but won’t chafe or become bothersome while you sweat. When testing, I looked at everything from how they felt when I put them on to if I noticed any discomfort during short or long workouts.
Tracking accuracy: Testing for accuracy isn’t always easy. You can wear two different watches and get different GPS readings, pace data, and so on. So, instead of using a second tracker to test a wearable’s accuracy, I’d map out how far an exact mile was from my house before running it a few times wearing the same watch. The trackers we recommend all produced results no more than .1 miles off.
Features: This category is mostly straightforward: Does a tracker have any supplemental features outside tracking steps, calories burned, or heart rate? These could be anything from extra activities it’s capable of logging to the ability to act like a smartwatch and get smartphone notifications, etc. Trackers aren’t defined by their added features, but it’s a nice touch and something that can separate a good tracker from a great one.
Value: The value of a fitness tracker isn’t just its sticker price but also how valuable it is from a function standpoint. Does it have the features you need? Will it track and compile the data you want it to? Can it serve as something that benefits your fitness? When shopping to find a tracker’s true value, these are all questions you want to consider. Value becomes more of a subjective category when viewed that way, but when testing, I judged how well each tracker held up across the above categories against how much they cost.
What to look for when shopping
Those looking for a device dedicated to tracking daily activity, workouts, and sleep have a vast number of choices, even without including members of the smartwatch family. Here’s what to consider:
Comfort and design: Since you’ll wear the tracker daily (even to bed for sleep tracking), comfort is a high priority. If it’s not comfortable, you won’t want to wear it. The same goes for design. If you have a small wrist, you may want a tracker with a sleek, understated look. Fitness trackers come in all shapes and sizes, so you can find one that suits your style.
Features: If you’re looking for a no-frills fitness tracker, one that only tracks steps and your sleep habits may suffice. However, if you work out often or want insight into how your activity impacts your overall health, a more advanced tracker with a heart rate monitor or built-in GPS may be the one for you.
You should also consider the types of workouts you like to do. For example, if you’re a swimmer, waterproofing is a must. If you’re just starting a new fitness routine, a device that coaches you and gives you goals to work toward may provide the extra motivation you need.
App experience: Most fitness trackers are designed to work in tandem with your smartphone, syncing the data collected with a downloaded application, which allows you to gain even more insight into your health and save the information collected to track your progress over time.
Unfortunately, not all companion apps are effective, and you may find some experiences you prefer over others. It’s important to choose a fitness tracker that gives you a good app experience. Easy navigation and compatibility with your phone’s operating system are a must.
FAQs
Are fitness trackers worth wearing?
Yes, so long as you use the tracker and the data it collects to inform your fitness goals. You should understand what a fitness tracker offers and opt for one that provides insight into your needs.
For instance, if you just need something to motivate you to increase your daily activity, you shouldn’t buy a full-featured watch like the Coros Apex or Suutno 7. Something like an Apple Watch or Fitbit’s Versa 3 would be better suited to your lifestyle.
Although there’s nothing wrong with wearing a fitness tracker to only keep tabs on your daily steps or calories burned, that information it accrues can be vital for anyone who wants to develop a daily, weekly, or monthly fitness routine.
The term “worth,” as it applies to fitness wearables, is relative to how exactly that information is used and who is using it. You first need to decide how you intend to use a fitness watch to determine how worthwhile it can be.
What does a fitness tracker do?
The best fitness trackers monitor and accrue a variety of activity data, such as the number of steps a wearer takes each day, how many calories they’ve burned, and the flights of stairs they’ve climbed, among many others.
Basic fitness trackers often offer tracking for just those listed above, while more advanced wearables and fitness smartwatches provide a slew of advanced features such as workout tracking (running, cycling, weight lifting, etc.), heartbeat monitoring, smartphone notifications, and more.
Some trackers even have compatible smartphone apps that centralize the data they collect, allowing users to chart their progress over time via a dashboard or activity calendar.
What are the pros and cons of fitness trackers?
Deciding whether a fitness tracker’s pros outweigh its cons ultimately comes down to how you intend to use it. It can be extremely beneficial if you plan to be routinely active and use the data it collects to develop and maintain a fitness routine.
However, if you never look at the data amassed or buy a watch with too many features you’ll never use, it will surely become an expensive digital timepiece that tracks fitness data for no reason.
Fitness trackers can offer deep insight into one’s health profile but can also be expensive. It’s important to figure out how you want to use the watch before buying one and research which watch is best for your lifestyle and goals.
Rick Stella is the fitness tech editor for the Insider Reviews team. He reviews and reports on all forms of wearables like activity trackers and smartwatches, as well as a variety of other fitness-related wearables. Rick has over ten years of experience covering the verticals of health & fitness, outdoors, and consumer technology.When he’s not putting digital pen to digital paper, Rick enjoys seeing live music, playing soccer, catching up on Netflix shows, and riding his bike. An Oregonian for much of his life, Rick now resides in Brooklyn, NY. He can be reached at rstella@businessinsider.com or on Twitter @RickStella.Learn more about how our team of experts tests and reviews products at Insider here.Learn more about how we test health, fitness, and outdoor products.
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