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Best Overall Fitbit Charge 6Read more rubber band for exercise
Runner-Up Garmin Vivomove TrendRead more
Best Budget Tracker Fitbit Inspire 3Read more
Best if You Have an iPhone Apple Watch Series 10Read more
Like every piece of gear you wear on your body day in and day out, fitness trackers are incredibly personal. The best fitness tracker should be comfortable, attractive, and fit your lifestyle, including when and how you like to work out. Do you bike, row, or do strength training? Do you run on trails for hours at a time, or do you just want a reminder to stand up every hour? Do you want to wear it on your wrist or on your finger or tuck it into your bra?
No matter what your needs are, there’s never been a better time to find a powerful, sophisticated tool that can help you optimize your workouts or jump-start your routine. We test dozens of fitness trackers every year while running, climbing, hiking, or just doing workout videos on our iPads at night, to bring you these picks.
Updated January 2025: We added the Garmin Fenix 8 AMOLED, the Oura Ring 4, the Xiaomi Smart Band 9, the Garmin Lily 2 Active, the Amazfit T-Rex 3, the Amazfit Active, and the Polar Vantage M3.
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Don't see anything that's exactly your style here? Check out our guide to the Best Smartwatches. While the categories can overlap, fitness trackers are less feature-rich. I'm less concerned with whether a fitness tracker can replicate every feature on your smartphone than if the suite of health features is robust and accurate; if it can track multiple activities; and if it stays on and is secure while doing multiple fitness activities.
Some fitness trackers will feature the ability to read emails and control music, but the screens are often smaller and less bright. However, the battery life is often much better, which makes a difference, especially if you're tracking your sleep over time. If, however, you're more interested in the option to access apps without having to pull out your phone, you might want to think about getting a smartwatch. (If you want no notifications at all, get a smart ring instead.)
Are you having trouble with this brand-new fitness device you just bought? Here are just a few ways you can easily cure what ails you (or your device):
Make sure it fits. Optical sensors won't work if your device is slipping loosely around your wrist. You can customize most devices with new straps. Make sure it sits securely an inch above your wrist.
Wash it! I'm horrified by how many people tell me their fitness trackers are giving them a wrist rash. Wipe it down with a little dish soap and water after a sweaty session.
Get out from under tree cover. Does your device utilize multiple satellite positioning systems to track your location when you're starting an outdoor workout? This is a lot harder for it to do if you're under power lines, trees, or even (gulp) inside.
Set a routine. There's nothing quite as frustrating as opening your tracker's app and finding out that it ran out of battery before you went to bed last night. Keep your app updated regularly. Check if your tracker is connected to your phone, and keep chargers everywhere.
Even as Fitbit has faced stiff competition from other manufacturers—most notably, the Apple Watch—its trackers have always won me over. They hit a very specific sweet spot between attractiveness, affordability, accessibility, and ease of use. They're perfect for everyone who isn't an ultra-marathoner or a semipro powerlifter trying to hit a PR.
The Charge 6 (7/10, WIRED Recommends) now has many integrations from Google, Fitbit's new parent company. The redesigned app looks much more modern and is much better organized. You can now get directions from Google Maps, pay with Google Wallet, and control your music with a YouTube Music Premium subscription. You can also check your skin temperature and your 24/7 heart rate readings, take ECGs, and track your activities and sleep schedule in the newly Google-fied app. The battery charge lasted well over a week, and the physical button is back, baby! Finally, this all comes in a package that costs $160.
In July 2024, the company also unrolled several updates. Improvements to the algorithm now mean that the heart rate tracking is more accurate; it can also auto-detect more sports, like the elliptical and spinning, and the GPS accuracy has improved. Many of its best features are still locked behind its $10/month Fitbit Premium subscription. But if all you want is a basic fitness tracker that won't break the bank, the Charge only costs $160! Check out our guide to the Best Fitbits for more options.
Garmin has many, many hybrid fitness tracker watches that range from the sporty Vivoactive line to the more stylish Vivomove line, all the way to the premium Venu line. Taking into account functionality and price point, the best overall option is the Vivomove Trend (8/10, WIRED Recommends), mainly because it has a common smartwatch functionality that's still all too rare with fitness trackers. If you're used to the convenience of charging your phone and earbuds on all-purpose Qi wireless charging pads, hunting for a specific charger can be an annoyance. The Vivomove Trend is the first Garmin to have wireless charging, and it works!
Garmin Connect is Garmin's proprietary tool for tracking all your fitness stats, and it's one of the most comprehensive and actionable apps I've used. Garmin recently redesigned it to look, well, a little bit like Fitbit's, with Body Battery (Garmin's metric to gauge your energy throughout the day) at the top, above an easy-to-navigate At a Glance section. The Trend is an easy way to access Garmin's most convenient fitness features, with an analog watch face, connected GPS, incident detection, contactless payments, sleep tracking, and continuous heart rate monitoring. It's worth noting here that Garmin watches age pretty well, and 2022’s Vivomove Sport ($180) is much cheaper and looks almost the same. But you will probably make up the difference in six months when you don't have to replace the chargers.
If all you want is a simple health tracker that will track your steps and your sleep and let you know when someone is calling, the internet's marketplace is awash in knockoffs of this fitness tracker. For $80, you might as well get the original. In 2022, Fitbit updated the Inspire. It has a pedometer, tracks SpO2 and sleep, and comes with a wide array of watch faces and accessories.
It wasn't all easy-peasy. I had some connectivity issues and had to restart my phone when the Inspire 3 wouldn't update the time zone for a day or two. The Inspire 3 also regularly overestimated how much sleep I'd gotten, which made me mistrust Fitbit's Sleep Profile feature. For two months, I had a chronic nighttime cough; the Inspire 3 regularly logged me at seven hours a night because I was lying still, while switching to a more sensitive fitness tracker put me at a much more accurate five. However, if you have no health issues, it is more reliable and accessible than a knockoff Inspire 3, and Fitbit regularly puts its trackers on sale.
People tend to hold on to their Apple Watch for years, and rightfully so—it is far and away the best fitness tracker if you have an iPhone. For its 10th anniversary, Apple launched last year's Watch Series 10 (8/10, WIRED Recommends). It still doesn't have blood oxygen sensing due to a patent dispute with Masimo Corp, but in almost every other way, this is still a significant upgrade. The standout feature is sleep apnea notifications. The watch uses an accelerometer and machine learning to check if you have breathing disturbances in the night, which is convenient considering that the current way to test for sleep apnea is to go to a hospital for a sleep study.
There are a bunch of hardware notifications that make it easier to track activity as well—it's thinner, lighter, easier to wear, and charges faster. It has a new water-temperature sensor, which is vital if you live in an area where people tend to conk out in too-cold water, and a bunch of new health-related software upgrades in WatchOS 11, like Training Load, to check how your workouts impact your performance and a new easy-to-reference Vitals app. You can also find most of WatchOS 11's updates on the second-gen Watch SE, but you won't get the more advanced health sensors like wrist-based body temperature sensing. Even with that pretty significant ding of no blood oxygen sensing, this is still the best fitness tracker if you have an iPhone.
The Google Pixel Watch 3 (8/10, WIRED Recommends) is the best watch with Wear OS and the best-looking smartwatch, period. It comes in two sizes, and WIRED reviewer Julian Chokkattu and I both strongly recommend that you stick with the larger 45-mm model for better battery life. The focus of the latest edition of the Pixel Watch was running, with AI-generated running plans and a new feature called Cardio Load that can track if you’re over- or under-training. As a longtime runner, my experience was mixed, but Julian liked Fitbit’s basic, low-intensity plans (Google owns Fitbit). The other latest health feature, Loss of Pulse Detection, isn’t yet available in the US.
With that said, the Fitbit integration is perfect. The heart rate monitor and other health capabilities are accurate, and it has electrocardiogram readings, sleep tracking, heart rate readings, blood-oxygen measurements, and stress measurements. After several years and a shaky start, the Pixel Watch 3 is finally becoming the Apple of the Android universe.
The Galaxy Watch7 is the latest iteration in Samsung's smartwatch lineup. The current model infuses some artificial intelligence algorithms to improve your health tracking data, like the Energy Score and updated sleep tracking capabilities. The sleep tracking offers a lot of information, but WIRED reviewer Julian Chokkattu did notice a few times that it had stopped tracking mid-sleep. You also get FDA-cleared sleep apnea detection, though this isn't a feature you'll turn on all the time—it takes two nights to track and afterward, you'll get a note saying whether or not you show symptoms. As always, some features, like sleep apnea, the electrocardiogram, and irregular heart rhythm notifications, are only available when paired with a Samsung phone, although otherwise it works well with any Android phone.
Julian found the battery life frustrating compared to older models. With the always-on display, he struggled to hit a full 24 hours with two tracked activities and sleep tracking overnight. Otherwise, if you keep a charger handy, the Watch7 is a nice update to the Galaxy watch lineup.
The best running watch will probably always be a Garmin Forerunner. The line is one of Garmin's oldest and goes all the way from the bare-bones Forerunner 55 ($200) to the spendy Forerunner 965 ($600). They all have different graduated specs and features; for example, the less expensive ones have cheaper displays and no blood oxygen sensors. However, all have access to multiple satellite systems for accurate positioning, as well as access to Garmin's proprietary training algorithms. Garmin's suggested workouts are flexible.
The Forerunners also age pretty well, which means you're getting a bargain if you can find the previous year's watch on sale (see the Forerunner 255). However, I think the Forerunner 165 (8/10, WIRED Recommends) is a good compromise for most people. It's on the more affordable end of the spectrum, but it has everything you need, including a bright AMOLED display, an altimeter for more accurate mileage, and a blood oxygen sensor. I found the sleep and workout tracking to be pretty accurate, the battery life is decent, and I really like Garmin's Morning Report, which wakes you up with a summary of last night's stats—how well you slept, the weather, and how ready you are to take on the day. The Music version costs an extra $50 and may be more trouble than it's worth, but other than that it's a pretty solid option for even more advanced runners.
★ Alternative: If only Garmin's Forerunner line weren't so good! Otherwise, the Coros Pace 3 ($229) would be a shoo-in for this spot. Because Coros uses a less-battery-intensive screen, the Pace watches are incredibly light, durable, and comfortable, with very long battery life; I wore it for two weeks last fall without having to charge it once. It has dual-frequency GPS that tracked my interval runs seamlessly. (I was trying to see how long I could maintain Eliud Kipchoge's pace, since he's one of their partners—the answer is “not very long.”) It does everything much more expensive trackers do, like breadcrumb navigation. However, its 1980s looks and dimmer screen may be off-putting to some.
Garmin has combined features from its previous Epix and Fenix lines back into the Fenix 8 AMOLED. You get the updated, hugely bright AMOLED screen of the Epix with the much longer battery life of the Fenix (longer than two weeks for the 47-mm model, in my testing). It also comes in the Fenix E version ($800), which is cheaper and has the less-bright MIPS display. This is why you buy a Garmin outdoors watch—so you can figure out where you are and find your way home. Now there's also dynamic routing, which lets you enter how far you want to go into the watch and then it will route you home on time.
This is the best outdoor sports watch that money can buy. It's compatible with both Android phones and iPhones, and the screen is ridiculously bright—not that it gets super sunny in Oregon in the winter, but it's noticeably brighter outdoors than other Garmin displays. You get everything you need for almost every sport, most notably Garmin's proprietary off-grid maps, which includes SkiView for ski resort maps, and golf course maps. There's leakproof buttons for scuba and a microphone and speaker for voice commands when you're off-grid. There's a built-in flashlight! No more relying on a phone flashlight with 17 percent battery when you're out hiking later than you expected!
Garmin Connect is included with the purchase of the watch, which means that you won't have to pay a subscription fee to use its best features, which now include suggested strength-training workouts, if you've also become recently obsessed with weight lifting to prevent you from disintegrating into a bag of dust. The one thing I found in my testing is that it's less sensitive in sleep tracking and incidental activity tracking than my Oura ring. This is less useful if you want just an everyday fitness tracker. But if you love outdoor sports, there's none better.
The Fitbit Ace LTE (8/10, WIRED Recommends) is the first fitness tracker that I've gotten my kids to wear consistently. (They used to wear Apple watches, but found it difficult to keep them charged.) The Ace is a combination fitness tracker, gaming device, and location tracker that has been incredibly useful and fun for both me and my children as they've moved from camp to lesson to pool to neighbor's house this summer.
It has the full suite of Fitbit's health sensors, so it can track my kids' step count and make sure they're not spending too much time in front of the TV. The $10/monthly subscription pays for both LTE connectivity—so you don't have to add a line to your cell phone plan—as well as Fitbit Arcade, which has a plethora of fun, time-limited, movement-based games that incentivize my children to keep their watches on. They can call and text me (sometimes too often) and other approved contacts through the Fitbit Ace app, and I can also see their location via Google Find My to make sure they made it back home from a field trip. This has made our summer so much easier. Its childlike aesthetic is probably not going to appeal to kids older than 11, though.
I have nothing against huge, chunky sport watches—the bigger the better, I always say. However, if you have a tiny wrist, I suggest the Lily 2 Active. It packs a remarkable number of sensors into a watch that is smaller than my children’s smartwatches—the case is 38 mm, compared to the Fitbit Ace's 41 mm.
Despite its unobtrusive looks, it's still a fully-functional fitness tracker. You can operate the watch either through two buttons on the side or the unobtrusive LCD touchscreen display, which I found to be responsive to my touch. It has built-in GPS which tracked my runs accurately and all the Garmin bells and whistles, which includes Garmin's proprietary Body Battery energy monitoring measurement and the Morning Report, which hits you with all your stats when you wake up in the morning. There's also the standard sleep tracking, blood oxygen tracking, and incident tracking if you get hurt while you're outside. There are fewer activity profiles, but it still hits the major ones—running, skiing, pickleball—if not surfing or climbing. Like the Fenix 8, it is slightly less sensitive than the Oura Ring when it comes to tracking sleep (that's why the Oura Ring is our Best Sleep Tracker, after all), but this is a good option if you're tired of pulling your blazer sleeves over your giant sports watch.
Do you want a tracker that doesn’t look like a tracker at all? Then you want the Withings ScanWatch 2 (7/10, WIRED Recommends). We loved the original ScanWatch (and the Withings Steel before that). This version includes everything we loved, including comfort, good looks, long battery life, and a comprehensive suite of health features. It also includes temperature tracking, a new charger, and an unfortunate and unpalatable price hike.
My colleague Simon Hill found the health features to be comprehensive and generally accurate, including the new temperature tracker; I tested it as well and found that it wasn't quite sensitive enough to predict my menstrual cycle with the accuracy of the Oura Ring (see below). It also doesn't have onboard GPS and many features are locked behind a $10/month subscription. If this is a bit too pricey for you, you may want to consider the ScanWatch Light ($250), which doesn't have the ECG, irregular heart rate warnings, blood oxygen, or temperature tracking but costs $100 less.
Last year, Oura introduced a ton of updates to the Oura Ring 4 that make it more appealing to the women who now make up the majority of its customers (9/10, WIRED Recommends). In addition to new colors and a wider range of sizes, the sensors are now recessed inside the body of the ring to make it thinner and lighter. The sensors are now also placed asymmetrically and combined with a new Smart Sensing algorithm that works with the sensors to continuously adapt to taking the best measurement at any given time, no matter what's going on with your hands. (No, don't tell me.)
While the Fenix 8 is one of the best fitness trackers on the market, the Oura Ring caught a night of insomnia and several more hikes per day. The battery life is also extended from the last Oura Ring, and the app has also been updated to make it easier to navigate, with new features like Timeline, which let you add tags throughout your day. The experimental Oura Labs feature lets them continuously test new features, like Meals, which lets you update pictures of your meals for AI analysis, and Symptom Radar, which tracks metrics like resting heart rate and temperature trends, to let you know if you've started exhibiting cold- or flu-like symptoms. Of course, the best features are still paywalled behind the $6/month Oura membership. Non-paying members are stuck with the three simple Sleep, Readiness, and Activity scores, as well as the Explore content, which includes meditation videos and advice clips that I have mostly found pretty useless.
As my colleague Simon Hill points out, smart rings have grown enormously in popularity since the Oura debuted in 2015. If you want a simple, understated smart ring and don't want to get another subscription charge per month, the Ultrahuman Ring Air (7/10, WIRED Recommends) is a great place to start.
This lightweight, unobtrusive ring has an infrared photoplethysmography (PPG) sensor, a noncontact medical-grade skin temperature sensor, a six-axis motion sensor, and colored LEDs for heart rate monitoring and blood oxygen saturation. It also has IPX8 water resistance, so it's fine to wear in the shower or pool, and the battery life lasts for about four days. Hill notes that the sleep tracking is excellent, but the workout tracking leaves something to be desired.
The biggest problem with any fitness wearable of any kind is how often they get in the way of … working on your fitness. You can't wear the Oura ring while rock climbing, for example. That's why the cult fitness tracker company Whoop introduced a line of smart clothes. With a Whoop in your bra, you can track runs with your Garmin!
latex band Whoop is best suited for athletes who can independently interpret its somewhat arcane metrics. Daily Strain measures only cardiovascular load, so a day where I walked 3 miles to and fro is supposedly a harder day than when I lifted weights for an hour. The Whoop 4.0 is also smaller than previous models, with a new battery, but I did experience charging issues with the new version. You have to keep the app running at all times lest it constantly warn you that it can't update right this second. The company recently debuted an AI coach that I found considerably less than helpful—I know why I'm not getting enough sleep, but my work and kids aren't going away any time soon. Finally, at $30, the monthly subscription is the most expensive one here, the line of proprietary clothing does not have extended sizing, and there hasn't been a significant overhaul of either the hardware or software in quite some time.