The Greatest Watches and Fitness Trackers for Everyone

Fitbit’s trackers have always impressed me, despite the company facing fierce competition from other manufacturers—most notably, the Apple Watch. They strike a very particular sweet spot in terms of design, cost, use, and accessibility. They are ideal for anyone who isn’t attempting to set a personal record in powerlifting or ultramarathon running.

Fitbit’s new parent firm, Google, has added numerous integrations to last year’s Charge 6 (7/10, WIRED Recommends). The updated app has a far more sleeker, more ordered appearance. With a YouTube Music Premium subscription, you can now manage your music, pay with Google Wallet, and receive directions using Google Maps. With the recently Google-fied app, you can also take ECGs, monitor your activity and sleep pattern, and check your skin temperature and heart rate continuously. The physical button is back, baby, and the battery charge lasted for more than a week! All of this is finally included in a $160 package.

Later in July 2024, the business also released a number of changes. Updates to the algorithm have resulted in enhanced heart rate tracking accuracy, increased ability to auto-detect more activities, such as spinning and elliptical, and improved GPS accuracy. Many of its greatest features are still only available with a Fitbit Premium subscription ($10 per month). On the other hand, the Charge is an affordable option for those looking for a simple fitness tracker—it just costs $160! For more choices, see our guide to the best fitbits.

Runner-Up

The fact that every fitness tracker needs its own unique charger is one of the main annoyances with them. It can be annoying to search for a specialized charger if you’re used to charging your phone and earphones on multipurpose Qi wireless charging mats. The first Garmin device with wireless charging is the Vivomove Trend (8/10, WIRED Recommends), and it functions well!

Garmin Connect is a proprietary product from Garmin that tracks all of your fitness metrics. It’s among the most feature-rich and useful apps I’ve ever used. This year, Garmin revamped it to resemble Fitbit’s design somewhat, with Body Battery—Garmin’s statistic for measuring your energy levels throughout the day—positioned above an easily accessible At a Glance area. With an analog watch face, linked GPS, event detection, contactless payments, sleep tracking, and continuous heart rate monitoring, the Trend offers a simple way to take use of Garmin’s most practical fitness features. Nonetheless, Garmin offers a number of comparable devices that are frequently discounted; the Vivomove Sport ($180) from 2022 is somewhat less expensive and has a nearly same design.

Best Budget Tracker

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 instead. 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 the new 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. The best Apple Watch right now is the Series 9 (7/10, WIRED Recommends). It looks pretty much the same as every other Apple Watch, but it has the new S9 chipset for faster onboard processing of Siri commands, which improves battery life noticeably and theoretically provides more privacy for your sensitive medical data. It also has a new ultra-wideband chip that lets you precision-locate your iPhone quickly and accurately.

The watch also has a new feature called Double Tap, which borrows from Apple’s accessibility learnings. The accelerometer, gyroscope, and optical sensor will detect the minute shifts as you tap your index finger and thumb on your watch hand twice to activate the primary button on your watch screen; it’s nice for stopping and starting music or timers around the kitchen. It’s compatible with WatchOS 11, which has exciting health-related software updates 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.

The Google Pixel Watch 2 (7/10, WIRED Recommends) is by far the most attractive fitness tracker in this lineup and the hardest to take off my wrist. Last year’s iteration was everything that reviews editor Julian Chokkattu wanted to see in last year’s release. It ships with Wear 4, Google’s latest operating system, and has a speedy processor which makes it easy to track health metrics and view them in the lovely updated Fitbit app. Those now include electrocardiogram readings, sleep tracking, heart rate readings, and blood-oxygen measurements, along with a new feature borrowed from Fitbit called Body Response which uses an electrodermal activity sensor (cEDA), along with heart rate and skin temperature, to tell you to take a walk when you’re stressed.

It does require daily charging with a new proprietary charger—no, you cannot use last year’s charger—and it still requires daily charging. It’s just annoying when you can seed every home and office with 3-in-1 Apple chargers.