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The best fitness trackers will give you health and fitness metrics in a package that’s generally smaller and cheaper than your average smartwatch. They’re great for people trying to make a dent in their health and fitness, but who don’t want to splash out on one of the best smartwatches.
Fitness trackers are generally lower-profile bands that can track sleep, calories burnt, and more, although they might be cheaper smartwatches or even other wearables such as smart rings. We’ve been testing fitness trackers and smartwatches for years, using every offering from Garmin, Apple Watch, Fitbit, Amazfit and many more.
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 Apple Watch
If you want an Apple Watch to track your health and fitness, the Apple Watch SE 3 isn’t nearly as cheap as some of the other trackers on the list (it’s a fully-fledged smartwatch), but it’s the cheapest up-to-date Apple Watch you can get right now.
Best budget
The Samsung Galaxy Fit 3 is one of the cheapest fitness trackers 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.
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.
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.
Best screenless fitness tracker
The Amazfit Helio Strap is a good value, subscription-free screenless fitness tracker and worthy Whoop rival. It’s not as detailed in terms of analysis, but far more affordable.
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 good choice.
Best fitness trackers: Specs comparison table
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|
Component |
Apple Watch SE 3 |
Samsung Galaxy Fit 3 |
Fitbit Charge 6 |
Samsung Galaxy Ring |
Amazfit Helio Strap |
Garmin Vivosmart 5 |
|
Price |
From $249 / £219 / AU$399 |
$59 / £49 / AU$139 |
$159.99 / £139.99 / AU $259.99 |
$399 / £399 / AU$750 |
$99.99 / £99.00 / $179.00AU |
$149.99 / £129.99 / AU$229 |
|
Dimensions |
40 x 34 x 10.7mm (40mm), 44 x 38 x 10.7mm (44mm) |
42.9 x 28.8 x 9.9 (mm) |
38 x 18.5 x 11.6mm |
Ring sizes 5-13 |
33.97 x 24.3 x 10.59 (mm) |
19.5 x 10.7 x 217 (mm) |
|
Display |
Always-On Retina LTPO display |
1.6-inch 256 x 402px AMOLED display |
1.4-inch full-color AMOLED |
None |
None |
0.5″ OLED display |
|
GPS? |
Yes |
No |
Yes |
None |
Yes |
Yes |
|
Battery life |
18 hours, fast charging |
13 days |
7 days |
Up to 7 days (10 days with Galaxy Watch) |
10 days |
7 days |
The best fitness trackers of 2026
The best Apple Watch
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The Apple Watch SE 3 is the best Apple Watch for most people. While the Apple Watch Ultra 3 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 3 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 with watchOS 26, 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, and provides a ton of contextual features when paired with Apple Intelligence-capable iPhones. It also can aid in the diagnosis of health conditions like Sleep Apnoea and hypertension.
In our Apple Watch SE 3 review we wrote “it matches the Series 11 and Ultra 3 in speed and smoothness, offers solid battery life, and feels like a compact yet uncompromised Apple Watch”.
Read our full Apple Watch SE 3 review
The best budget fitness tracker
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The Samsung Galaxy Fit3 is a very aggressively-priced fitness tracker with a big screen, lots of battery and generally good fitness tracking features. It’s a good buy if you’re looking for a fitness tracking solution on a budget for gyms, fitness classes and light running.
For a very reasonable price, you get a 1.6-inch 256 x 402px AMOLED display. There’s no GPS, but you do get up to 13 days on a single charge. It’s fast, accurate and our cheap wearable of choice for 2026.
It’s a by-the-numbers fitness tracker, and while the lack of GPS might be a turn-off for some, there are plenty of fitness modes to track a range of different workouts, and it interfaces with the same excellent Samsung Health ecosystem as the Samsung Galaxy Ring below.
It might not be the all-singing, all-dancing experience of the Apple Watch SE 3, but you won’t find more bang for your buck anywhere else.
Read our full Samsung Galaxy Fit 3 review
The best Fitbit
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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 smart ring
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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
5. The best screenless fitness band
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For a long time, Whoop’s screenless fabric circle design was unique, but in the last year, screenless fitness bands have been having a bit of a moment. We reviewed the top-flight Whoop MG and deemed it great, but far too expensive.
Since then, we’ve seen rivals from Luna, Polar, Speediance and others begin to pop out of the woodwork, but it’s the Amazfit Helio Strap that’s won first place as the budget Whoop alternative to opt for.
With 10 days of battery life, comprehensive fitness metrics and reliable heart rate tracking (we tested it against a chest strap and a Garmin watch) the Amazfit Helio Strap is great, especially at its modest $99.99 / £99.00 / $179.00AU price tag.
Read our full Amazfit Helio Strap review
The best Garmin fitness tracker
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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 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. The Amazfit Helio Strap is a screenless, unobtrusive wristband, so even if you wore it on your non-dominant hand, a watch wouldn’t look out of place.
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 3 or Polar H10 heart rate monitor, 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
Battery
During testing we extensively study the battery life of all these devices. Simply wearing them for a few days isn’t enough, so we always make sure to run them down completely to get a true feel for how long battery lasts in a given fitness tracker. Obviously your mileage may vary, but we always use them the way most regular people would to give a fair assessment.
Health tracking and accuracy
All of our reviewers have extensive experience with fitness and health tracking tech, so we know what to look for when it comes to calorie tracking, heart rates, and sleep. We even test these devices alongside existing tech to look for disparity and erratic results.
Workouts
Obviously, we undertake extensive fitness tracking to test the best fitness trackers, conducting a variety of workouts including running and cycling. All of our reviewers engage in a variety of different sports, together they bring years of experience and a huge variety of disciplines to the table.
