The best fitness trackers available right now, ranked and rated to help you meet your goals and make healthier choices.
The best fitness tracker will help you develop healthier habits by giving you gentle encouragement to take a few extra steps, go for a run, take the stairs rather than the elevator, and get a little more sleep. It’s all about making small changes that can add up to make a big difference to your health over the long term. When we test fitness trackers, we wear them all day and night to see not only how much data they gather and how accurate it is, but also how comfortable they are to live with. The best fitness tracker is the one you’re happy to wear every day, and comfort and looks are both important factors. During our tests, we also take fitness trackers for a variety of workouts (both in the gym and outdoors) and test their heart rate monitoring and location tracking against dedicated sports watches to see how they compare. We wouldn’t expect a budget fitness tracker to match a premium triathlon watch for sports metrics, but even cheap devices can be surprisingly good at monitoring biometrics. That’s why for us, the best fitness tracker is the Fitbit Luxe – a device that’s slim, lightweight and attractive enough to wear around the clock, giving you a fully rounded picture of your health. It also has a high-res AMOLED display that shows fitness data in impressive detail, plus remarkably accurate heart rate monitoring to track your workout intensity. We update this guide regularly, so you can be sure you’re getting the very best advice on the latest devices. Read on to discover the best fitness trackers you can buy today, and choose the right one for you. The Fitbit Luxe is our number one fitness tracker thanks to its excellent health monitoring tools, stylish design, and the strength of the supporting Fitbit app and ecosystem. The Luxe tracks everyday activity, sleep, heart rate, respiration and workouts, and when we put it to the test, we were particularly impressed by the accuracy of its heart rate monitoring, which was on a par with much more expensive running watches. Your daily data is all presented on a super-sharp color AMOLED display, which presents an impressive amount of detail in a very small space. 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 by jewelry designer Gorjana. In our tests, it was comfortable to wear all day and night, which allowed us to build up 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. The Luxe even comes with a free trial of Fitbit Premium, which lets you get even more out of the watch, including more detailed historical data, a wider range of workouts and meditation sessions in the Fitbit app, and the ability to create a personal health report that you can share with a family member or doctor. There’s no on-board GPS (instead the Luxe needs a connection to your phone’s GPS receiver), but other than that, it’s very hard to fault. The Fitbit Charge 4 is an excellent fitness tracker, which features built-in GPS, so you can track your runs and walks and leave your phone at home. There’s also Fitbit Pay for contactless payments, and if you do decide to take your phone along, you can control your Spotify playlist from your wrist. It’s an impressive feature set for such a small and affordable device. It also includes a new feature called Active Zone Minutes. This is a measure of any activity faster than a brisk walk, and is based on recommendations from various health organizations. It’s essentially a simple type of heart rate training, encouraging you to spend time at different levels of exertion based on your age and fitness (as measured by the watch). The Fitbit Charge 4 lacks a color screen, but its icons and menus are well laid out and easy to understand. Whether you’re looking for sleep tracking, the weather forecast or breathing exercises, it’s only a couple of swipes away. Slim, neat and packed with features, the Charge 4 bridges the gap between activity bands and serious running watches, and is truly a fitness tracker for everyone.
