The Best Fitness Trackers of 2024

The Luxe wraps a sleeker look around Fitbit’s admirable tracking, aiming to look like a piece of jewelry, with a slim design and a wide range of wristbands (sold separately) that you can switch in and out.

Still, it’s no slouch in the health and fitness department. The Luxe detected exercise within about a minute of starting out and displayed information on the watch one might want to see during exercise: heart rate, workout time, a calorie burn estimate, heart rate “zone,” and pace for walks and runs, which you can cycle through with a tap.

It’s easy to start workouts on the wearable, too. The Luxe limits you to six exercise “shortcuts,” from a general “workout” option to more specific activities like tennis and Pilates—but the “workout” option felt suitable for almost any exercise.

The tracker promises five days of battery life and delivers six and a half—nothing to sneeze at, if not as good as the Charge 5’s seven days and less impressive than the Inspire’s 14 days. It looks sleek, too. We had the plain black version, which didn’t look quite like a piece of jewelry, but wasn’t an eyesore, either.

But the Luxe isn’t perfect. First, there’s the screen—like the rest of the device, it’s small, which usually didn’t mean compromising visibility or responsiveness for its size. However, that went out the window during high-intensity workouts. Then, heavy breathing and sweating made tapping more of a challenge—it was too easy to swipe past the desired stat and have to cycle through each one to go back, or accidentally end the whole workout.

The sleep tracking felt accurate most of the time, but not always. It neglected to record at all some nights, and a few times, it detected super-early wakeup times that never happened.

Overall, the Luxe is a great tracker for someone who wants to keep tabs on their health without having a massive cuff on their wrist—if not for a more serious fitness buff who wants to see everything at once.

The Charge 4 was our previous top pick before the new Charge 5 dethroned it. It’s a great option as you get plenty of the same features that make the Charge 5 our top pick, and it's worth snagging for $50 less than the new upgraded versionwhile retailers still have it in stock.

The Charge 4, offers the standard reminders to move, step count, and automatic exercise tracking, as well as a built-in GPS that can be quick-started from your wrist with the customizable exercise shortcuts, just like the newest version. We found the GPS tracking on the Charge 4 to be accurate, though it doesn’t start up as quickly as with the Charge 5.

We loved the Charge 4’s sleep tracking features and found they captured our nights more accurately than some others on the market. This tracker monitors the same stats the Charge 5 does, including time spent in sleep phases (awake, light, deep, and REM), resting heart rate, and estimated oxygen variation (which could point to breathing issues to discuss with your doctor).

Our main issue with the Charge 4 is the readability of the screen (which the Charge 5 drastically improved). The Charge 4’s screen is dimly lit, which makes it difficult to read in the sun, and turns off almost as quickly as it turns on, which makes it difficult to scope your stats mid-workout compared to a running watch.

The Whoop 4.0 collects and analyzes valuable health and sleep information to help you optimize your exercise and recovery time. It tracks your pulse, heart rate variability, blood oxygen levels, time spent in each sleep stage, and respiratory rate, and translates that data into sleep, strain, and recovery scores that indicate how your exercise habits impact your rest and energy levels.

Whoop offers both automatic and manual activity, sleep, and recovery tracking. You can also manually track other wellness habits such as CBD use, caffeine intake, or meditation habits in the app’s journal tab to see how they affect your sleep, strain, and recovery scores.

Whoop helped me build better habits, but with a few caveats. Unlike many other fitness trackers, the Whoop doesn’t have a screen—the tracker is attached to a cloth band which wraps all the way around your wrist, making it look like you’re wearing a thick elastane bracelet. Without a screen, you’re left turning to the companion app to view your data, which is slow to load and refresh.

Whoop also requires a subscription, which costs up to $360 a year—more than many other fitness trackers we’ve tested. However, you can reduce this cost by committing to a two-year package, and app updates eliminate the need to buy new hardware when new features and functionality are added.

It may surprise you that the budget-minded, bare-bones Fitbit Inspire 2 (an upgraded version of the Inspire HR) landed so high on this list, but hear us out. If all you want is a simple, unobtrusive device as an entree into Fitbit’s world of counting steps, tracking sleep and improving habits, this is a $100 well spentgreat choice.

Once you look past its bland plasticky looks and monochrome display, you’ll find that the Inspire 2 offers an exceptional battery life—it claims “up to 10 days” but it lasted at least two weeks in tests—plus most of the tracking highlights of the Charge 5. This includes automatic activity and sleep recording, timed workout modes, basic heart rate data and, most importantly, access to Fitbit’s motivational community and well-designed app.

What you won’t find: Any GPS functionality for recording outside activities. Curiously, Inspire 2 purchasers get a full year of access to Fitbit Premium’s deeper health insights and programming, double that of what you get with Fitbit’s smartwatches and the Charge 5. That makes Inspire 2 an even greater value.

The Garmin Vivoactive 4 is more a multisport watch than a fitness tracker. Its top attributes are the seemingly endless menu of fitness activity modes, its built-in GPS, and the access to free race-training programs via the Garmin app. It could make a good running watch, as long as you don’t mind navigating via its touchscreen. However, many runners hate those as they can be too easily accidentally triggered.

That said, its smartwatch features are limited (moreso for iPhone users than Android)—a shame, considering it has the nice looks and big screen you’d want from a smartwatch.

Apple Watch is the industry leader and our favorite smartwatch of them all, a distinction it earns for its plethora of apps and seamless integration with the iPhone. In addition to automatic activity and sleep tracking, on-board GPS, wrist-based heart rate monitoring, and FDA-cleared ECG app, the Series 6 is the first Apple Watch with blood-oxygen tracking, putting it on par with the other advanced fitness trackers in terms of what activity it tracks and how. (The exception is an EDA sensor for tracking stress, for which Fitbit beat ‘em to the punch with the Sense.)

One big reason to get an Apple Watch is the ability to use Apple Fitness+, Apple’s fitness app that requires Apple Watch ownership to use. It’s free for three months with purchase of a new Watch, free for a month for people who already have one, and $9.99 a month after that.

When we tested Apple Fitness+, we loved the classes that range from HIIT to yoga to outdoor walks, how it integrates the stats the Watch records into each workout, and the relatively affordable cost of the app (well, once you get over the initial sticker shock of the Apple Watch itself).

A big issue with it—and what could be a challenge for a person whose primary interest is in activity tracking is the relatively steep learning curve of the device itself. There are three iPhone apps needed to make the most of Apple Watch. The Watch app is for programming settings, the Workout app is for exercise data, and the Health app is for all the other wellness-related data).

There are also a lot of apps on the watch itself, and more than a dozen tiny icon tiles for accessing all its “smart” functions. New Apple users will find it most difficult, but anyone could feel lost in a sea of possibilities just trying to view your calendar or start a workout.

For someone dedicated to making the most of their shiny new purchase, the Apple Watch delivers in spades. But if you just want a capable fitness tracker with advanced health data acquisition, you simply don’t need to buy an Apple Watch.

The premise of the Galaxy Fit should excite Samsung phone owners, especially because it touts “you won’t have to worry about disruptive battery discharge when tracking your activity”—a real problem with Samsung watches.

All told, it did a fine job as a fitness tracker, but lacked in its “smart” features, such as the ability to reply to text messages, which (ironically) were responsible for the battery drain in the older models. And while the Galaxy Fit works with iOS, it’s a pain, requiring two apps—Galaxy Wearable, for pairing the device to the phone, and Samsung Health, for parsing the activity data—and can be buggy at that.

Fitbit’s introduction of the Sense, touted as “its most advanced health smartwatch,” is admirable if only for the serious technology that went into it. The aim of Sense is to capture an even more holistic look at the wearer’s health and wellbeing, with a major emphasis on tracking stress in order to determine ways to better manage it. For this, the Sense includes an EDA (electrodermal activity) sensor—the first-ever on a wearable device (yes, even before Apple).

The EDA on the Sense works from the touchscreen. When you place your opposite palm over it, it measures “small electrical changes in your sweat response” to ascertain your stress level. You can either take a 2-minute measurement to see where you are (during which time your stress level will likely quiet from when it begins) or you can use the EDA during a guided meditation.

Fitbit offers 15 meditation sessions on the app for free and the rest are (you guessed it) available with Premium. That said, if mindfulness and stress relief are big concerns of yours, this feature alone may be reason to shell out the bigger bucks for the Sense.

The other big addition to the Sense is an ECG app, which measures the electrical activity of the heart to detect irregular rhythms and recently received FDA approval. (Samsung Galaxy Active 2 and Apple Watch also have ECG apps.)

Otherwise, its activity tracking and smartwatch features mirror those of Versa 3, as do the limitations on access to some of the data it collects, which Fitbit cordoned off with its Premium paywall. The good news here is that Sense buyers who haven’t tried Premium in the past can get a six-month trial to see if all the extras make a difference to them.

It had two big issues, however. It seemed to disconnect from a Samsung Galaxy S10e phone frequently, rendering smart features like notifications moot. The touchscreen also occasionally lagged to respond and was hard to see in bright light conditions, say, when running (which kinda defeats the purpose of wearing a watch for said activity).

The Garmin Venu Sq isn’t a terrible product—it’s just not as good as others on this list. It’s stocked with fitness features, like Garmin’s better-than-most GPS, and some smartwatch features, all of which together seem like a value for its lower-than-the-competition price.

Setting up the Withings Pulse HR was a bear on Android in particular: Syncing to the app kept failing on my Samsung Galaxy S10e and required restarting the whole setup process from scratch more than once.

The Pulse HR worked well enough as an activity tracker, but just doesn’t measure up to the ease of use of others; it feels like a low-rent Fitbit. The only major attribute it has going for it is the claimed 20-day battery life, more than double what others claim, though we didn’t do long-term battery tests to compare.