Best Fitness Trackers 2023: The best tech to hit your fitness goals

The best for serious athletes

Garmin devices are consistently high scorers when we get them in for review, as the firm’s overt fitness focus and strong location tracking always impresses our testers. The Fenix 7 continues this legacy, and according to our testing it’s the best option currently on the market for hardcore athletes.

The Fenix 7 is one of the top products in Garmin’s current wearable lineup, sitting above its Forerunner and Venu watches. Though it’s not going to win any awards at fashion ceremonies, during testing we found it’s the best fitness tracker on the market at the moment.

The chunky metal chassis may look large, but despite its size we found it to be incredibly comfortable to wear, with the rubber strap never chafing or causing irritation even during prolonged and animated workouts.

The Sapphire Glass variant we reviewed was also near indestructible. During our test period, the watch survived everything from an accidental encounter with a climbing wall rock to being hit full blast with a tennis ball with zero damage.

Garmin’s accurate distance and heart rate tracking also let the watch track pretty much every activity under the sun, ranging from indoor or outdoor running to cross country skiing and surfing. This plus the stellar two-week battery life and robust post workout analytics (which include useful metrics such as VO2 Max estimates, recommended rest periods and suggestions for what you should do for your next exercise) make it the best tracker you can buy right now.

Reviewer: Michael Sawh
Full review: Garmin Fenix 7 Review

The best for iPhone owners

At this point, it’s almost a no-brainer to any iPhone users out there that if you want a fitness tracker that’s perfectly optimised to make the most out of iOS and all of Apple’s in-house features then the Apple Watch is your best bet. This has been the case for a long time but with each iteration, the experience just gets even better.

The Apple Watch 8 is the latest culmination of all of Apple’s innovation on that front, and it’s leaps and bounds ahead of the competition in several key areas. For starters, automatic workout tracking is incredible on the Apple Watch 8, having a key understanding of when you start to break out a sweat and when a workout is over based on your movement.

Apple Rings also does a great job of breaking down a day’s exercise into three-key components, although it isn’t quite as forgiving as Fitbit’s Active Zone Minutes, pestering you to hit your workout goals every single day as opposed to working around your schedule and hitting them on a weekly basis.

Still, there are no shortage of workouts to be tracked on the Apple Watch and more are added year after year, so it’s a great investment for anyone already synced up in the Apple ecosystem.

Reviewer: Max Parker
Full review: Apple Watch 8 Review

The best for fashion conscious buyers

Even though Garmin is one of the most established brands in the world of fitness tracking, the company isn’t exactly a trendsetter when it comes to making fashionable wearables. The average Garmin watch is definitely feature-rich, but form tends to get left on the wayside in favour of function – that is until the Garmin Vivomove Trend hit the scene.

This stylish wearable combines the trappings of a traditional analogue watch with the fitness tracking features that have made Garmin so successful. The tracking in question is shown on a display that sits beneath the watch’s physical dials, so you can discreetly start your next workout or check up on a few notifications.

As an added bonus, the Garmin Vivomove Trend is also one of the few wearables out there to support wireless charging, so if you have a Qi wireless charging station to hand then you can pop the Vivomove Trennd on it and get on with your day.

The watch also does a great job at keeping an eye on your overall wellness and mental health, with stats such as heart rate variability and respiration levels that can be key indicators of overall stress levels.

Reviewer: Michael Sawh
Full review: Garmin Vivomove Trend Review

Fitness trackers tend to be split into watch and band form factors. Watches offer a larger screen to interact with and generally have more developed hardware. But for entry level athletes, or people that don’t want a large wearable on their wrist 24/7, there’s a lot to be said for the smaller band design.

If that sounds like the sort of wearable you’re after, then the Fitbit Luxe is the best option we’ve reviewed at the moment.

The Luxe comes with a solid array of band options and its colorful AMOLED panel is the brightest and sharpest we’ve seen on a band design fitness tracker its price. This made it much more pleasant to use than many of the competing band design trackers we’ve used recently, including the Garmin Vivosmart 5, which has a more basic black and white display.

The key selling point here is the Fitbit OS easy to understand and use software and navigation system which offers basic, but easily digestible snippets of workout data that are really good at motivating, rather than intimidating, users. This makes it a really solid option for people who are just getting started or just care about boosting their daily step count. The 5 day battery life we enjoyed during testing also means you’ll generally get through the work week before needing to give it a top up charge.

The only downside is that we found it’s not terribly well suited to even semi-serious athletes, with Fitbit locking the more in-depth data regular runners need behind a paywall and its connected GPS providing less accurate distance tracking than we’d like.

Reviewer: Michael Sawh
Full review: Fitbit Luxe Review

If you’re an entry level athlete looking for a reliable fitness tracker that can handle more than basics, like step count and your morning exercise bike ride then the Amazfit GTS 3 is a solid choice and our current recommendation.

Out of the box, the GTS immediately impressed our reviewer, with it featuring a similar, premium looking design to the Apple Watch despite costing a fraction of the price. The aluminium alloy used in the chassis feels rugged and we’re big fans of its physical crown control which can be used to power the screen up and navigate menus is wonderfully intuitive to use.

The AMOLED screen is also wonderfully bright and remained legible when we used it to track our runs outside, during very bright summer days.

It’s also one of the only wearables at this price we’ve tested to offer accurate distance tracking without being paired to a smartphone, with it featuring an inbuilt chip that supports five satellite systems, including GPS. Testing it against the Fenix 7 we were surprised how well it performed with it never being more than 0.3km out of sync with the more premium wearable.

We were also pleased by the appearance of a few other health tracking sensors traditionally seen on more premium trackers, like an ECG. This let the tracker deliver estimates for more serious metrics, like VO2 Max, that you simply don’t get on most trackers at this price. The only downside is that the heart rate sensor and data isn’t quite as uniform and reliable as what we detected on the Fenix 7, so we wouldn’t recommend it to serious athletes.

Reviewer: Michael Sawh
Full review: Amazfit GTS 3 Review

If you’re on the strictest of budgets but still want a decent tracker for the basics, then the Xiaomi Mi Band 6 is the best value option we’ve tested.

Despite costing less than $50/£50 the tracker has a colorful, sharp AMOLED screen and offers a waterproof design that let our reviewer comfortably wear it 24/7 with zero irritation.

Battery life also proved sold with it uniformly lasting at least a full week, even with power hungry functions like constant heart rate tracking.

If you just want the basics it also performs well, considering its price. Our tests showed that its three-axis accelerometer and a three-axis gyroscope were good enough to offer suitably reliable step counting and heart rate monitoring for basic things, like walking and treadmill running.

The main downside is that it doesn’t have an inbuilt GPS. During our tests, we found this meant that, even when connected to a phone’s GPS, distance tracking was nowhere near as reliable as what we got on the Fitbit Luxe and Vivosmart 5.

Reviewer: Jon Mundy
Full review: Xiaomi Mi Band 6

If you don’t need an ultra rugged design that’ll survive the odd accidental encounter with a climbing wall or ocean rock then the Forerunner 955 is the best premium fitness tracker we’ve tested. 

The Forerunner is a smaller cardio-focused wearable from Garmin that shares a lot of the best features seen on the more premium Fenix 7. This potent combination seriously impressed our reviewer during testing.

With it being the first 9-series Forerunner we’ve tested to feature multi-band GPS, the watch offered top-tier distance tracking accuracy. As well as locking a connection in seconds, the watch proved incredibly accurate during our 5km run tests. Running around a track we know is 5.3km, the watch offered a maximum variance of just 0.1km, which is excellent. 

Add to this its local map support, which let us get turn-by-turn directions on routes we didn’t know and inbuilt music support for both local and Spotify/Deezer and it becomes an easy recommendation at a hardware level.

But what truly sets it apart from competing devices, like the Polar Vantage V2 and its ilk, is its advanced post workout and training analytics. Unlike some brands, such as Fitbit, Garmin offers users complete access to their workout and health data free of charge. So, like the Fenix you get nicely uniform VO2 Max estimates, SpO2 readings and guidance on how effective your workouts have been. But as an added bonus the 955 can also factor races and events you’ve added to your calendar to the coaching advice it gives. 

This, plus new HRV and Training Readiness metrics make it great at helping avoid overtraining. The latter is a custom feature that tells you how well-prepared your body is to train. What’s great is that it also tells you why you may not be in an optimal state for a run. Our tester was frequently told to get more sleep ahead of his next training session and race, an insight that helped him change his routine to improve results.

Reviewer: Alastair Stevenson
Full review: Garmin Forerunner 955 Review

If you want a fitness tracker that can double as a powerful smartwatch to pair with an Android phone then the Galaxy Watch 5 Pro is the best option on the market we’ve tested.

The Watch is a sportier version of the base Galaxy Watch 5 that adds a few key features we loved while reviewing it. For cyclists and hikers, the biggest is the addition of GPX file support. This is a big feature traditionally seen on Garmin and Polar trackers, and it lets you use apps like Strava to plot routes and then load them onto the watch. Once on (which can admittedly be a finicky process) they let the Galaxy Watch 5 Pro offer turn by turn navigation when cycling or hiking, ensuring you never get lost.

On top of this, the device’s BioActive sensor offers a few useful features, like the ability to get information on your body fat and skeletal muscle, which is useful for people with specific fitness goals, such gaining muscle or losing weight.

These features, plus its OLED screen and use of Wear OS, which outside of Apple has the best application offering on this list, make it the best hybrid smartwatch-come-tracker for people without iPhones.

Reviewer: Alastair Stevenson
Full review: Samsung Galaxy Watch 5 Pro review

With plenty of affordable fitness trackers and high-end smartwatches to its name, Huawei is no stranger to the wearables market but it has still managed to deliver something new and exciting in the Huawei Watch D.

Blood pressure tracking, while an important metric in the medical community for judging one’s overall bill of health, has yet to take off on the consumer wearables market. This hasn’t perturbed Huawei however, as the Watch D can expand and contract its unique watch band to conduct a blood pressure test from your wrist.

Beyond its capabilities in the realm of blood pressure tracking, the Watch D can also offer fairly accurate ECG tests to pick up any signs of arrhythmia, the presence of which could be indicative of underlying health issues.

As a cherry on top, the Huawei Watch D also benefits from a week-long battery life so that you can cruise through a fairly substantial workout routine before needing to top the device up.

Working against the Watch D is the fact that it doesn’t depict Huawei’s HarmonyOS in the best light. If you want to see the full extent of Harmony OS’s capabilities then you’re better off checking in on one of Huawei’s more premium smartwatches like the Huawei Watch 3.

The Watch D isn’t much of a looker either, so if you’re in the market for a fitness tracker that also doubles as a fashionable wearable for night out then unfortunately, this isn’t it. Still, if you can look past its industrial design and less than brilliant interpretation of HarmomyOS then there’s still plenty to get excited about, not the least because it currently leads the charge in blood pressure tracking on the go.

Reviewer: Michael Sawh
Full review: Huawei Watch D review