Best fitness trackers that will get you moving, from Fitbit to Garmin

For less than £100, the Amazfit offers a multitude of useful features to help both beginners and sporty types take control of their fitness. We tested it when walking, running, swimming and playing netball, but this lightweight device can track up to 120 sports.

In real-time, it showed us blood oxygen levels, heart rate, step count and a GPS map of the route when we exercised outside. To ensure GPS accuracy, it draws on five different satellite positioning systems, using patented circularly polarized antenna technology, so it’s pretty impossible to get lost wearing this – even if you head down an unfamiliar route. The screen is clear and bright, so everything is easy to read, both in daylight and after dark.

We loved its Alexa voice functionality, meaning that we could make a shopping list while getting our steps in, as well as set alarms and check the weather to see if we needed a coat before leaving the house.

We have to admit that we were sceptical at what a tracker that costs less than £22 could offer, but we were blown away by the unbelievable amount of data this wallet-friendly option provides. It automatically tracks distance, calories and active data, so you don’t need to remember to press any buttons to record your workout – it’s all done for you.

For extra motivation, it’s super easy to sync the watch to the brand’s app, which is available for both Android and Apple users. The app provided a snapshot of our fitness activity, making us feel proud of what we’d accomplished and spurring us to do more.

As we had the tracker on for 24 hours a day, we were also able to see sleep data in the app, learning about our sleep time, deep sleep, light sleep and overall sleep quality. But what really surprised us is that it offers call and message notifications – including WhatsApp and Instagram likes and DMs – while we were on the move. This can be disabled if you prefer a bit of peace, but it’s good to have the option to stay connected if you’re sneaking a walk into the middle of a working day.

The inspire 3 is Fitbit’s most basic, uncomplicated fitness tracker, and it’s a delight to use if you’re just getting started on your fitness journey. Many beginners make the mistake of thinking that fitness is all about being active, but by tracking stress levels and sleep, this tracker reminds us that it’s a holistic concept, too.

If you purchase the watch from Amazon, it comes with six months of premium membership to the Fitbit app, which we used to take our stress levels down a notch. We definitely felt more relaxed after following mindfulness sessions in the app, which took around 15 minutes. However, we preferred the bitesize two-minute guided breathing exercises to get us in the zone before meetings and important phone calls.

It can track 20 different sports, as well as offering a step count, showing heart rate, calories and steps from the wrist. The colour OLED display is easy to read even in direct sunlight or underwater, and as it has a waterproof screen, we enjoyed taking this swimming.

Our favourite feature is the smart wake technology, which is unique to this fitness tracker. It means the tracker vibrated to wake us up during a light-sleep stage rather than a deep one, up to 30 minutes before our actual alarm was set. Occasionally it didn’t vibrate, but when it did, we woke up feeling super refreshed and alert.

For more recommendations, read our review of the best Fitbits

If you struggle with your eyesight, this display provides the largest font size out of all the trackers we tested. Whether we were looking at the time or how many steps we did, the numbers were so large we thought they were virtually shouting the information at us. Think of it as a personal trainer on the wrist, screaming that you’ve done 6,000 steps so you only have a few more to hit your daily 10,000 target.

It tracks steps, plus five different sports, and can show heart rate and body temperature. And, when synced to a phone, it can display incoming calls and messages, as well as control your music playlist.

There are eight different colour options and we liked how it looked on our wrist, with the square display being sleek and streamlined. We even got a few compliments while testing this tracker, with people asking for more information. Everyone was pleasantly surprised by the £55 price tag, as the design is on par with the Apple Watch, which costs five times as much.

It’s important to get kids into healthy habits from a young age, but computer games and tablets often get in the way of them going outside to run, walk or play. This cute watch turns moving more into a game, so they can earn rewards if they hit their daily step target.

Our six-year-old enjoyed wearing the watch, as she’s a big fan of Disney princesses. After we synced it to an app on our phone and she played some games, she was desperate to get outside and move, as some features of the app are only unlocked if they’re active enough.

Meeting their daily activity goals also rewards kids with colourful gems – all they have to do is tap on the map on the app to scoop them up and collect as many as they can. It’s swim-friendly and you don’t have to take it off to charge it up because the battery lasts for a whole year.

Lightweight and ultra-comfortable to wear, we barely noticed the vicoactive when it was on our wrist. If it wasn’t for the purple providing a flash of colour from under our sleeve, we would have thought our wrist was bare, the silicone strap is that soft and unobtrusive.

It offers a morning report showing an overview of how we slept, our recovery status, a snapshot of our heart rate and what appointments we had on that day.

For sports tracking, the focus is on quality rather than quantity. It’s preloaded with 30 different workouts, which is noticeably less than others that offer almost 100. But when running, you not only get the usual step count, calorie burn and heart rate data but also training plans and insights through the Garmin Connect app.

We set a faster 10km time as a goal in the app and got daily sessions sent to the watch so we knew what we had to work on each time we went for a run. It was also cool to see VO2 max levels improve as we did these sessions, giving us motivation to keep going and boost these numbers even more.

This slim, elegant fitness tracker has just as much substance as it does style. It can track sleep tracking, your menstrual cycle, stress and mindfulness, as well as 96 different kinds of workouts. We mainly used it when running and swimming and found it easy to read in real time to see how fast we were going. The Huawei app is on par with those offered by fitness trackers costing around £100 and provides bar graphs and pie charts, which can be easier to understand than a list of numbers.

The wearable is always tracking steps as well as heart rate – the latter means that it alerted us when our resting heart rate was either too low or too high.

Another useful feature is Find My Phone. If, like us, you misplace your phone on an almost daily basis, you can ring it from the watch. This saved us a lot of time in the mornings when getting our phone, keys and wallet together to leave the house.

While most fitness trackers have sleep monitoring capability, they often rely on us having to press a button to activate sleep mode. Not so with the Coros pace 2, which could automatically detect when we went to sleep. Then, when we synced it to our phone, we had a great graph of how much light, deep and REM sleep we got. This helped us plan our workout for the day, and we ended up shelving a workout when the app showed us that we hadn’t achieved much rest the day before. Injuries often occur when the body is tired, so it’s very valuable to know when you’re not likely to perform at your best.

We tried the tracker with a Coros POD sensor, which clipped onto our shoelaces and provided us with even more information to help avoid injury when running or walking. It provides insights into ground contact time, left-to-right balance and stride height. Left-to-right balance data will tell you if you land heavier on a specific side so you can adjust your technique before injuries occur or work your way back from an injury sensibly.

The Coros app works well on both Android and iPhone, and connects to Strava and Training Peaks, so you can compete with, or get encouragement from, other runners and connect with coaches. They can see your sleep data, too, so they can tell if you’re ready to work hard or not.

Used by Olympic medal-winning triathletes, Jonny and Alistair Brownlee, and Ironman world champion Jan Frodeno, this is one of the cleverest fitness trackers we’ve ever seen. For example, it can switch from tracking your swims, bike rides or runs without the need to press any buttons. While we tested it while jogging around the suburbs, it would come in handy during races when we wanted to focus on performance rather than fiddling with buttons on a watch.

Even better is that if you have a Wahoo Elemnt cycling computer, you can transition data from the watch to the computer, so you can see your performance without taking your eyes off the road to look at your wrist.

The screen is easy to read and with a 64-bit colour display, it can be seen perfectly in low lighting, as well as daylight. We also appreciated its durability – the display is made from curved gorilla glass, which can be knocked or scraped without damage, and a ceramic bezel designed to be scratch-proof. For less than £100, it’s excellent value for money.

Solid and functional, the Samsung Galaxy Watch 5 pro has a rugged exterior with sapphire crystal glass and titanium casing built to take on adventures. That said, where this watch really shines is in its smart features. It can take calls, send and receive messages, and offer third-party apps in its app store. Google Assistant is enabled so you can say “Hey Google” to make calls, send messages, set timers, get the weather forecast, check your calendar and more. You can download apps through the Play Store, including Strava, YouTube Music, Spotify and the meditation app Calm.

We liked that you can head straight out the door wearing this without having to wait for a GPS signal. The Samsung Galaxy Watch 5 pro can automatically detect and begin tracking walking, running, elliptical, rowing, swimming and dynamic high-movement activities. After 10 minutes of starting one of these activities, the watch will alert you that it’s tracking the workout. When you stop, the watch will automatically stop tracking, too.

OnePlus’s limited edition Nordic blue watch 2 is a good-looking piece of kit. Straddling the line between an everyday watch smart enough for business meetings and dinner dates, and a watch that will track you cross country skiing in freezing conditions or wild swimming or diving to a depth of 50m, it combines style and substance. The strap is leather on top but fluroelastomer next to the skin, so it never chafed or rubbed when we wore it for intense exercise. It’s also comfortable enough to sleep in and, if you do that, you’ll be rewarded with graphs showing you exactly how much of each stage of sleep you had, including light sleep, deep sleep and REM. Once we heard it could withstand temperatures of -20C to 55C, we tested it while hiking in the snow and kept it on for a pore-opening sauna session. It never let us down and we really enjoyed syncing it to the app to look at both our workout and sleep stats in more detail. Just one word of warning – the app is not available for iPhone users.