The best fitness trackers have a very simple purpose of keeping you pacing towards your health goals. Depending on the person, those objectives can range from improving your sleep regimen, getting your daily steps in, or hitting peak Schwarzenegger-level physique. The latest class of fitness trackers have advanced way beyond your grandma’s OG Walk-A-Matic. Sure, these wearables will count your steps, but now they’ll also give you a pretty good estimate of how many calories you burned, the amount of flights you’ve scaled, and even your walking asymmetry (a pretty neat stat that tells you how your legs differ during your walks). All of this data comes together inside these fairly tiny devices to let you know just how well you’re doing health-wise. They’ll even help you make better, smarter life choices to live longer, better lives.
The crowded wearables marketplace can make it really tough to figure which are truly the best fitness trackers, though, especially since each new model seems to pack in more features than the last (do you really need to know you blood oxygen saturation levels?). But we’ve used our intel on the market, findings from our own testing and previous reporting, plus winners from GQ Fitness Awards of the past to pad out these recommendations. Sound good to you? Here are the best fitness trackers to get you back on, ahem, track.
The Best Fitness Trackers, at a Glance
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The Best Fitness Tracker Overall: Garmin Forerunner 245
At $300, Garmin’s Forerunner 245 sits nicely between the low-budget fitness trackers and the wildly expensive super computers that are sized like a watch. The 245 is a lightweight, workout-ready fitness tracker for basically everyone. It boasts an impressive battery life—up to seven days—and even with the GPS running, it’ll go on for up to 24 hours. On the daily, you can get exercise programs tailored to you, and if you have a real-life coach, they can even sync their custom workouts to your device so it’s like your trainer is with you IRL.
Runners we’ve interviewed in the past love the Forerunner 245 for its lightweight feel. And anyone who’s training for a marathon or race can appreciate the 245’s training status monitor, which ensures you’re not overdoing it on activities, and the recovery time advisor that cautions you to ease up before tackling another big sweat session. For those who prefer to run without their phone on hand, the GPS will let you stay on the radar without the added baggage of a device.
The Best Budget Fitness Tracker: Fitbit Charge 5
Fitbit is arguably the most recognizable name in the fitness tracker game, and its Charge 5 is lightyears better than its previous iteration. First, it has a crisper, cleaner display, alongside a more streamlined design that sits subtly on the wrist. It’s not as beefy or jam-packed as our top pick, the Forerunner 245, but it does feature a surprisingly robust fitness tracking library for such a compact device. A lot of the greatest gimmicks are locked behind a membership ($10 per month) which is free for the first six months with your purchase, like a daily readiness reading—which tracks your sleep, heart rate, and previous workouts to determine your preparedness for a workout today—and a stress management setting to help you better manage that tension you feel coursing through your body.
The Best Splurge-y Fitness Tracker: Garmin Epix 2
As we noted before in last year’s Fitness Awards, the Epix 2 is the “Cadillac Eldorado of dedicated sports watches.” This luxury wearable offers a wealth of tracking capabilities—like stress, sleep, hydration, and respiration—as well as sport modes for specific activities like hiking and even pickleball. Big golf guy? The Epix 2 loads CourseView maps for over 42,000 golf courses to help you get on par. It also provides some of the most accurate GPS positioning among any other wearable, making for a perfect companion on trail runs even in the middle of nowhere. The sun’s glare is no match for the stunning screen, and the always-on display is crystal clear, especially with this extra-large, 47-millimeter display.
The Best Fitness Tracker for Elite Athletes: Apple Watch Ultra
Apple’s been in the wearables game for a minute now, but last year’s Watch Ultra launch was the biggest release for the category in a hot minute. As Alan Dye—vice president of human interface design—previously told us, the Apple Watch Ultra is “purpose-built for adventure.” The redesigned dual-frequency GPS offers some super-precise positioning, while a Backtrack feature helps you retrace your steps even in the most remote locations (and in case you forgot to alert your loved ones where you were headed).
The biggest addition to the Apple Watch Ultra is the action button, placed under the crown, which you customize to control the feature you use the most from the watch. And for those less-than-ideal SOS situations, the action button can be used to activate an emergency siren that’s loud enough to be heard from as far as 600 feet. It doesn’t have the most long-lasting battery, but it is an improvement on non-Ultra watches and lasts long enough to endure a grueling Ironman.
The Best Fitness Tracker for Sleep: Oura Ring 3
A wearable you don’t wear on your wrist?! The Oura ring, on its third generation, brings back all of the health tracking we loved before—activity (and inactivity levels), sleep habits, and recovery time—with the addition of a “readiness score,” which is sort of like the Fitbit Charge 5 in that it alerts you of your overall body status each morning. The longer you wear the Oura ring, the better it’ll get at telling you how to get the most out of your sleep, from when you should start winding down—i.e. wrap up your social media doom-scrolling—and alert you to any sleep disturbances from breathing you might have experienced. Also, the Oura ring just looks so damn good. Its sleek design (whose fashion bona fides have been paved by a collaboration with Gucci) is a far cry from the highly rugged wearables we’ve come to know and love, but it still does a damn good job on the tech side.
The Best Fitness Tracker for Apple Users: Apple Watch SE
Ever since Apple released “SE” versions of its flagship products, we’ve been loving these more affordable options for those who want the basics but maybe not all the bells and whistles. It has the usual tracking features for stuff like heart rate and noise levels, and for those who just want to make sure they’re not a couch potato all day long, the idea of creating “rings” of exercise you complete make it somewhat of a game to stand up, stretch, and flail around to get those bursts of movement in.
