Best Fitness Trackers of 2023

The Fitbit Inspire 3 is an upgrade from the older Inspire 2, with the biggest change being a bright OLED color display replacing the 2’s monochrome screen. The Inspire 2 remains a great option for the budget-conscious consumer. It’s lightweight and slim, and it offers GPS functionality, so you can leave your phone behind when you go out for a run. It also pairs easily with both iPhones and Android smartphones.

That said, getting access to all the functionality requires a subscription to the Fitbit Premium app, which costs $10 a month (or $90 a year) after your free trial is up. You can use the Inspire 3 without the subscription (which gives access to some wellness content as well as a historical look at your fitness data), but if you decide to sign up it won’t be long before the amount you’ve paid for the subscription exceeds the price of the tracker.

Our testers report that the Fitbit Inspire 3 is easy to use and quite accurate at counting steps and heart-rate accuracy. The claimed battery life is more than respectable at 10 days. The model also makes good on Fitbit’s claim of water resistance of up to 164 feet.

While technically a fitness tracker, this model has more of a watchlike vibe. You get a 1.3-inch monochrome display that shows you your step count and real-time heart rate, plus built-in GPS.

The advertised battery life is nine days, and in our labs the Garmin Forerunner 35 made good on its water-resistance claim of 164 feet. It also received top marks for accuracy in tracking heart rate and counting steps, and our testers found it quite easy to use.

The Fitbit Charge line has always featured great general-purpose fitness trackers, and the Charge 5 is no exception. The styling—sleeker than earlier versions and complete with a full-color display—is just as suitable for the office or a nice dinner as it is for the gym. And the model adds some features commonly found on smartwatches, including stress monitoring and an ECG (electrocardiogram) function that can alert you to irregular heart rhythms.

The Charge 5 earns solid test scores in key categories and works with Fitbit’s smartphone app to let you track your fitness progress over time and compete against family members and friends in fitness challenges. Ongoing access to Fitbit’s full functionality, however, requires a subscription to the Fitbit Premium smartphone app for $10 per month. Claimed battery life for the Fitbit Charge 5 is seven days, but I found in a real-world evaluation that this fitness tracker needed to be plugged in after about two and a half days.

The Garmin Vivosmart 5 is a compact, premium-priced fitness tracker with a small 0.9-inch monochrome display and access to a deep selection of high-performance fitness metrics on Garmin’s smartphone app. The Vivosmart 5 has an interesting collection of features, with some welcome additions compared with most fitness trackers (like stress management tools) but also some puzzling omissions for a tracker in this price range (the lack of onboard GPS for tracking runs, rides, or hikes.)

The Vivosmart 5’s display is rather small and hard to read, but Garmin’s robust smartphone app gives you access to high-end metrics like VO₂ Max (the maximum amount of oxygen your body can use during exercise) and long-term training trends. So, for example, you can go back and analyze your workouts before you ran your personal best 10K last spring to see what you were doing right.

If you’re a walker who wants a very cheap, very basic fitness tracker, the Amazfit Band 5 should be on your shopping list. The model offers sleep and stress-tracking capabilities but doesn’t have built-in GPS or the ability to load a music playlist.

Our testers found the Amazfit Band 5 quite easy to use, and they report that it counts steps quite accurately. For heart-rate monitoring, however, the Amazfit ranked near the bottom of our ratings, so if you’re a serious athlete who relies on those metrics, you should consider buying a more expensive model.