Choosing the best fitness smartwatch is about deciding how much you care about its fitness tools versus its smartwatch tools. Most flagship smartwatches come with all the right features needed for amateurs, but fitness-focused individuals could be left wanting more. Fitness-brand smartwatches have much better battery life and fitness data, but their apps and smarts are far more limited, often abandoning tools like touchscreens or mic/speakers.
We've generally looked for balanced fitness smartwatches that will help you work out but don't abandon the smarts and style you'll want. But we've also included picks that skew one way or the other, so everyone's needs are met. Starting with the excellent Garmin Venu 2 Plus, these are the best fitness smartwatches available today.
Achieve your fitness goals with these smartwatches
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It's an open secret that Garmin watches give you beneficial data and long battery life but also look somewhere between boring and ugly and have very few smart features. The Garmin Venu 2 Plus is the closest the company has come to addressing this reputation, adding a beautifully bright AMOLED touch display and a mic/speaker to a smartwatch while still offering nine days of battery life.
Any of the best Garmin watches could fill this top slot if fitness is your sole priority. But the Venu 2 Plus strikes the best balance of the bunch. It has all the core Garmin tools like Body Battery, fitness age, sleep/stress tracking, animated exercises, and so on, but without losing smarts like NFC payments or music storage.
Our Venu 2 Plus review praised everything from the "vibrant screen" to the dual option of three buttons and the touchscreen for navigating menus since touch isn't the best option during a sweaty workout but is far superior for daily life. The watch lives up to Garmin's nine-day battery life estimate or across 24 GPS-tracked hours, which beats what most watches offer, even those with worse non-touch LCDs. And it's the rare Garmin watch that can actually take phone calls or lets you speak to a voice assistant.
The biggest knock against it is that it's pretty expensive. You can downgrade to the equally solid Garmin Venu 2 if you don't need the mic/speaker but do want the same beautiful display. Or you could choose the Venu Sq 2, a redesigned squircle watch that loses the altimeter, gyroscope, and workout animations, but cuts further down on the price. For the best fitness smartwatch experience, though, you'll want to go Plus.
Now let's turn to the other side of the spectrum of fitness smartwatches. The Samsung Galaxy Watch 5 is primarily an Android smartwatch with fitness tools rather than a "fitness smartwatch." It doesn't have the in-depth metrics and workout suggestions of a Garmin or Fitbit. But that arguably doesn't matter because it supports a variety of fitness apps, from Samsung Health to 3rd-party apps like Strava or Nike Run Club. Thanks to Wear OS 3, it runs laps around other devices in performance, and in addition to tracked workouts, it has more health sensors than most fitness-focused watches.
The Galaxy Watch 5 can track your heart rate, blood oxygen, heart rhythm (ECG), and Bioelectrical Impedance Analysis; it also measures blood pressure in some territories, and it added a temperature sensor that will improve sleep tracking once Samsung activates it. The BIA sensor is designed to measure your overall body composition by recording key metrics, including body water and fat percentage, skeletal muscle mass, and more. If you're serious about fitness as a way to stay in shape, the Galaxy Watch 5 can track your body's progress very closely.
As our Galaxy Watch 5 review pointed out, Samsung "played it safe" with this model, not making too many changes from the Galaxy Watch 4. It has the same performance and mediocre battery life: it lasts 50 hours in ideal conditions, but continuous sensor data or GPS tracking will cut into that estimate. But it did double the charging speed so you can top up to 50% in less than a half-hour, and the watch itself was redesigned, so the sensors sit closer to your wrist for more accurate results.
Most importantly, the Galaxy Watch 4 was already the best Wear OS watch by a mile before the Galaxy Watch 5 came around, and Samsung's newer watch still owns that title. If you own an Android phone and want a watch, you can text friends on, manage your calendar, speak to Google Assistant, and use other tools besides fitness widgets, start and end your search with the Galaxy Watch 5.
As an Android-focused site, we don't typically focus as much on Apple devices. But we have to give credit where it's due, and the Apple Watch Ultra deserves athletes' attention despite its exorbitant price tag and short battery life. If you're an iPhone owner and have the money, this watch gives you the best of both worlds: Apple's watchOS smarts and plenty of fitness tools.
The watch itself has a titanium case, sapphire glass display with 2,000 nits of brightness, MIL-STD-810H protection, 10ATM water resistance with protection for "high-speed water sports" and diving, a rotating crown and two buttons for tactile feedback during workouts, and a ton of health sensors for an in-depth look at your health. It can last 12 hours with GPS tracking, or up to 60 hours in Low Power Mode.
As for software, the latest watchOS added tons of useful fitness-tracking data and watch faces. You can see your heart rate activity zones, elevation, running power, stride length, vertical oscillation, and more on your wrist while you work out. And you can create custom workouts encouraging you to hit certain benchmarks like pace, distance, heart rate, or cadence for a certain amount of time. It's exactly what you need in a fitness smartwatch.
Our colleagues at iMore called the Apple Watch Ultra (opens in new tab) the "best Apple Watch for most people this year" over the Series 8, and our senior editor of wearables Andrew Myrick also tested and loved the Ultra, calling it his "favorite smartwatch ever." When we matched up the Apple Watch Ultra vs. Samsung Galaxy Watch 5 Pro — the premium Android watch we included below — he said that the Ultra is almost "impossible to recommend given the price," but he personally didn't regret paying so much for it.
If you're turned off by the price, the Series 8 (opens in new tab) has most of the same software perks; it just lacks most of the hardware protection and has a smaller display and less premium materials, and its battery life is less reliable.
While the Galaxy Watch 5 has a better battery than most lifestyle watches, it's still not the most reliable for GPS tracking and can quickly burn through its battery with demanding use. The Galaxy Watch 5 Pro was designed specifically to package in a 590mAh battery that upgrades the battery life to 80 days, or up to 20 hours of continuous GPS. Although the Galaxy Watch 5 Pro has one key upgrade over the 5 — hiking/cycling maps and Trackback — it's essentially a bulkier, costlier Galaxy Watch 5 in every other respect.
The good news is that the device lived up to Samsung's estimates in our Galaxy Watch 5 Pro review. It'll last 3+ days with continuous heart rate and blood oxygen monitoring as well as sleep tracking, even taking some light GPS tracking into account. If you add tools like AOD, always-listening assistant, or music storage, it comes closer to 20-30 hours.
As we mentioned above, the Galaxy Watch 5 Pro doesn't have the same fitness specialization as an Apple Watch Ultra or Garmin watch. But the former is a pricey iOS exclusive, while the latter series gives you little justification to wear them outside of a workout. With its Wear OS apps, the Galaxy Watch 5 Pro has plenty of tools to make it worth wearing all day, even though it's heavy enough to weigh down your wrist after a while.
Whether you choose the Galaxy Watch 5 or Watch 5 Pro depends on how much of a concern battery life is to you. Other lifestyle watch owners make do with daily charges, and the base model will last across a marathon if you fully charge it beforehand and don't use extra features. The Pro gives you a huge battery buffer so that you know it'll rarely die on you, even with extras, but it's really only a good fit for people with large wrists. The Pro is the best Android watch available if you can live with the weight.
If you're buying a fitness smartwatch for the first time, you might be a tad overwhelmed by how many options you have. Luckily, several wearables cater to beginners and first-time users. You may not need a watch equipped with every fancy feature under the sun. If you're just getting started, you should check out the new Amazfit GTS 3, which our reviewer called "as close as you'll get to an Apple Watch without spending a fortune on the real thing."
This smartwatch is robust and affordable, which is a rare combo in the wearable world. It offers activity/sleep tracking, heart-rate monitoring, onboard GPS, blood-oxygen tracking, and much more. So when you're in a hurry, select the "one-tap measuring" feature to get a detailed reading in under a minute. This 4-in-1 health measurement records your heart rate, blood oxygen, stress, and breathing rate all at once.
Fitness enthusiasts who are always on the go don't usually have time to charge their watch every other day. However, the Amazfit GTS 3 still offers double-digit battery life even when recording a daily workout. It can last up to 12 days, depending on your usage. While this figure may vary a bit, it's pretty impressive to get anywhere near that number in the first place, especially from a budget smartwatch.
The Amazfit GTS 3 may not be overflowing with smartwatch features like some of the other watches on this list, as it lacks third-party apps, but it does come with Amazon Alexa built-in. There's no speaker on the watch, however, so you'll need to upgrade to the Amazfit GTR 3 Pro to take phone calls and get other upgrades. Otherwise, if you're focused on finding an affordable fitness watch that's perfect for daily wear, you'll love this one.
The Garmin Vivoactive 4 isn't the newest watch on the market anymore, but it's still one of the best fitness smartwatches you can buy and can also be found at a huge discount these days.
It offers some significant upgrades compared to its predecessor, including on-screen workouts, two size options, and music storage as a standard feature. It's not quite as expensive as it once was, but it's not the cheapest option either. That said, it's an excellent fitness smartwatch that tracks your every move.
On the fitness side of things, you've got your usual heart-rate monitoring with activity and sleep tracking. New features include a Pulse Ox sensor, Body Battery energy monitoring, and 20-plus preloaded sports apps. If you're unfamiliar, the Pulse Ox sensor monitors blood-oxygen saturation levels, and the Body Battery checks your energy levels throughout the day, so you can schedule your workouts and rest time accordingly. The built-in GPS allows you to map outdoor runs without bringing your phone, and the watch is waterproof up to 50 meters.
When you combine all of that with an NFC chip for Garmin Pay, the eight-day battery life in smartwatch mode (or six hours in GPS mode with music), and a lovely stainless steel design, it's easy to see why this was our former top pick. The Venu 2 beats the Vivoactive 4 because the older watch is missing newer tools like sleep score, fitness age, Health Snapshot, heart rate variance tracking, and so on. As our Vivoactive 4 reviewer put it, it's "an ideal option for those who want more than a basic activity tracker but don't want to spend a fortune on a premium watch that's loaded with features they won't use."
Mobvoi has done a fantastic job perfecting the TicWatch Pro lineup over the years, and the newest TicWatch Pro 3 Ultra GPS is no exception. This watch is still equipped with features that users know and love while offering some useful improvements to the overall user experience. The combination of these features makes the TicWatch Pro 3 Ultra GPS one of the best Android smartwatches out there.
The design was already a popular feature, but it's been further refined with a new customizable backlight for the display's top layer. Mobvoi also added some amazing new software features to the TicHealth suite. If you're seeking the best fitness smartwatch on Wear OS, this could very well be the watch of your dreams. Users who embark on rugged adventures will appreciate its improved durability thanks to the MIL-STD-810G rating.
So why, you ask, should you buy the TicWatch Pro 3 Ultra GPS instead of a Galaxy Watch, considering Mobvoi has yet to update it to Wear OS 3? For starters, it's due to receive the update before the end of 2022. So if you're patient, you'll have an even better wearable experience when your watch starts running Wear OS 3.
More importantly, it'll last for up to 72 hours in smart mode, something our TicWatch Pro 3 Ultra review confirmed: thanks to the 577mAh battery, it lasts three days with "24-hour heart rate monitoring and blood oxygen tracking, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, sleep tracking, notifications, and even a workout or two," though it's closer to 2 days with GPS workouts. That's pretty much exactly the same as the Galaxy Watch 5 Pro...except that the watch itself is $150 less at full price and often costs even less. And despite the equal battery size to the Pro, it weighs significantly less, making it more comfortable for long-term wear.
It's not as fancy as a Samsung watch, but it'll give you what you need in a fitness smartwatch.
The last generation of Fitbit devices, the Versa 3 and original Sense, gave you some of the best balance of fitness and smart tools in a fitness watch. With the latest generation, Fitbit gives a similar fitness experience, but takes one step forward and two steps back for smartwatch features, making the Versa 4 and Sense 2 a bit harder to recommend.
On the plus side, thanks to Google's acquisition of Fitbit, both of these new watches have access to Google Wallet for tap-to-pay and Google Maps for turn-by-turn navigation. They also have a mic and speaker for taking Bluetooth calls or speaking to a smart assistant. And it replaced the unreliable capacitive touch button with a physical button that's much more reliable on the go.
Unfortunately, while the last generation had Google Assistant support, music storage, and wi-fi downloads, the Sense 2 only works with Amazon Alexa, has its wi-fi antenna disabled, and has no music streaming or playback controls. As our reviewer described them, these downgrades are "just kind of baffling."
So why do we still consider the Fitbit Sense 2 one of the best fitness smartwatches? Mainly thanks to its attractively thin squircle design, bright AMOLED display, and bundle of health sensors. Along with the usual heart rate and blood oxygen data, it can continuously track your stress levels, check your body temperature to ensure you're healthy and sleeping well, and use its ECG sensor to check for an irregular heartbeat.
It also lasts across six days of battery life with regular use, though it's only rated to last 5 hours with GPS tracking. That, too, makes it hard to recommend for "serious" athletes, but should be plenty for casual fitness tracking. Otherwise, we recommend the Sense 2 over the Versa 4 simply because the Sense 2 has its sensor suite to recommend it, while the Versa 4 lacks any X-factor feature to make it worth the price.
As a sidenote, the Google Pixel Watch is a better smartwatch than the Sense 2 by far, and has Fitbit Premium integration, but not necessarily a better fitness watch. It lacks the health sensors that make Premium so handy, has a fairly short battery life, and doesn't have irregular heart rate or automatic workout detection. Plus, its SpO2 sensor isn't active yet. So while we really like the Pixel Watch, it's difficult to include it on this list.
Despite being the best running watch we've tested, the Garmin Forerunner 255 barely belongs on this list, simply because it lacks the "smarts" of most of the other picks on this list, even compared to the handicapped Sense 2. It has no mic or speaker, no third-party apps, and only supports music storage with a $50 upgrade.
Despite that, we're squeezing in a third Garmin watch on this list for those runners who don't care as much about the smarts, and simply want a watch that'll give them all the metrics they need to improve. And on that front, the Forerunner 255 is the best Garmin Forerunner model among a crowded list.
Our Garmin Forerunner 255 review goes in-depth on the laundry list of features you get to help you before, during, and after a run. Where most lifestyle watches tell you to hit your daily targets without any context, the Forerunner 255 tracks your current fatigue and training load during the last week to help give you an automated suggested workout for the day. And after your run ends, you'll see how your aerobic and anaerobic fitness has improved, with a recommendation of how long to wait before your next run.
If that sounds like a lot, believe it or not, I'm just scratching the surface! Unless you want to upgrade to the Forerunner 955 for full-color maps and real-time stamina tracking, the Forerunner 255 gives you the best fitness watch experience on the market today. It's much more specialized than the Venu 2 Plus, in exchange for losing the AMOLED touchscreen, mic, and speaker.
Best fitness smartwatches: How to decide
The ultimate fitness smartwatch comes with numerous sporting and workout modes that can be applied to the real world, comprehensive health, and workout tracking functionalities. It provides valuable feedback and analytics that you can benefit from. It is important to get a wearable with a heart rate monitor, along with as many other sensors as you need for health, sleep, and stress tracking.
Bonus features such as Google Pay and third-party apps are nice, but they aren't entirely essential. You need your smartwatch to be a portable health and fitness trainer for your fitness needs. The best fitness smartwatch will help you on your journey, aid you in your workouts, and track your progress.
We feel confident that the Garmin Venu 2 Plus is the best fitness smartwatch for most users. You have a little bit of everything, including an attractive design, solid fitness features, and a few extra smartwatch perks. But it sits closer to the fitness side of things than the "smart" side, even with its mic/speaker and music storage. A Galaxy or Apple Watch will serve you better if you need fitness tools but don't want to make them the focus of your watch.
On the other hand, you'll want to turn to Garmin, Fitbit, Polar, or another fitness-focused brand if that's your number one priority. These watches may not have superfluous battery-draining apps. Still, they'll actively guide your training with recommendations for today's workout and subsequent recovery time. In contrast, a lifestyle watch will simply tell you to close your rings every day with little other guidance.
Your preferences are your own, but whichever way you lean, these picks should guide you towards a healthier body or your next PR.
