You don't need to spend hundreds of dollars on a shiny new smartwatch to reap the benefits of fitness tracking — you can monitor your stats just as effectively with the best budget fitness trackers. These smart wearables boast great performance, a wealth of smart features, and stylish design, yet they cost far less than some of the top-shelf models.
True, the best budget fitness trackers may not harbour the high-octane performance and military-grade durability typical of best Garmin watches, but they still feature most of the key metrics like heart rate, body composition, sleep tracking and step count. When used consistently, even the most affordable wearables can help you make positive changes to your lifestyle.
However, picking the right model can be a difficult task, even for the most data-driven consumers. The market is flooded with low-cost fitness trackers of dubious quality, and frustrated users often abandon them not long after the purchase. But that's where we step in.
To help you make the best choice possible, we've tried and tested countless budget fitness trackers on the market. We put each and every model through its paces, taking note of their battery life, design, features, ease of use, and many other aspects. Here's our ultimate roundup of the fitness trackers that won't break the bank.
But if you are looking for wearables with a more premium feel, check our general guide to the best fitness trackers. And if you are a keen runner, our guide to the best running watches can offer you some great advice.
The best budget fitness tracker overall
With a big color AMOLED screen, the Inspire 3 can track steps, workouts, heart rate and sleep. It can also tell you how much time you spend in each heart rate zone, personalized to your age and fitness level. Similar to the Apple Watch’s Activity app, it has a metric called Active Zone Minutes that encourages you to reach daily movement goals. We enjoyed how it tracks passively in the background giving you useful insights into your health and fitness habits.
Fitbit Inspire 3 scores 4.4 out of 5 stars on Amazon, with 70% giving it a full five stars. One positive review said it was “reliable and discreet” with accurate sleep tracking and with an impressive battery life. Another said: “This [fitness tracker] has inspired me to get fitter. Feel so much better having used this for two weeks.” One negative review said the Inspire 3 buzzed a lot when wet, and another said the screen was too small to read at times.
As with so many of Fitbit’s products, it’s the battery life – 10 days – that’s most impressive on the Inspire 3. While this will depend on usage, and go down significantly if you use the always-on display mode, it’s still great to not have to charge the tracker too often.
The Inspire 3 doesn’t have the same quick-release buttons as the Charge 5, so swapping bands is a little bit fiddly. It’s also lacking GPS but you can use your phone to track routes and distances on hikes and runs. Comes with six months free Fitbit Premium membership so you can enjoy extra features and content.
- Read our full Fitbit Inspire 3 review
Best budget fitness tracker for sports activities
The Xiaomi Mi Smart Band 7 is proof that you don’t have to spend a fortune on health and fitness tracking, nor do you have to sacrifice fancy features either. We were impressed by the sheer number of features on this Fitbit lookalike, although the screen can be unresponsive, especially when wet/sweaty.
The band tracks blood oxygen, sleep and stress – impressive for a product at this low price – and we love the ‘relax reminders’ that prompt us to do a guided breathing meditation when stress levels reach above a certain number. If you’re a swimmer, it’s water resistant up to 50 meters, although we found the screen hard to use during and post-swim.
The Xiaomi Mi Smart Band 7 scores 4.3 out of 5 stars on Amazon, with 69% of users giving it the full five stars. Fans of the tracker love the “great battery life” and screen brightness. Negative reviews said the touchscreen wasn’t so responsible when it was wet (after swimming or a sweaty workout), and others cited issues with the accuracy of the sleep tracking and steps counter.
The Xiaomi Mi Smart Band 7 has an impressive battery life and is a comprehensive health and fitness tracker at a budget-friendly price. It has a ludicrous number of activity tracking options too, with over 110 different sports modes.
- Read our full Xiaomi Mi Smart Band 7 review
Best budget fitness tracker for advanced fitness tracking
If you’re the kind of person who loves a huge amount of data, and don’t mind the Vivosmart 5’s utilitarian design, then this could be the budget fitness tracker for you. Lightweight, easy to use and with heart rate and SpO2 sensors, it has a crisp OLED screen, but it’s still monochrome rather than color.
You can look at your stats free of charge in the brilliant Garmin Connect app, where there are also guided workouts to try, plus running and cycling training programs. We were particularly impressed by the automatic sleep tracker. Every morning you get a mini sleep report including a ‘sleep score’ to help you understand how much rest you’re getting. But note, it doesn’t track naps – so if you like a snooze this could mess up your nightly sleep data.
The Garmin Vivosmart 5 gets 4 out of 5 stars on Amazon, with 58% giving it a full five stars. Positive reviews praised the battery life, with one calling it "the best fitness tracker in the market." Another happy user said: "What really amazed me was the accuracy and detail of sleep data." Negative reviews said it was “clumsier than Vivosmart 4 in terms of size, materials and functionality." Another said they found it hard to read without glasses.
Garmin says the watch has a seven day battery life – but most people getting report five days when they've been using it for regular workout tracking.
The Vivosmart 5 doesn’t have inbuilt GPS, so you’ll need a Bluetooth connection to your phone to track your route and pace when training outside. It has an on-board accelerator that can gauge distance and pace, but we’d only use this as a rough estimate. This watch is all about the stats, so if you’re a numbers nerd you’ll love it.
- Read our full Garmin Vivosmart 5 review
Best budget fitness tracker for fitness newcomers
Feature-rich, with 96 workout modes the Huawei Band 7 is a solid fitness tracker that does big things for a small price. Design wise it’s also very similar to the Fitbit Inspire 3, it’s linked to the impressive Huawei Health app that is intuitive and easy to use.
From blood pressure management to weight, the app can set you customized training metrics to help you reach your goals. Beginners to fitness will find it a great entry-level tracker to get them motivated to progress and get stronger and healthier. If you own an iPhone, your stats will be sent to Apple’s Health app so there’s one place for all your data.
Huawei Band 7 scores 4.5 out of 5 stars on Amazon, with 52% of users giving it full five stars. Fans of the tracker said it was a good Fitbit alternative, good value, easy to set up, with hundreds of watch faces to choose from. Negative reviewers complained about connection issues and one person said the calorie and sleep tracking was “completely inaccurate."
Sadly there’s no Bluetooth playback or music storage so if you like listening to a playlist or podcast on a run you’ll need your phone. It doesn’t have GPS either, but its step counting and distance tracking is surprisingly accurate.
- Read our full Huawei Band 7 review
Best budget fitness tracker for display
The Honor Band 6 has enough tracking tools, a big colorful screen and impressive battery life to make it a savvy entry-level fitness tracker.
The continuous heart rate monitor seems fairly accurate and the information is used to drive the Band’s stress and sleep monitoring. Like a lot of stress trackers, this feels a bit inconsistent. The sleep tracker is more effective, automatically charting the different sleep stages and giving you a ‘sleep score’ every morning.
With 4.3 out of 5 stars on Amazon (and 65% of users giving it five stars), the Honor Band 6 is excellent value for money according to reviewers. One said: “The battery life is AMAZING and it’s a great watch for what I need it for.” Negative reviews cited issues with the sleep tracker recording a sleep cycle when they were just sitting still watching TV or reading. Another said the connected GPS for bike rides was appalling and it didn’t indicate any watts or power in the reading.
Battery life is where the Honor Band 6 really excels – 14 days for regular use and about 10 for heavy usage. We love that the custom charger fits into any USB-A port magnetically (why can’t all trackers do this?!). Plus it only takes an hour for a full charge – or the fast charge technology will give you an extra three days of juice in just ten minutes.
- Full review coming soon
Best budget fitness tracker for smartwatch credentials
Like all the best fitness trackers, The Amazfit Bip 3 Pro is lightweight, comfortable to wear (even during sleep) and has a simplistic design that’s easy to use. The sleep tracker on this band comes with lots of actionable tools, although the accuracy does vary.
We like that it doubles as a smartwatch, packing in tools like ‘find my phone’ and displaying notifications on its easy-to-read screen. While it doesn’t have in-built music storage, it does allow you to navigate your tunes from your wrist (when your phone is connected) and you can control your camera, although we’re not sure how useful that would be.
The Amazfit Bip 3 Pro gets 4.2 out of 5 stars on Amazon, with 61% of users giving it full 5 stars. Positive reviews praise this smartwatch for a wide range of health tracking features, lightweight design and battery life. Negative reviews cite mostly issues with pairing the watch with cell phones.
Women can use the watch to track their cycles and monitor fertility, which is a nice touch, and it’s in-depth sleep tracking actually tells you how well you’re managing the different stages of sleep (light, deep and REM.)
If you want absolute accuracy for distance tracking, you’ll need to try one of the best running watches — but we think most people will be impressed with the in-built GPS on this model. All in all, it’s a good package for this price.
- Read our full Amazfit Bip 3 Pro review
Best budget fitness tracker for sleep management
The Halo View is a great budget fitness tracker that measures physical activity, SpO2, heart rate, sleep and skin temperature, all for under $80. The accompanying app opens up access to a ton of features to help you progress in your health and fitness journey too. You'll need a Halo membership to access this, but Amazon will give you 12 months for free when you buy a watch. Design wise, it looks a lot like the Fitbit Inspire 3, but is $20 cheaper.
Some reports indicate that the Halo View band can accidentally come away from the tracker, so make sure its secured tightly before any gym sessions. Amazon says the View has a seven-day battery life, but most users report a five-day average.
This watch comes with a built-in skin temperature sensor (very unusual in a wearable of this price) which is activated when you're asleep. This can show you when you're running hotter or colder than usual. The watch is also able to report on sleep quality, duration, stages and efficiency — it's brilliant to see this much detail in a cheaper model. Combined with the temperature sensor, the watch is able to really help you pinpoint what could be disturbing your rest.
If you’re on a low budget and have never had a fitness tracker before this band is great value and a good place to start, particularly as it comes with a year’s free Halo Membership. After 12 months it will automatically renew ($3.99pm) but you can easily cancel it and use the Halo View as a basic tracker.
Amazon Halo View scores 3.7 out of 5 stars on Amazon, with 48% giving it five stars. Fans of the device say it’s a massive improvement over the Halo, with the addition of the screen being a game changer. They said: “The text messaging feature is awesome”, although they cited some issues with syncing. Negative reviews said the touchscreen didn’t work well in water, and data was hard to read due to the screen size.
If you’re on a low budget and have never had a fitness tracker before this band is great value and a good place to start, particularly as it comes with a year’s free Halo Membership. After 12 months it will automatically renew ($3.99pm) but you can easily cancel it and use the Halo View as a basic tracker.
- Full review coming soon
Best budget fitness tracker for stress management
Drum roll please, in our opinion this is the best Fitbit you can buy right now, with options for stress and sleep tracking, mindfulness sessions and health and fitness data you didn’t even know you needed.
It feels like the Swiss Army Knife of fitness trackers, with in-built GPS, heart rate and step monitoring, as well as ECG app and new electrodermal activity (EDA) tracker. This will allow you to check for atrial fibrillation (an irregular heartbeat) while the EDA test looks at sweat secretion — a marker of stress. Once you’ve worked out your stress levels, you can help reduce them with the library of mindfulness sessions.
We love how easy it is to read, even in sunlight, which is a good thing as there are no physical buttons. Sadly there’s no option for music playback and it’s quite reliant on its accompanying app if you want to get the most out of it, but other than that we struggle to fault this extremely impressive and affordable wearable. It's slightly more pricey than the other options in this list, but also has a wider range of features.
Fitbit Charge 5 scores 4.1 out of 5 stars on Amazon, with 63% of users giving it full 5 stars. This fitness tracker is praised for its highly for battery life, durability and comfort, and many positive reviews mention the accuracy of the ECG feature, vibrant color screen and how easy it is to use. Negative reviews said some of the watch faces were ‘cartoonish’, cluttered and made it hard to read data, while others complained that tracking was inaccurate – a problem we also encountered.
We love how easy it is to read, even in sunlight, which is a good thing as there are no physical buttons. Sadly there’s no option for music playback and it’s quite reliant on its accompanying app if you want to get the most out of it, but other than that we struggle to fault this extremely impressive and affordable wearable. It's slightly more pricey than the other options in this list, but also has a wider range of features.
- Read our full Fitbit Charge 5 review
How we test the best budget fitness trackers
We test the models in this guide by using them to track workout sessions, sleep and daily activity. We then compare this data to high-end, accurate models to see how well these cheaper products match up. Once we've spent two weeks with the models, we evaluate them on design, performance, features and value for money and give them an overall score.
FAQs
What should you look for in a budget fitness tracker?
When looking for a budget fitness tracker there are a few things to consider. Firstly, battery life is often a deal breaker. Fitbit is renowned for creating trackers and smartwatches with amazing stamina, and many of its competitors are now catching on (some of the above options even outlast the famous Fitbits). Battery life will go down depending on usage, so if you’re tracking sleep overnight, as well as regular workouts, expect to charge your device more often.
Is GPS included? Many trackers can pair with your phone to track routes and distance, but if this is important to you, it might be worth paying a few extra bucks to get inbuilt GPS (bear in mind this will also zap the battery).
Another factor is will the device track all the sports and activities you want? And how easy is it to use and access the data? Smaller screens mean the fitness tracker will be lightweight, but you might struggle to read the stats.
