The Greatest Health Watches of 2023

Fitness encompasses a host of activities: walking, running, golfing, climbing — all with different metrics to track. The best fitness watch or fitness tracker is one that supplements your workout regime, tracks the data, and fits with your lifestyle.

Our experts have been strapping on fitness watches of all kinds for close to a decade now, testing more than 40 of the best fitness watches and pulling together the best for every situation in this guide. These watches have been tested using standardized methods for comparing sensor accuracy, battery life, functionality, durability, and fit. Beyond that, we’ve also taken these watches everywhere — from the summits of volcanoes in the Pacific Northwest to the depths of the canyonlands of Utah — and pushed these devices to the limit to see what breaks.

Besides our own personal testing, our resident fitness coach reached out to the clients he trains and other athletes for their insights and spent hours reading online reviews. We read spec sheets and compared them across brands and models.

Below are the best fitness watches, GPS watches, and fitness trackers based on our testing. To help you find the best fitness watch for your unique needs, we’ve included a buyer’s guide, a frequently asked questions section, and a comparison chart.

Editor’s Note: We updated our fitness watch guide on November 15, 2023, to include our new choice for the best budget fitness watch, the COROS Pace 3, as well as the best fitness watch for iPhone users, the Apple Watch Ultra.

The Best Fitness Watches of 2023

Fitness Watch Comparison Chart

How We Tested Fitness Watches

GearJunkie knows fitness, and our testers know their watches. The team includes Cory Smith, an online running coach and freelance journalist with over 25 years of running and rock climbing experience. He’s an expert, from treadmills to shoes. 

He’s joined by Staff Writer Austin Beck-Doss, a climber, hiker, and snowboarder with more than 250 product tests under his belt. His expertise ranges across a wide variety of outdoor accessories, and his work on our “Emerging Gear” series keeps him out on the cutting edge of wilderness tech. 

Lastly, there’s Josh Wussow, who’s been reviewing watches for GearJunkie since 2017. As a late adopter of wearable tech, his experience with adventure-themed watches (and his sometimes unorthodox testing methods) brings a new and skeptical eye to the field. 

Our experts have crafted a detailed testing regimen that aims to compare these watches on a level playing field, and it’s not uncommon to see our testers wearing three or more watches at once in order to give them a fair shake. We compare track lengths, measure heart rate data against dedicated devices, challenge the satellite reception with difficult terrain, and run each of these watches completely dead — all in the name of winnowing out the chafe and finding the best fitness watches available today.

Beyond their personal expertise, GearJunkie has solicited the opinions of fellow runners, hikers, and climbers. When the dust settled and the final grades came in, the list above represented the best fitness watches we could drum up. But know that fitness tech is constantly improving, and new functionalities are being added daily to some of these watches. As they improve, so does our coverage, and we’ll continue to test them.

Buyer’s Guide: How to Choose the Perfect Fitness Watch

The fitness watch market is vast. Selecting the best fitness watch to fit your needs requires a small investment of research and time. In this handy how-to-choose guide, we’ve compiled all of the essential information that you’ll need to make an informed purchase. From battery life to GPS accuracy, our guide covers all the bases.

Smartwatches, GPS Watches, and Fitness Trackers

There are three very distinct categories of watches, each with strengths and weaknesses. Smartwatches are basically small smartphones for your wrist where you can add apps and take calls without your phone.

The most popular smartwatches are Apple and Samsung Galaxy watches. Functionally, they’re geared toward convenience and health tracking, but they tend to fall short on battery life, GPS accuracy, and workout functionally.

GPS watches such as Garmin, COROS, Suunto, Polar, and Wahoo are designed primarily for workouts that require GPS functionality (running, cycling, hiking, swimming, etc.). They tend to have over triple the battery life of smartwatches and are very strong with workout features, metrics, and tracking.

While most will allow text and email messages, they’re limited in the scope of apps you can add and will not replace your smartphone.

Fitness trackers have the least functionality and only track health and fitness metrics such as resting and variable heart rate, sleep patterns, and steps. Most will need to stay connected to their phone for features like GPS tracking.

Battery Life

This is the most notable difference between smartwatches and GPS watches. On average, smartwatches need to be recharged every 24 to 48 hours, whereas GPS watches can last 5 to 15 days between charges. These times are ever-increasing, thanks to the integration of solar charging on some of the more premium models. 

Charging time is relatively quick, with most offering a full charge in around 2 hours. If you’re like us and hate having to constantly charge yet another device, we would lean toward a GPS watch.

Ecosystem

Perhaps as important as the fitness watch itself is the depth and strength of its ecosystem. An ecosystem is composed of the watch’s application, web portal, and supported third-party apps such as Strava and Spotify. To view your data, you’ll need to download an app on your phone.

As Garmin is the largest fitness watch company, it has the broadest and strongest sport-specific ecosystem. Garmin’s app and web portal, called Garmin Connect, displays just about all the performance and health metrics you need. Polar’s Flow app and web portal follow close behind Garmin, with COROS, Suunto, and Wahoo following Polar. Amazfit’s Zepp app is a bit of an outlier, though it shows function and promise. 

Sport Modes

Today’s fitness watches can track just about any activity imaginable, ranging from running to indoor rock climbing and even surfing. We’ve found that watches labeled as “outdoor” or “multisport” not only tend to be able to track the more obscure activities but also do so with more detail and granularity. As a result, this increased level of functionality tends to come with a higher price tag.

All the watches we tested tracked common activities such as walking, running (outdoor, trail, treadmill), outdoor and indoor cycling, yoga, elliptical, general strength, and cardio sessions. If there’s a less-common sport you’d like to track, we suggest taking a look at the watch’s spec sheet to see if it’s covered.

Features

From notifications of an irregular heartbeat to alarms reminding you to hydrate, fitness watches have an astonishing number of features these days. To help you get a sense of features, we’ve listed a few below.

Based on our testing, budget watches and trackers under $100 have all the basic features and perhaps a few standard ones. Watches priced from $150 to $250 will have the basic features and most of the standard ones. Premium watches carry basic, standard, and more advanced features.

• Basic: Distance, pace, heart rate, steps
• Standard: Sleep, calories, VO2 max, stress, elevation gain/loss, training zones, cadence, power, notifications (call, text, email)
• Advanced: Music, Strava Live Segments, auto swim stroke detection, pulse oximeter, respiration rate, live activity tracking, incident detection, temperature sensing

Training and Coaching

As fitness watches have gotten better at tracking health and fitness data, companies have been able to use that data to give guidance on training. As a full-time running coach, our tester Cory Smith finds this particularly interesting.

The top reason he sees most runners struggle is because they overtrain or under-rest. Garmin and Polar seem to have the best training and coaching insights, with COROS right behind them.

Price

Price can give you a good measuring stick of the breadth of features of a watch. Entry-level fitness watches tend to focus on basic sports and tracking and cost under $200 retail. Both the Garmin 35 and Polar Unite are two of our favorite entry-level watches.

Entry-level watches are perfect for someone interested in casual fitness. More serious fitness people should expect to spend over $200.

Moving up in price above $250 brings a huge difference in the look and feel of watches. Premium fitness watches fall in the $300-500 price range, with top-end watches above $500, such as the Garmin fenix 7 Solar.

GPS Accuracy

Most GPS devices are accurate within 1-3%. In our testing, all GPS-focused brands (Garmin, COROS, Polar, Suunto, and Wahoo) performed equally in GPS connection and accuracy. Connection time varied from 10 seconds to a couple of minutes, while distance was within the 1-3% margin.

It’s important to keep in mind that location has a lot to do with GPS connection and accuracy. Accuracy depends on multiple satellites communicating with each other freely and reporting back to the watch.

Distractions such as buildings and clouds can affect the satellites’ ability to pinpoint the sensor in the watch. We suggest asking fellow athletes in the area where you’ll be working out to find out how their watch GPS performs.

GPS isn’t the only game in town when it comes to satellite navigation systems, and many new fitness watches are integrating other global systems to increase fidelity in their location technologies.

GLONASS is a Russian satellite navigation system that provides global positioning data in the same way that the GPS system does, and can provide more definition in high latitudes. Galileo is operated by the European Union and also offers full global coverage. The BeiDou Satellite Navigation System is operated by China and while originally only providing coverage to eastern Asia, went global in 2020. And finally, QZSS, a Japanese system, provides coverage over the Asia-Oceania regions.

Because different satellite systems have undergone multiple generations of satellites, each operates on a different frequency than the last. These older satellites are still functional and provide more data that leads to a much higher fidelity signal when combined with one another. This is multi-band GNSS (Global Navigation Satellite System) technology, and more and more fitness watches today are incorporating it into their builds.

Size

Outdoor and multisport watches seem to be larger and heavier because of the sheer number of features, so much so that they can look too big and awkward on small wrists. If you prefer a smaller size, most brands (including Garmin, COROS, and Polar) offer smaller versions of flagship models. 

FAQ